Directing/Acting Beckett

Abstract

COMPARATIVE drama 1 Volume 19 Winter 1985-86 Number 4 Directing/Acting Beckett Barbara S. Becker and Charles R. Lyons The dramatic texts of a playwright like Samuel Beckett maintain at least two functions. The confrontation of audience and text, accomplished by the collaborative mechanism of pro­ duction, provides the ostensible raison d’être of these dramatic works. However, the plays also maintain an active existence as texts, and they are subject to the variations of readings by a diverse public and analysis by professional exegetes who study Beckett’s drama in order to exercise their critical acuity and to produce their own texts. Both the director in the theater and the critic in the study use the text in highly subjective acts. Performance and criticism are mediations that, inevitably, conflate the text and the interpretor ’s vision of the text to produce an independent artifact: the critical discourse or the performance. The critical act and theatrical production, however, constitute radically different exercises in textual interpretation. Theatrical performance, under BARBARA S. BECKER teaches criticism and the interpretation of literature at Louisiana State University. An actress and a director, Becker has performed in several Beckett plays and has published on the phenomenology of performance. CHARLES R. LYONS, who is Chairman of the Department of Drama at Stanford University, has written books on Shakespeare, Brecht, and Ibsen. His most recent book is a critical study of Samuel Beckett. 289 290 Comparative Drama most circumstances, remains tied to a sequential, word-by-word movement through the text that offers its audience a single representation of the work that is usually limited to the words of the text itself without additional verbal commentary. While this statement seems both obvious and simplistic, it points out a major difference between the kinds of interpretation accom­ plished by the director and the critic. The critic is not limited to a word-by-word sequential representation of the text but is, on the contrary, free to focus upon specific moments of the text, to omit attention to others, and to move from section to section without regard to the printed order of the text. The critic, as he mediates the text for his reader, assumes that the audience of his essay has already read the work through sequentially at least once. The critical discussion often attempts to reveal alignments of part to part that are not transparently obvious, and, under the authority of an idea of “structure,” the critic often posits a vision of the text that subsumes the sequential movement of language and visual image within a highly gen­ eralized, static or atemporal scheme. Critics also frequently subject the work to some external structure as they attempt to demonstrate that the text manifests the influence of an autonomous source or represents some his­ torical event or cultural phenomenon directly or indirectly. While the critical discourse may limit the significance of the work in precise interpretations of its significance, the commen­ tator is free to offer highly speculative glosses on individual lines and, even more significantly, to propose multiple inter­ pretations of the text. While the critical essay may emphasize one stratum of a multivalent interpretation, the analysis often exercises an interplay of antithetical readings as its own princi­ pal rhetorical strategy. While the objective of the critical commentary may be to inform the reader’s or spectator’s un­ derstanding of the play, it produces another text that offers itself as a substitute for the play, an individual “reading” of it. The director may confront the potentiality of multiple inter­ pretative strategies and select a single perspective that controls the representation of the text. This primary conceptualization provides a set of criteria that director, designer, and actor exercise as they make a series of individual choices that, as they accumulate, form the production’s individual mediation of the dramatic text. The audience builds its own sense of this interpretation by inference. That is, the spectator responds to Barbara S. Becker and Charles R. Lyons 291 the specific directorial, acting, and design choices and establishes an image of the work represented by assimilating the data the director elects to reveal and to emphasize. The critic may build an...