Beckett's Actor

Abstract

In performance, Beckett's drama makes extensive demands of the actor, and of the spectator as well. Emptied of psychological motivation, of setting, of spectacle, and often apparently of action, Beckett's plays challenge actors and• audiences to create theater from the tatters of the traditional stage. From this extreme, as Jonas Barish has noted, Beckett's theater seems so markedly "eviscerated of everything the world has always thought of as theater," that it sometimes appears designed to frustrate theatrical enjoyment, to be calculatedly "antitheatrical" in attitude. And yet, in many respects Beckett's drama seems less to negate theater than to distill it. Although Beckett's plays eschew the allied diversions of the stage — no scene painters or fencing masters, please — they do so not to impress us with the poverty of the theater, but instead to rivet our attention to the theater's essential means: the actor. Beckett's drama scrupulously clarifies the actor's art, and substantially reconsiders the modem actor's complex enactment.