SAMUEL BECKETT
1906
April
Samuel Barclay Beckett is born on April 13 (Good Friday) in Foxrock, near
Dublin.
1928
October
Beckett accepts a position in Paris, France, and from then on lives only
intermittently in Ireland and England.
1931
February
Beckett’s first stage piece, the “irreverent burlesque” of parts of
Corneille’s Le Cid entitled Le Kid, is presented at the Peacock
Theatre by the Dublin University Modern Language Society. Written in French
with a fellow lecturer at Trinity College, Georges Pelorson, the short play
violates every stricture of French classical drama. Beckett himself took the
role of Don Diègue. No copy of the work has been located.
1934
August
Beckett, a great admirer of W. B. Yeats's poetry, comments in a letter to a
friend that he saw the latest of his plays, Resurrection and King of
the Great Clock Tower, and found them dull; "Balbus building his wall
would be more dramatic."
Reviewing two of O'Casey's short plays in Bookman, Beckett calls him "a master of knockabout in this very serious and honourable sense—that he discerns the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities, and activates it to their explosion. This is the energy of his theatre, the triumph of the principle of knockabout in situation, in all its elements and on all its planes, from the furniture to the higher centres. If Juno and the Paycock, as seems likely, is his best work so far, it is because it communicates most fully this dramatic dehiscence, mind and world come asunder in irreparable dissociation."
1936
December
Beckett reports in a letter to a friend that he may write a play about Samuel
Johnson and Mrs Thrale. He had "often thought what a good subject was
there, perhaps only one long act. What interested me especially was the
breakdown of Johnson as soon as Thrale disappeared." A letter of June 1937
reports that he is making progress on the play, to be entitled Human Wishes,
but he never completes more than part of a scene of the projected four acts.
That is described and printed as an appendix in Just Play: Beckett's Theater
(1980) by Ruby Cohn, to whom Beckett gave the manuscript.
1937
January
Beckett records in a notebook thoughts that underlie his developing
antinaturalistic view of life and prefigure his later aesthetic, as he
expressed them to Axel Kaun and a man called Meier: "I am not interested
in a 'unification' of the historical chaos any more than I am in the
'clarification' of the individual chaos, and still less in the anthropomorphisation
of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos. What I want is the straws,
flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and deaths, because that is all I can know.
. . . Meier says the background is more important than the foreground, the
causes than the effects, the causes than their representatives and opponents. I
say the background and the causes are an inhuman and incomprehensible machinery
and venture to wonder what kind of appetite it is that can be appeased by the
modern animism that consists in rationalising them. Rationalism is the last
form of animism. Whereas the pure incoherence of times and men and places is at
least amusing."
1938
January
Beckett is nearly killed when a Parisian pimp, exasperated at his refusal to
accompany him, stabs him in the chest, barely missing his heart but inflicting
a dangerous injury by penetrating the pleura. Later the two men meet; Beckett
asks him why he did it, and the pimp responds, "Je ne sais pas,
Monsieur. Je m'excuse."
1947
January
Writing in French, Beckett composes his first full-length play, Eleuthéria
("Freedom"), finishing it in February. He will never sanction its
production or publication, but after many legal wrangles an English translation
is published in the United States in 1995 partly because a private production
had aroused great interest. The most prominent elements of this "drame
bourgeois" are a parodic use of well-made-play devices and a notably
incongruous young romantic hero (Victor Krap) whose goal in life is to be
"as little as possible," ultimately "nothing."
1949
In "Three Dialogues" with Georges Duthuit (transition49,
No.5), Beckett speaks favorably of the artistic revolutionaries Matisse and Tal
Coat "turning from [the plane of the feasible] in disgust, weary of its puny
exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little
better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road."
They preferred "the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing
with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no
desire to express, together with the obligation to express."
January
Beckett finishes writing En attendant Godot, having started it in
October 1948. It will not reach the stage until January 1953 (in Paris) and, as
Waiting for Godot, August
1953
January
After being published (in French) in October 1952, Beckett's En attendant
Godot is staged at the tiny Théâtre de Babylone in Paris and
gradually becomes a cause célèbre as Jean Anouilh, Armand Salacrou,
Jacques Audiberti, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and others champion it. Along with
subsequent productions in Germany, the play brings Beckett unaccustomed riches
and worldwide attention; as he later puts it, from then on he was "damned
to fame." He produces an English version by the end of the year, which is
published in 1954 (at the urging of Thornton Wilder) but not staged until
August 1955.
1955
August
Beckett's Waiting for Godot, masterfully directed by Peter Hall, is
performed on August 3 at the private Arts Theatre Club in London. (A West End
production had been planned, but the Lord Chamberlain's office refused a
license unless irreverent passages, including the first 15 lines of Lucky's
tirade, were excised.) The play's reception is hostile; half the first-night
audience leaves at the intermission. But prominent reviews by Kenneth Tynan and
Harold Hobson four days after the opening prompt discerning playgoers to feel
they must see it. (Tynan notes, "It forced me to re-examine the rules
which have hitherto governed the drama; and, having done so, to pronounce them
not elastic enough"; Hobson declares prophetically that the play at its
best is "something that will securely lodge in a corner of your mind for
as long as you live.") In September the production is transferred to the
Criterion Theatre in the West End, where its run is extended to a total of 263.
Beckett labeled Waiting for Godot a "tragicomedy," implying a careful blend of the two disparate forms. He told the French director Roger Blin, "The spirit of the play, to the extent to which it has one, is that nothing is more grotesque than the tragic." Its radical dramaturgy derives from his success in devising what he will speak of as "a form that accommodates the mess," in his eyes "the task of the artist now." Vivian Mercier will pen the enduring description of its basic form in a review: it is "a play in which nothing happens, twice." The two acts follow the same pattern, with variations, as two interdependent down-and-outs keep a tenuous appointment with a Mr Godot, who does not come. First they kill time with talk and games designed for that purpose; then a diversion, first mistaken for Godot, arrives in the person of a domineering master and his vassal; after they leave, the men kill time again until a boy reports that Mr Godot cannot come today but surely will tomorrow; then night abruptly falls as they consider hanging themselves rather than returning the next day. At the curtains to each act, they decide to depart but remain motionless. The second act, after an ominous cyclical song on the theme of death, is markedly more dismal than the first. Pathos dominates instead of farce as before. Disintegration is inherent in their treadmill existence, and they realize more and more, along with the audience, that succeeding days / acts would bring increased discomfort and the same lack of wish-fulfillment. Their consolations—"We always find something . . . to give us the impression we exist" and "We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment"—are negated by the overwhelming impression that "nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!" The nihilistic theme is stated immediately—"Nothing to be done"—and the play's cyclical form embodies and transmits this meaning. The alleged entity "Godot" will be interpreted as everything from a fulfilling God to a welcome death; Beckett himself snuffs questions about what he represents by saying "If I knew, I would have said so in the play." (Critics have widely agreed that he represents whatever kind of respite or salvation an individual might seek.) The impact of the play’s minimalist dramaturgy—analogous to the minimalist sculpture of Giacometti (who designed the tree for the Paris premiere)—will be adeptly described by Tom Stoppard in an April 1893 conversation at the National Theatre: Godot “was a shocking event because it completely redefined the minima of a valid theatrical transaction. Up till then, to have a play at all you had to have ‘x,’ you couldn’t have a tenth of ‘x’ and have a play.” Beckett adamantly refuses to permit cuts or other alterations in performances that he cannot supervise, but often makes minor changes on the spot during rehearsals he attends. All editions vary, even the English and American printings; finally two scholars in collaboration with the author produce a "definitive" text in the first volume of the series The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett (1993). This work also reprints many of Beckett's illuminating comments on the meaning, choreography, and musical texture of the play, including detailed notations on Lucky's long speech, recorded from rehearsals for a German production.
December
Beckett comments in a letter to his director Alan Schneider before the impending
American premiere of Waiting for Godot: “When it comes to journalists I
feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind. And to
insist on the extreme simplicity of dramatic situation and issue. If that’s not
enough for them, and it obviously isn’t, it’s plenty for us, and we have no
elucidations to offer of mysteries that are all of their making. My work is a
matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and
I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches
among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin” (printed in the Village
Voice Reader).
1956
April
Beckett's Waiting for Godot is finally presented on Broadway. Its
January preview production in Miami, advertised as the "laugh hit of two
continents" and starring the comedians Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell, misled
audiences and nearly scuttled its New York opening. However, with a new
director and advanced billing as a must-see for "seventy thousand
intellectuals" (and Lahr still starring), the play attains a run of over
100. Notable among the reviews are Eric Bentley's, focusing on the play's
existentialist nausea and "undramatic" theatricalism, and Harold
Clurman's reluctant enjoyment of a "poetic harlequinade" masterfully
shaped to convey a view of life that repels him.
May
In an interview (New York Times), Beckett compares his aesthetic with
that of Joyce: "The more Joyce knew the more he could. He's tending toward
omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I'm working with impotence,
ignorance. There seems to be a kind of esthetic axiom that expression is
achievement—must be an achievement. My little
exploration is that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by
artists as something unusable—as something by
definition incompatible with art."
June
Beckett comments briefly on Shaw, Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey in a letter to
Cyril Cusack, who had asked him for a tribute to G.B.S. for a centenary
programme: "I wouldn't suggest that G.B.S. is not a great play-wright,
whatever that is when it's at home. What I would do is give the whole
unupsettable apple-cart for a sup of the Hawk's Well, or the Saints', or a
whiff of Juno, to go no further. Sorry."
1957
April
Beckett's Fin de partie, eventually translated as Endgame, is
presented in London at the Royal Court Theatre six times before its first Paris
production later that month. His first version, written in the first two months
of 1955, was in two acts, the first one ending at the apparent death of the
master-figure's mother. The one-act revision, for which Beckett supplied an
English translation (truncating the scene in which a boy is dimly perceived
outside) will usually be supplemented in performance by the brief mime Acte
sans paroles, published in English as Act Without Words I, or by the
one-act Krapp's Last Tape.
October
Beckett's Endgame is presented six times at the Court in a double
premiere with the shorter one-act Krapp's Last Tape. It is revived in
October 1958 for a run of 38. Set in an underground shelter whose environs seem
to be "corpsed," Endgame moves a degree beyond Waiting for
Godot in negativity, superseding that play's theme, "Nothing to be
done," with "Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be
nearly finished." Beckett will describe the play to the American director
Alan Schneider as "rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the
power of the text to claw, more inhuman than Godot." It was
immediately dubbed "the ashcan play" because of the startling
spectacle of two dying relics, the main character's parents, spending their
last hours in such receptacles. It moves these and two other disintegrating
personae through an "old endgame lost of old" (the chess metaphor is
intentional). However, nothing decisively comes to an end—except sugarplums, painkillers, coffins and the
like. Instead of two highly repetitive acts, the play conveys the "last
million last moments" in another abusive but interdependent relationship
between master and slave, this pair more like a contemptuous father and sulking
boy. Rather than a futile shared commitment to waiting for a
"savior," the play depicts the servant-figure building up his
determination to abandon his master, and, at the finale, actually posing at the
door, dressed for the road. He is not seeking merely to escape but to pursue
his dream of extinction, entering a world in which "all would be silent
and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust." But the
final tableau reflects the opening one closely, and the servant remains frozen
where he stands. ("The end is in the beginning.") The blind,
chair-bound master is often preoccupied with composing a story which seems to
be based on his one redeeming action long ago, taking the baby of a man who was
perishing into his shelter. When his exploited man-slave states that he is
leaving and a small boy appears (or seems to) outside, he claims he doesn't
need him any more. But at the finale he whistles for him and receives no
response. His stoic acceptance of his abandonment is poignant. As in the case
of Waiting for Godot (and subsequent major plays), the definitive text
of the play appears in the series The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett.
Krapp's Last Tape, another "endgame play" written rapidly in English in early 1958, is an innovative and moving monodrama of lost love and dead aspirations. The 69-year-old title character, a stumbling, white-faced, purple-nosed figure immersed in a void, putters through a minimal existence and nostalgically revisits his past. He does so by playing excerpts from audio tapes made when he was 39, still believed in love, and experienced a "vision" that fired him to produce a "magnum opus." But the book sold only seventeen copies—presumably because the miraculous revelation which inspired him (parallel to one in Beckett's life) was that the profound spiritual gloom that had plagued him was the "reality" that should underlie his work. The old man concludes that the long-lost delights add up to nothing but "all that old misery."
1958
January
Beckett's Endgame is presented Off-Broadway and has a run of 104.
1961
February
Responding to questions put by sixth-form students in Bielefeld, Germany,
Beckett comments: "For me, the theatre is not a moral institution in
Schiller's sense. I want neither to instruct nor to improve nor to keep people
from getting bored. I want to bring poetry into drama, a poetry which has been
through the void and makes a new start in a new room-space. I think in new
dimensions and basically am not very worried about whether I can be
followed" (Spectaculum).
Summer
In a memorable interview with Tom Driver (Columbia University Forum),
Beckett expresses his underlying aesthetic principles. Averring that the world
is in a state of "buzzing confusion" best conveyed by the term
"mess," he states: "The only chance of renovation is to open our
eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of." He then
speaks of "the tension in art between the mess and form." As
paraphrased by Driver: "until recently, art has withstood the pressure of
chaotic things. It has held them at bay. It realized that to admit them was to
jeopardize form. 'How could the mess be admitted, because it appears to be the
opposite of form and therefore destructive of the very thing that art holds
itself to be?' But now we can keep it out no longer, because we have come into
a time when 'it invades our experience at every moment. It is there and it must
be allowed in.'" But this does not mean the end of art, with chaos
reflecting chaos. There will still be form in art, but "new form" of
a type that "admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is
really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. . . . That is
why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem
separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates
the mess, that is the task of the artist now."
September
Beckett's Happy Days is presented at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York
a full year before the first London production (November 1962, Court). Begun in
October 1960 and later translated as Oh les beaux jours, the play itself
poses the spectator's inevitable question: "What's it meant to mean?" Beckett's latest endgame drama features the striking
mythic image of a woman buried in a mound of scorched earth up to her stomach,
then after the intermission up to her neck. She resides amid a desert
"wilderness" under relentless sunlight with only a scraggly parasol
for self-defense. Her useless mate stays behind the mound in a cave, emerging
rarely to read from an old newspaper or for the briefest of replies. She busies
herself carrying out cosmetic routines and fondling cherished objects (among
them a pistol), prattling to her husband as if he were listening, and
reflecting on things that pop into her mind, including romantic memories and
lines of poetry. Even after her crucial world of things is forbidden to her in
Act II, she makes up stories about a little girl and her doll, and clings
desperately to the attitude of a Christian polyanna: "it will have been a
happy day, after all, another happy day." As in Endgame, the play
concludes with a deliberately ambiguous event. Her mate claws his way up the
mound, perhaps wanting to help or kiss her, perhaps heading for the pistol,
then slithers back down. At the curtain "They look at each other. Long
pause."
1962
May
John Russell Taylor’s Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama
is published. The book parallels Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd in
its effect on drama reviewers, teachers, and playgoers by fixing in the public
mind the idea that the English theatre “has undergone a transformation in the
last six years or so, and the event which marks ‘then’ off decisively from
‘now’ is the first performance of Look Back in Anger on 8 May
November
Beckett’s Happy Days is staged at the Court a full year after its
premiere in New York. A young Tom Stoppard reviews it for Scene and
declares “The statement has left theatre behind. . . . Dramatically it is not
enough.”
1964
March
During rehearsals of Beckett’s Play at the National Theatre, a
controversy arises between Tynan and Devine, who is directing the play. Tynan
notes that before Beckett began attending rehearsals, “The delivery of the
lines was (rightly) puppet-like and mechanical, but not wholly dehumanised and
stripped of all emphasis and inflections.” But since the playwright’s arrival,
“the lines are chanted in a breakneck monotone with no inflections,” so that
“many of them will be simply inaudible.” Devine replies that Beckett’s presence
has been invaluable, and that “you’ll have to have a bit more guts if you
really want to do experimental works.” Tynan retorts that Devine is expressing
the viewpoint of a director’s theatre and a writer’s theatre,
whereas he believes in “a theatre of intelligent audiences. . . . I
thought we had outgrown the idea of a theatre as a mystic rite born of secret
communion between author, director, actors and an empty auditorium. The
‘dramatic purpose” you mention involves, for me, communication and contact with
a live audience. . . . So far from wanting to ‘turn the play into literature,’
I was proposing that we should liberate it from the author’s (to me) rather
confined view of its dramatic possibilities.”
April
Beckett's half-hour cyclical drama Play is performed in London. In a
sense a logical extension of Happy Days, the play startlingly exhibits
the motionless heads of two females and one male protruding from identical
urns. They dwell in a kind of purgatory where a "unique inquisitor,"
a spotlight that punctures the darkness by moving from face to face, provokes
the characters to recall a sordid ménage à trois during their earthly
existence, with no interaction or verification possible. The play concludes
nebulously, but must then be repeated (with variations determined in rehearsal)—and a second restart is
mercifully cut short. The minimal plot and precise musical structure are
qualities that recur in exaggerated form in Beckett's later stage plays,
notably Not I (1972), That Time (1976), Footfalls (1976),
Ohio Impromptu (1981), and Rockaby (1982). As Beckett deals with
problems in the performances of Play in England, America, and France
(where it is titled Comédie), he becomes more and more directly involved
in overseeing them. One result is that he does not consider the texts of
succeeding plays determined (and does not want them printed) until he has the
experience of rehearsals behind him. This attitude carries over into already
printed plays, so that he revises them in the light of rehearsals for new
performances and finally collaborates with scholars in an attempt to produce
definitive editions, printed as The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett.
1969
December
In an interview (in Vogue) occasioned by his winning the Nobel Prize in
Literature, Beckett states, "If my work has any meaning at all, it is due
more to ignorance, inability, and an intuitive despair than to any individual
strength. I think that I have perhaps freed myself from certain formal
concepts. Perhaps like the composer Schönberg or the painter Kandinsky, I have
turned toward an abstract language. Unlike them, however, I have not tried to
concretize the abstraction—not to give it yet
another formal context." Later he comments, "Writing becomes not
easier, but more difficult for me. Every word is like an unnecessary stain on
silence and nothingness. Democritus pointed the way: 'Naught is more than
nothing.'"
1976
November
Beckett tells the American musician Morton Feldman that there has been only one
theme in his life: "To and fro in shadow, from outer shade to inner
shadow. To and fro, between unattainable self and unattainable non-self" (Buffalo
News).
1983
June
Beckett's only stage play with political implications, the tiny one-act Catastrophe,
is presented in New York. (He had written it in French in 1982 for the Avignon Festival's
"nuit pour Václav Havel") Dedicated to the Czech playwright
who had been imprisoned for dissident views, the play uses the imperious
attitude of a theatre director toward an actor ("the Protagonist") as
an analogy to the oppressive behavior of dictators. Beckett's wordless actor,
pressured to be totally submissive and expressly forbidden to show his face,
raises his head and looks toward the audience at the curtain. Beckett commented
on a reviewer's opinion that the ending was ambiguous, "There's no
ambiguity there at all. He's saying: you bastards, you haven't finished me yet!"
1989
December
Beckett dies on December 22 of emphysema and undernourishment.
Samuel Beckett
28/10/2008 17:45 revised 6/12/2008 17:20
URL: http://pods.binghamton.edu/~ccarpen/Beckett.htm
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Rubén Moratalla Mayo
rumoma@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press
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