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Clov: There's nowhere else.
Endgame
One answer to this question is: in a theatre. Beckett doesn't try to create a dramatic illusion or encourage the audience to suspend disbelief. On the contrary, he often deliberately draws attention to the performance as a performance, playing with the relationship between player and audience. In Waiting for Godot, when Estragon directs Vladimir to the toilet 'End of corridor, on the left,' Vladimir requests, 'Keep my seat.' Then he sees the audience:
Vladimir: We're surrounded. [Estragon makes a rush towards back.] Imbecile! There's no way out there. [He takes Estragon by the arm and drags him towards front. Gesture towards front.] There! Not a soul in sight! Off you go. Quick! [He pushes Estragon towards auditorium. Estragon recoils in horror.] You won't? [He contemplates auditorium.] Well, I can understand that.
In Endgame, Hamm conducts self-auditions and criticises his own performance. 'Did you never hear an aside before?' he asks Clov. 'I'm warming up for my last soliloquy.' When Clov wonders ' What is there to keep me here?' Hamm quips: 'The dialogue.'
The grimly satirical Catastrophe takes its title from the term for the final resolution of the plot of a classical tragedy. The principal player is called 'P' for 'protagonist' (the word is from the Greek for 'principal actor'). He is placed on a pedestal, immobile, speechless and totally passive.
Assistant: [Finally.] Like the look of him?
Director: So so. [Pause.] Why the plinth?
Assistant: To let the stalls see the feet.
As far as setting and scenery goes, there is little or nothing in the plays to distract either audience or player:
a bare interior - Endgame
a low mound - Happy Days
a desert - Act Without Words I
a table - Krapp's Last Tape
a street corner - Rough for Theatre 1
three urns - Play
three chairs - Come and Go
two sacks - Act Without Words II
empty stage littered with rubbish - Breath
a bare stage - Rockaby, What Where
darkness - That Time, Not I I
In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon find themselves on a lonely, open 'country road', with a solitary tree; a non-representational place they can describe only as 'here' or 'this place'. Whether 'this place' is even where they are to keep their appointment is in question:
Estragon: You're sure it was here?
Vladimir: What?
Estragon: That we were to wait.
Vladimir: He said by the tree. [They look at the tree.] Do you see any others?
The world elsewhere is silent and indifferent, and they are unable to move on.
Estragon: Well, shall we go?
Vladimir: Yes, let's go. [They do not move.]
For Hamm and Clov, in Endgame, it is as if nature no longer exists. The world Clov spies through the windows is inaccessible, dead and grey: Hamm: And the horizon? Nothing on the horizon?
Clov: [Lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, exasperated.] What in God's name could there be on the horizon? [Pause.]
Hamm: The waves, how are the waves?
Clov: The waves? [He turns the telescope on the waves.] Lead.
Hamm: And the sun?
Clov: [Looking.] Zero.
As the plays progress, the characters become more and more hemmed in. In Krapp's Last Tape, Krapp is surrounded by darkness, stuck with himself and his memories.
Tape: The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness round me I feel less alone. [Pause.] In a way. [Pause.] I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to ... [hesitates] ... me. [Pause.] Krapp.
In Happy Days, Winnie is actually buried up to her waist and later to her neck in a mound in the centre of the stage.
Winnie: I speak of when I was not yet caught in this way and had my legs and had the use of my legs, and could seek out a shady place, like you, when I was tired of the sun, or a sunny place, when I was tired of the shade, like you, and they are all empty words ...
Happy Days was Beckett's last full-length play, and after it the work became increasingly minimalist, allowing nothing in the setting to distract either character or spectator. 'Beckett is a remover of anything that might misdirect the audience,' observes Charles Sturridge, director of Ohio Impromptu in the Beckett on Film series. 'He takes everything out except the absolute essentials in order to produce the purest, simplest line of thought.'
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