사무엘 베켓의 『무엇을 어디서』 텔레비전 버전에 나타난 미장아빔의 시노그래피

Abstract

While associated with highly minimalistic stages, Samuel Beckett is a playwright deeply invested in scenography, conceiving theatre as abstract, metaphysical, and materialistic. Beckett’s abstract yet corporeal theatre mediates between the objective and the subjective, the abstract and the concrete, rather envisioning abstraction of the concrete or objectification of the subjective. This paper examines the ways in which Beckett’s scenography embodies such a literal correspondence through the television version of What Where. Repetitively emerging from and disappearing into the dark surrounding them by turns, four players “as alike as possible” on the television screen work out free play of signifiers as mirrors that reflect each other. As they morph and are morphed by each other, Bam, Bem, Bim, and Bom operate their permutations as if on a computer loop, constituting the screenscape of mise-en-abyme. Considering how these figures are subject to both an infinite loop and a compulsion to repetition as they lose power to “make sense,” this paper particularly pays attention to the materiality of these images as they are presented as flat two-dimensional images rather than three-dimensional computer ones. The mise-en-abyme of images on the screen paradoxically serves for scenographic materiality as they become indistinct from the inanimate entities around them.