The Dramatic Art of Beckett

Author(s): Torunn Kjølner

Source: Nordic Irish Studies , 2009, Vol. 8, No. 1, Samuel Beckett (2009), pp. 5-13
Published by: Dalarna University Centre for Irish Studies

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25699539

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The Dramatic Art of Beckett

Torunn Kjolner

I first encountered Beckett's dramatic art on a theatre course run by the

Norwegian avant-garde composer Eyvind Solas in 1967. Solas was in love
with everything that was modern and new: modern music, modern poetry,
modern films and theatre. My fellow students and I understood that he
adored texts with no (realistic) meaning; or rather that he loved the sounds
and silences of texts. He composed theatre through the materiality of words
and sounds; and Beckett provided him with such material, as did Jean
Tardieu (who wrote several plays in the form of musical compositions,
such as The Sonata and the Three Gentlemen and Conversation -
Sinfonietta).
Most of the course was spent working with Beckett's dramaticule
Come and Go and Tardieu's The Sonata and the Three Gentlemen. I was
fifteen years old. I had had some roles in amateur theatre and had
participated in drama groups. However, meeting plays in this form was
another cup of theatrical tea! No forceful conflicts or oversized characters,
whose feelings it felt awkward to simulate. "You don't have to
understand", Solas said. "It's absurd. Just do it. Wait for the beat, speak
some of the words, wait for the beat, go with the flow... say the words,
wait, sit, stand up - and again, please. And with variation ... Do not try to
understand, sense its rhythm."
Looking back, I must admit that at the time I did not understand that
what he meant. It took me many years to realise that not only had I met an
extraordinary playwright, I had also been confronted with another concept
of theatre. I believe that this first experience with Beckett was central to
my decision to follow a career in theatre. It also taught me that theatre is
not just theatre, that drama is not just a good plot driven by characters in
conflict. The traditional view of theatre as the study of characters in their
psychological subtleties was constantly questioned by the course.
With Beckett it is all in the text: his texts build a complete theatrical
universe. Beckett's dramatic art is spun through the creation of lines and
actions, which can be used as scripts for rehearsing the way in which sound
and silence, words and pauses, action and non-action work together. Act
follows act, not as psychological and dramatic entities, but rather as
compositions in time and space. The relations between Beckett's characters
are not so much psychological as conceptual. They are not to be

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Nordic Irish Studies

understood as socially or psychologically recognizable characters, who

perform understandable actions, but rather as relations of theatrical
components and effects: as images of human conditions, moods,
atmospheres, rhythms, sounds, stillness, light, words and actions.
During my ten years of higher education I have thrice been
examined in Waiting for Godot. The first was in 1972, when I was
studying History and Theatre at the University of Bergen and wrote my
first academic paper on Waiting for Godot and Martin Esslin's The Theatre
of the Absurd (1961).1 The second time was at The Royal Scottish
Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, where I trained for three years
in Speech and Drama. Alongside this, I took some courses at the
University of Glasgow: one of the professors of modem drama, Claude
Shumacher, gave a seminar on Beckett. Due to a death in my family I had
to re-sit the exam, and Schumacher designed a special exam question that I
shall never forget: What happens in the third act of Waiting for Godot?
I had four hours to answer...
'Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!' I cited from
the text, adding: 'it's even more awful than the first two acts.'
I believe 'awful' really represents my view of Waiting for Godot at
the time. It seemed painful, filled with existential anguish, in which the
dialogue served only to show that we do not really talk to each other, that
we do not have any chance of understanding each other. The tramps have
each other and they talk and expect something from each other, and yet
their individual needs are never satisfied. So there is really no reason for
them to be there, no reason for asking questions and no reason for
answering. No reason for waiting. Vladimir and Estragon are 'alone
together', to cite the Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse's most famous play,
Someone is Going to Come (1996). Waiting for Godot, then, seemed like
the very image of human tristesse ... Today, I am sure it was neither
Schumacher, nor myself, that guided me to think about Waiting for Godot
in these terms. The responsibility lies fully with Martin Esslin, to whom I
will return later.
At the age of 18, I had taken the train to Oslo to see Waiting for
Godot at Det Norske Teatret. It was performed on a black box stage to a
very small audience, which was rather unusual at the time. I remember
how happy I was that there was nobody with me to discuss it with. There
was nothing to talk about, no plot or theme to analyse, nothing to be said
about the acting. It was just an experience, and a very lasting experience at
that: a mood, an atmosphere, the satisfaction of an 18 year old's basic
desire to feel melancholic about life. It was not sad, not at all; it was even
funny, and yet the affect was melancholic. There was nothing to
understand or discuss: it was just absurd. Or was it?

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 The Dramatic Art of Beckett

My third academic experience of Beckett came in 1977 when I was

studying English at the University of Bergen. I attended a course on Post
war British Drama, run by Andrew Kennedy, who had recently written Six
Dramatists in Search of a Language (1975) on Beckett and other post-war
playwrights.3 So we studied Beckett's language, his use of lines, his
references to the stage conventions of the circus, the music hall and the
comedy shows. It was a small and exclusive seminar, where Kennedy let
some of us see a letter from Beckett that he had received after having tried
to arrange a meeting with him in Paris. In the neatest of handwritings
Beckett suggested a place and a date, with the addition that 'we will meet,
if I am there at the time'. (According to Kennedy, Beckett happened not to
be there at the time.) I was also attending a seminar on Shakespeare, with
special attention given to Othello. I remember that we managed to make
Othello fit all of the dramatic and tragic Aristotelian dogmas. Both
seminars focused on plays, on dramatic art, as literature; neither of them
connected the plays to the stages they were written for. The discussions
were predominantly thematic, with reference made to the characters in
order to make the plays more accessible. I re-read Esslin's The Theatre of
the Absurd and was once again brainwashed: in order to understand
Beckett's plays one had to understand absurd drama, or so we were made
to believe.
I took notes and participated in many discussions in order to
understand what the term 'absurd' really meant. At the time it seemed to
make a lot of sense, particularly in Esslin's wise, witty and eloquent
formulation. We understood that one characteristic of absurd drama was
that it included contradictions between what was said and what was done.
This was apparently created in order to represent the absurdity of
contemporary life. It all seemed true and reasonable, as well as
academically correct, to categorise as absurd a drama without characters in
conflict and without a solution. For some reason I never brought any of my
acting training to bear on these seminars. I guess I did not even think about
it; my training as an actress and the field of literary study seemed two
different worlds. If I had done so, I could probably have pointed to the
simple fact that the ability to create a gap between what is said and what is
done is an essential aspect of an actor's training. In fact, it is something we
all do in normal life: nothing absurd about that.
Looking back, I wonder how Esslin managed to convince us that
there was - or is - such a phenomenon as absurd dramatic art. Of course,
he argues his case extremely well. In order to make my point clear, I must
cite Esslin rather extensively. I start with his introduction to Absurd Drama
(1965), published four years after The Theatre of the Absurd:

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Nordic Irish Studies

The Theatre of the Absurd' has become a catch-phrase, much used

and much abused. What does it stand for? And how can such a label
be justified? Perhaps it will be best to attempt to answer the second
question first. There is no organised movement, no school of artists,
who claim the label for themselves. A good many playwrights who
have been classed under this label, when asked if they belong to the
Theatre of the Absurd, will indignantly reply that they belong to no
such movement - and quite rightly so. For each of the playwrights
concerned seeks to express no more and no less his own personal
vision of the world.
Yet critical concepts of this kind are useful when new modes
of expression, new conventions of art arise. When the plays of
Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, and Adamov first appeared on the stage
they puzzled and outraged most critics as well as audiences. And no
wonder. These plays flout all the standards by which drama has been
judged for many centuries; they must therefore appear as a
provocation to people who have come into the theatre expecting to
find what they would recognize as a well-made play. A well-made
play is expected to present characters that are well-observed and
convincingly motivated: these plays often contain hardly any
recognizable human beings and present completely unmotivated
actions. A well-made play is expected to entertain by the ding-dong
of witty and logically built-up dialogue: in some of these plays
dialogue seems to have degenerated into meaningless babble. A
well-made play is expected to have a beginning, a middle, and a
neatly tied-up ending [...] By all the traditional standards of critical
appreciation of the drama, [absurd] plays are not only abominably
bad, they do not even deserve the name drama.
And yet, strangely enough, these plays have worked, they
have had an effect, they have exercised a fascination of their own in
the theatre. [...] If the critical touchstones of conventional drama did
not apply to these plays, this must surely have been due to a
difference in objective, the use of different artistic means, to the fact,
in short, that these plays were both creating and applying a different
convention of drama. It is just as senseless to condemn an abstract
painting because it lacks perspective or a recognizable subject-matter
as it is to reject Waiting for Godot because it has no plot to speak of.
Yet, if tackled directly most of the playwrights in question
would refuse to discuss any theories or objectives behind their work.
They would, with perfect justification, point out that they are
concerned with one thing only: to express their vision of the world as
best they can, simply because, as artists, they feel an irrepressible
urge to do so. This is where the critic can step in. By describing the
works that do not fit into the established convention, by bringing out
the similarities of approach in a number of more or less obviously
related new works, by analysing the nature of their method and their

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 The Dramatic Art of Beckett

artistic effect, he can try to define the framework of the new

convention, and by doing so, can provide the standards by which it
will become possible to have works in that convention meaningfully
compared and evaluated. The onus of proof that there is such a
convention involved clearly lies on the critic, but if he can establish
that there are basic similarities in approach, he can argue that these
similarities must arise from common factors in the experience of the
writers concerned. And these common factors must in turn spring
from the spiritual climate of our age (which no sensitive artist can
escape) and also perhaps from a common background of artistic
influences, a similarity of roots, a shared tradition.
A term like the Theatre of the Absurd must therefore be
understood as a kind of intellectual shorthand for a complex pattern
of similarities in approach, method, and convention, of shared
philosophical and artistic premises, whether conscious or
subconscious, and of influences from a common store of tradition. A
label of this kind therefore is an aid to understanding, valid only in
so far as it helps to gain insight into a work of art. [.. .]4
In other words: while most plays in the traditional convention
are primarily concerned to tell a story or elucidate an intellectual
problem, and can thus be seen as a narrative or discursive form of
communication, the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd are primarily
intended to convey a poetic image or a complex pattern of poetic
images; they are above all a poetical form. Narrative or discursive
thought proceeds in a dialectical manner and must lead to a result or
final message; it is therefore dynamic and moves along a definite
line of development. Poetry is above all concerned to convey an
idea, an atmosphere, or mode of being; and is essentially static.
This does not mean, however, that these plays lack
movement: the movement in Amedee, for instance, is relentless,
lying as it does in the pressure of the ever-growing corpse. But the
situation of the play remains static; the movement we see is the
unfolding of the poetic image. The more ambiguous and complex
that image, the more intricate and intriguing will be the process of
revealing it. [...] It is only when the last lines [of Waiting for Godot]
have been spoken and the curtain has fallen that we are in a position
to grasp the total pattern of the complex poetic image we have been
confronted with. [...] What will the completed image be when we
have grasped the nature of the pattern? [.. .]5
The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may
be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And
that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not
provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.6

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Nordic Irish Studies

As might seem obvious, Martin Esslin speaks with a forked tongue.

However, he does it very convincingly. Dramatists have the right to write
what they want - out of conviction - and so does the critic. Esslin is
convinced that there is such a thing as absurd theatre, since dialogue
written for the stage can achieve dramatic effect without dramatic conflict.
But Esslin is a man with a mission. He leaves us with two categories of
plays, both of which have rather heavy, and incompatible, values attached
to them. According to Esslin, there are two types of drama: well-made
plays and absurd drama. The first is old-fashioned, boring and out-of
touch, while the second is new and possesses great contemporary potential.
Esslin catches the stick thrown by the German critic and theoretician
Peter Szondi, who categorized modem drama in terms of its attempts to
'save' or 'replace' classical dramatic form. Both Esslin and Szondi look for
new forms and they do it for the same reason: the art of the theatre is in
need of a contemporary identity. Esslin is convinced that absurd drama is a
replacement of the (old-fashioned) well-made play, and therefore he apes
the world's first dramaturgical analysis. Like Aristotle, who read and
analysed all the Greek dramas he could find from the golden period of
tragedy in order to discover the connection between means and effect,
Esslin looks around for particular plays and locates a category. For
Aristotle, catharsis is the greatest effect a play can have. Esslin finds that
post-war European drama simply 'works' on contemporary audiences with
other means and other effects. His point is that they provoke not 'tears of
despair' but the 'laughter of liberation'.
By classifying contemporary productions, plays and playwrights,
including Beckett, as 'absurd', Esslin gave the world of the theatre a term
and a rhetoric that has stuck for almost 40 years. On a practical level the
term 'absurd' does not - at least in my experience - make much sense in
drama or theatre, neither as an analytical term nor as a classification of
dramatic art. Even when teaching text or performance analysis, it is my
experience that the term 'absurd' functions more as a block to analytical
insight than as an eye opener to what it is 'really about'. When training
actors, I refrain from using the term 'absurd theatre' at all. The actors
would otherwise immediately try to find a style or mode of acting as an
end result of their work; and such an idea of a result makes it very difficult
to sense what these dramas have to offer the stage.
Had Esslin really absorbed the consequences of what he experienced
between 1962, when he coined the term, and 1965, when he wrote the
introduction to Absurd Drama, he would have been able to redefine the
classification and argue his own point, namely that these plays represent
another concept of theatre, and therefore a different concept of dramatic art
altogether. Instead of forcing me to spend hours trying to discover what
absurd acting is, or what kind of character work one has to apply to

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 The Dramatic Art of Beckett

Beckett's plays, Esslin would have assisted me greatly by emphasizing that

one could examine the pure formality of these plays, rather than the lack of
themes, meaning or coherence which the term 'absurd' connotes. In his
introduction he does point to the formal structures of Beckett's plays, to
images and complex patterns of images. But by summing up that this
(new) drama has a particular effect, which classical drama does not have,
he promotes a term with an ontologically-based assumption it has been
near impossible to refute: that the theatre of the absurd provokes "laughter
of liberation" - and thus absurd drama is more relevant than previous
forms of drama. Not only does he presume that absurd drama has specific
effects, he also mixes the effect of performance with the effect of the text,
which in the world of theatre makes very little sense. In fact, it seems
rather absurd. The art of the theatre is, like other art forms, a conscious
creation of a whole, a composition of elements presented in a space for a
period of time. The effects will arise from the (very detailed) choices
made, not only from the combination of words written on a piece of paper.
As in other art forms, differences arise in the understanding of what theatre
art is, of what it can, should or must do. In other words, different concepts
of theatre are at stake, different ideas as to which elements are most
important, different ways of receiving theatre. What is important to notice
is that these concepts of dramatic art co-exist in our society today, as they
did in the 60s. There is simply no agreement about what theatre should
provoke, how it could provoke, or what is important to present on stage.
In a nutshell, the dramatic art of Beckett is not concerned with
replacing Aristotelian plotted conflict and character development with
another kind of dramatic suspense, or another kind of effect, such as the
laughter of liberation. Nevertheless, we must grant Esslin the point that
Beckett does something Aristotle would have had problems fitting in to his
dramatic dogma of tragedy. Aristotle could, through reading the plots of
the Greek tragedies analyse a cathartic effect. Reading Beckett's plays is
not like reading Greek drama, because Beckett's plays are not dramatic.
They are not dramatic because they are not plotted and conflict driven.
There are no antagonists, and hardly any protagonists. These plays are not
written for the kind of theatre that places characters and their relationships
centre stage: they are more like theatre art than dramatic art, in that they
include all the elements of the theatre. Theatre seems conceived as a
compositional art form, where the creation of a theatrical universe through
metaphors and images plays the main role. Thus Beckett's plays are more
like musical scores. The actors are expected to read the images, notes,
beats, pauses, lighting cues, rhythm and spacing of the words, all the
commas and the full stops, in order to gain a sense of what it is about. It
might not be very wise to try to understand such a play thematically. The
theme is the composition of elements, such as the images and the potential

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Nordic Irish Studies

use of time and space. It is necessary to understand the rhythm of it, to

look for changing moods and atmospheres, because this is what Beckett's
plays offer.
Humans can function as adequate material in theatre art: humans can
speak lines and can move; they have shapes that can be visible or hidden
by clothes, props and scenery. Actors enter such a universe with their
bodies, voices and minds, but nobody expects them to understand the
psychological motives of the characters or to make them recognisable as
human beings who live amongst us. Through framing and metaphors,
actions and images, theatre art communicates complex patterns of images,
as Esslin so clearly saw in what he calls 'theatre of the absurd'. The
problem is, it is not absurd. 'Absurdity' is a theme, a statement, a
contemporary catchphrase that hides the real workings of these plays.
Beckett's dramatic art, or rather his theatre art, lies in his ability to include
the art of performance in texts that also have literary qualities. He holds his
elements together in strong conceptual frameworks, like installations. A
heap of sand in Happy Days, two dustbins in Endgame, a tape recorder and
a man in Krapp's Last Tape: the act of placing these installations on a
theatre stage functions as a 'dramatic connotation'. There is no social or
realistic answer to why there is a heap of sand or two dustbins filled with
people. The objects or scenic elements are prerequisites in the theatrical
metaphor Beckett presents us with. The stage and all the stage directions
are elements of a coherent concept, designed to be played out in the
theatre.
To sum up, I find it more interesting and challenging to approach
Beckett's plays as scores for performing art, than as plays with 'another
kind of dramatic suspense'. As a director or actress one seems better off
investigating the given circumstances of the plays in terms of their
formalities, the frames and scores they offer, rather than trying to
understand the characters. Today we expect contemporary directors to
interpret plays we already know in new ways. This usually involves
creating a new universe or a new mode of behaviour for the characters. A
dramatic text is no longer seen as a given frame for staging, where all the
words, all the action, all the characters and (especially) all the scenography
must be represented in every production of the play. On the contrary,
contemporary directors are expected to come up with a brand new
interpretation or conceptualisation of the text.
It is possible to take words and lines from Beckett's plays and use
them in different kinds of theatre concepts. They are very robust and
flexible, and can be used and abused. It is a well-known secret that many
directors have stolen bits and pieces from his plays, for instance to replace
lines resulting from endless improvisations. I have seen several attempts to
give Waiting for Godot 2l new concept, a new theatrical universe, or new

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 The Dramatic Art of Beckett

interpretations of the roles. Thus, it has been performed in female prisons,

in death camps, in circuses and so on. But this is only really possible if the
director, the scenographer and the actors overlook the formality of the play
and the very specific images it sets up to make its statements. It is very
difficult to conceptualise Beckett's play in a new manner, because there is
already a strong concept in its compositional workings. It does not
represent a story that can be adjusted to contemporary society by being told
in another way. Without the specific and very coherent formality of each
play - its images, musicality and silences - Beckett's plays are no longer
recognisable as his own conceptual statements. It is very difficult to avoid
reducing coherent conceptual statements to well intended messages. An
understanding of this danger - which mainly lies in the subtle difference
between specific ambiguity and ambiguous ambiguity - has been shown by
Beckett's Estate, which insists on the strictest control over production
rights for Beckett's plays. It is almost impossible to receive permission to
perform his plays without promising to keep to Beckett's spatial demands
and stage directions, as well as to his words, pauses, lighting and so on. So
Beckett has not really become the classical playwright he could have
become, staged by every creative director on the European theatre scene in
new versions and variations. Perhaps this is for the best, in order to protect
a form of dramatic art that is not so much dramatic as performative.
Perhaps it is simply because there is only one way to stage Beckett's plays:
his way.

Notes and References

1 Esslin, Martin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Doubleday, 1961)
2 Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986) 41
3 Kennedy, Andrew, Six Dramatists in Search of a Language: Studies in Dramatic
Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)
4 Martin Esslin, 'Introduction' to AbsurdDrama (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) 7-9
5 Esslin, 'Introduction' 11-12
6 Esslin, 'Introduction' 23

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