The initial problem confronting a staging Samuel Beckett's shortest, and, as it turns out, most f... more The initial problem confronting a staging Samuel Beckett's shortest, and, as it turns out, most frequently performed play, "Breath," is less how to stage it, especially in a traditional theatre (the options for this characterless, twenty-second playlet being really quite limited) than in what context to offer it. Writing to Jenny Sheridan of Curtis Brown on 27 April 1972, Beckett withdrew the play from his repertory: “I have come to the conclusion it is almost impossible to do Breath correctly in the theatre so must ask you to decline, with my regret, this request and all future ones for this play.” Less than a year later (6 March 1973) he wrote to Dr. Rincono, an Italian director, through Curtis Brown, “May I suggest that Breath be performed twice only, at the opening and close of programme.” This play, which runs barely longer than a cycle of respiration, is, then, something less then than an evening's theatre. But as an opener to an evening of shorts, by Beckett or a variety of artists, as it is most frequently performed, it is inevitably lost, as it was in the evening of cabaret sketches it opened in Jacques Levy's and Kenneth Tynan's less-than-subtle revue, Oh Calcutta, which premièred at the Eden Theater in New York City on June 17, 1969 and for which Beckett's piece served as a "Prologue." Tynan drew attention to the playlet by rewriting it. To Beckett's opening tableau, "Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish," Tynan added "including naked people."
Chapter 18 of James Knowlson’s exemplary biography, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, i... more Chapter 18 of James Knowlson’s exemplary biography, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, is entitled “Censorship and How It Is, 1958-60.” The chapter reviews many of Beckett’s confrontations and much of his preoccupation with the censorship of not only his own work but that of fellow artists as well, and the chapter captures much of the spirit of censorship of the 1950s, particularly on the London stage but also in Dublin and even Paris. Beckett was, of course, keenly aware of the potential cultural resistance to his work. As early as the summer of 1953 (25 June) he risked scaring off his new American publisher, Barney Rosset, by outlining his firm opposition to the censorship of his work: "With regard to my work in general I hope you know what you’re letting yourself in for. I do not mean the heart of the matter, which is unlikely to disturb anybody, but certain obscenities of form which may not have struck you in French as they will in English, and which frankly (it is better you should know this before we get going) I am not at all disposed to mitigate. I do not of course know what is possible in America from this point of view and what is not. Certainly as far as I know such passages, faithfully translated, would not be tolerated in England." Beckett was by then no stranger to censorship, and some of his asperity in June of 1953 was no doubt in response to the recent indignity of having had a section of L’Innommable censored by the Nouvelle revue française that February. With Rosset, however, Beckett had stumbled onto a publisher who had set out with a new publishing venture only a year earlier, Grove Press, specifically to change "what is possible in America from this point of view," and Rosset's efforts would culminate with the unexpurgated, commercial publication of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1959 and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer shortly thereafter.
The pursuit of the voice, a disembodied manifestation, fragment, or echo of being or identity, is... more The pursuit of the voice, a disembodied manifestation, fragment, or echo of being or identity, is the heuristic that drives Samuel Beckett’s supreme fiction, then manifests itself powerfully, if obliquely, in the drama that follows. It may be, finally – beyond the Watts and Murphys, beyond the Didis, Gogos, Hamms, Clovs, Winnies and Willies – Beckett's most profound literary creation. He inherited a version of it from the Modernists – in particular James Joyce, the surrealists, and the Verticalists huddled about Eugene Jolas’s transition magazine in Paris – in the form of the interior monologue, which he then stretched, extended, and finally disbursed beyond recognition, beyond identity. Reduced to its fundamental sound, that mystery consists of a search for: 1. source, the location of the voice, without or within; 2. its credibility or authenticity, that is, whether transcendent or delusional; and 3. whether a marker of discrete, essential being or identity, or a cultural echo, often of a cultural echo. These were questions that drove Beckett’s art beyond the delineation of literary character, but even as character was disbursed, the origin of voice remained irresolute, part of the enigma, the paradox of being and the mystery that drove creativity. The very insolubility of these difficulties, thus, provided the impetus for Beckett’s articulating the epistemological quandary beginning with, then moving beyond Watt. Beckett’s exploration of these questions admittedly took a variety of forms: an early fascination first with echo, then with the schizophrenic voice; his need, expressed in the "German Letter of 1937” to find some kind of Nominalist irony en route to the unword; his attempt in the fiction from Three Novels to Company to determine the nature and location of that impossible imperative, the need to express; and finally his representations in the theater of a dramatic voice beyond the constrictions and conventions of the interior monologue, beyond the coherence of ego and character, difficulties that dominated the so-called mature fiction as well.
Resumo
Neste artigo discute-se o processo de elaboração do texto e montagens da peça Play, de Sam... more Resumo Neste artigo discute-se o processo de elaboração do texto e montagens da peça Play, de Samuel Beckett. A correlação entre novas encenações da peça e revisões em seu texto projeto a adesão de Beckett à experiência teatral em sua amplitude,induzindo-o a redefinir o status e o conceito de autoria. Palavras-chave: Samuel Beckett, Autoria, Play. Abstract This paper discusses the process of rewriting and staging Beckett's Play. The correlation between new staging of the play and textual revisions projects a deep adherence to the theatrical experience. Thus the concepts of text and authorship are redefined.
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Neste artigo discute-se o processo de elaboração do texto e montagens da peça Play, de Samuel Beckett. A correlação entre novas encenações da peça e revisões em seu texto projeto a adesão de Beckett à experiência teatral em sua amplitude,induzindo-o a redefinir o status e o conceito de autoria.
Palavras-chave: Samuel Beckett, Autoria, Play.
Abstract
This paper discusses the process of rewriting and staging Beckett's Play. The correlation between new staging of the play and textual revisions projects a deep adherence to the theatrical experience. Thus the concepts of text and authorship are redefined.