Culture Shock:If directors are not free to explore Beckett's texts, they run the risk of putting on repetitions, not renditions, writes Fintan O'Toole
In his autobiography, the American director Alan Schneider recalled his attendance with Samuel Beckett at Peter Hall's first production of Waiting for Godot in London in 1955. Whenever a line was misinterpreted or an extra piece of stage business was added, Beckett would clutch Schneider's arm and exclaim, in a clearly audible stage whisper, "It's ahl wrahng! He's doing it ahl wrahng!"
That Irish-accented outrage still sounds in the ears of those who stage Beckett's plays now. No other dead dramatist remains such a daunting admonitory presence for his directors and performers. Where most great playwrights were content to write the text of a play, Beckett wrote the entire theatrical event. He specified not just the words, but the rhythms and tones, the sets and the lighting plots.
In a sense, the problem of producing Beckett now is the opposite of the one that usually occurs where ideas of faithfulness to an author's intentions come into question. It is not that Beckett was an aloof genius, unaware of the real processes of theatre. It is precisely the opposite - that he was so acutely aware of performance that he writes it into his texts, making it as integral to his words as tempo and rhythm are to the music of a great composer.
THE PROBLEM, HOWEVER, is that theatre doesn't work like that. If the director and the actors are not genuinely free to explore a text, their faithful renditions become, over time, arid repetitions. If Beckett is not open to change, his plays will become mere museum pieces, performed for academic conferences but not for general audiences. The great fascination of Peter Brook's visit to the Dublin Theatre Festival this week with Fragments, his production of five short Beckett pieces, is that Brook embodies, more than any other living figure, the idea of theatre as a process of discovery that must be entered into with a complete openness to what happens in a rehearsal room.
Brook doesn't do renditions of an author's intentions, he does explorations of a text. And, sure enough, his versions of the Beckett pieces turned out to be radically individual, sometimes expanding on Beckett's scenarios, as in his very funny version of Act Without Words II, but sometimes, as in Rockaby, effectively disassembling and reassembling the text, keeping the words but fundamentally altering their relationship to the movements that define the piece. He thus raised, in the starkest way, the question of to whom these texts belong. Beckett purists, and perhaps the Beckett estate, might feel that Brook has appropriated the texts and made them into something they were never meant to be.
There is certainly justice in this view, and there is no doubt that when Beckett was alive, he had every right to insist that his plays be done as he intended. But there's the rub, for when Beckett was alive he was also alive to the possibility of change. Nothing could be farther from the truth of Beckett's actual practice than the image of a martinet muttering "it's all wrong".
IN THE LAST years of his life, he did try to stop productions that changed the texture of his plays by having, for example, Godot acted by women. But he also created some of the most unstable texts ever written by a major writer, with versions in two languages (English and French) and numerous alterations made in the course of his own productions. (He never quite decided, for example, whether the character of the Auditor in Not I should stay or be cut out.)
The very notion of what a Beckett play is remains up for grabs: "staged readings" of his prose texts are increasingly full theatrical productions and texts such as Neither, which Brook includes in Fragments, continue to pop up. And in fact, Beckett's attitude to changes in his plays was itself fundamentally unstable, if perversely consistent. If he didn't know a director's work, he hated interventions. If he knew and liked a director, he was flexible and open-minded. Besides, the great irony of the belief that there is a once-and-for-all right way of doing Beckett is that it goes against the grain of the writer's own aesthetic.
How odd that a writer whose work makes the human subject disappear and meanings evaporate should be imagined as the ultimate human subject, controlling the meanings of his words from beyond the grave. How strange that a writer for whom life after death is the ultimate nightmare should be supposed to desire this endless afterlife. What we're left with, I think, is a rough approximation of Beckett's own working practice: change is good if it's good and bad if it's not. Or, to put it another way, anyone who wants to second-guess Beckett's decisions needs (a) to thoroughly understand what those decisions are and (b) to be very, very smart. The test is as it always must be in the theatre: what works? In Beckett's case, what works is a balance between rigour and excitement, profound respect for what's there and deep commitment to making it new. Brook's breathtaking direction of Kathryn Hunter in Rockaby provided the best answer to the question of who Beckett's texts belong to: audiences.
Fragments is at the Tivoli Theatre tonight at 7.30pm and tomorrow at 1pm
www.dublintheatrefestival.com