On the Meaning of Performance in Samuel Beckett's Not I

Abstract

It is now commonplace to remark on Beckett's penetrating use of the dramatic medium. While critics may disagree over the significance of his effects, they are united in identifying their dependence on an exact use of the medium, and repeatedly warn the self-important director against the perils of an interpretation which distorts the means of performance. There is another side to this exigency. If the performers trust the dramatist, the apparent restrictions of his stage idiom allow an intense development of specific means of performance. They give the performer an indicator of style, the feel for "how it goes." Beckett's own widely quoted distinction between "fundamental sounds" and "overtones" encourages a critical interest in the execution of the works and in the way in which they are so intelligible in terms of an actor's physical performance, yet resistant to the explications of the critic. It may well be that the sense of "how it goes" is a good deal less impressive than scholarly hermeneutics, but as Susan Sontag persuasively argues, criticism, for its part, has not yet begun to come to terms with the sensual values of performance, and always risks distorting the meaning of works of art by divorcing sense and sensation. Among Beckett's theatre pieces none affords as intense a value to sensation as Not I.