Playing With Paint or Painting With Play

Abstract

In composing Play, Beckett paid more than lip service to painting as his inspira tional source by liberating, within dramatic form, the 'viewer's gaze', a process that Louis Marin finds to be integral to the reading of painting. Evidence of Beckett's motivation arises from the scrutiny of Play's three fragmented mono logues and his choreography of light. The result illustrates that Beckett's passion for the spectator's freedom of gaze embedded in the reading of painting beco mes transposed into the theatre. To state Samuel Beckett's love for the arts uncovers no secret. In his authorized biography, James Knowlson documents Beckett's apprecia tion for visual art and its corresponding influence on his aesthetic (21). Beckett's fascination with visual art unveils itself in his theatrical crea tions through thematic and imagistic quotations as well as compositional structure. A structural examination of Play reveals that Beckett embodied in dramatic form many principles of painting. Louis Marin offers a hypothesis on the reading of painting, which illuminates Beckett's dra matic technique by describing the relationship between viewer and pain ting and thus, the characteristics of visual art present in the design of Play. While no direct link exists between Marin and Beckett, striking similarities emerge from the works that inspired them and from their thinking. Their love of visual art led them to frequent art galleries (espe cially the National Gallery in London) and, coincidentally, both posses sed a fondness for Nicolas Poussin's works (Knowlson, 186; Marin 1977, 47). In aesthetics, Beckett and Marin both emphasize the link between form and content in terms of the primacy of recipient integration with aesthetic object, the concept explored here (Beckett 1983, 27; Marin 1980, 294). Evidence of Beckett's motivation for spectator implication arises from the piece's fragmentation of monologue, choreography of light, and textual composition. Beckett's Play exists as a theatre piece and, although Marin limits his analysis to painting and language, one no