Samuel Beckett’s Hypnotic Theatre

Abstract

Exemplary works of hypnotic dramaturgy in Samuel Beckett’s work include three plays enjoying special attention at present: Not I (1972), Footfalls (1976), and Rockaby (1981). Historically, hypnosis was used in the clinics of Jean-Martin Charcot and Josef Breuer, among others. Hypnotically compromised characters from the psychoanalytic corpus, such as Anna O. and Blanche Wittman, demonstrate parallels with the protagonists of Beckett’s three plays. I argue that Beckett develops a hypnotic dramaturgy that simulates hypnotic character worlds in order to stage the affective problems of verifying the truth of memory. Specifically, theatrically simulating hypnotic situations draws spectators into intimate, sensory contact with the human subject’s ultimately false self-witnessing. My firsthand experience of the three plays in production provides a contemporary context to consider memory and the subject in Beckett’s theatre. In particular, actor Lisa Dwan and director Walter Asmus’s Royal Court production in 2014 signals the plays’ capacities for eliciting an affectively prone, empathic spectatorship.