Literary Matters asked the curator of this Beckett page and the editor of Fulcrum to a Beckett evening at Boston University, with the participation of the critic Christopher Ricks, the theater director Robert Scanlan, and the actress and literary scholar Allison Vanouse. Here is the review. “Shadows of the Opus . . . Magnus” An engrossing soirée of performance and discussion dedicated to Samuel Beckett and titled “Shadows of the Opus . . . Magnus” took place at Boston University’s Katzenberg Center on Thursday 27 March. The star participants were the critic Christopher Ricks (BU); Beckett’s friend and theater director, the theorist of dramaturgy Robert Scanlan (Harvard); and the actress and literary scholar Allison Vanouse, Ricks’s graduate student, who has just recently defended her Master’s thesis at BU’s Editorial Institute. The evening opened with a stunning performance by Allison Vanouse of Beckett’s dramatic monologue for a female actress, Not I, originally staged in 1972. It was impossible to follow all of Beckett’s requirements and instructions on this occasion; in a theater setting, Not I would have been performed in pitch-black darkness, with the actress herself invisible, hoisted on a platform eight feet above the stage, a single spotlight keyed on her furiously speaking mouth, the only clearly visible thing in the entire space. Barring proper theater props, Vanouse instructed the audience to simply focus on her mouth and to try and ignore everything else while taking in the delivery. Then, masterfully and at what seemed like a superhuman speed of speech, she brought on Beckett’s complex and utterly poetic text, all fifteen minutes or so worth of it, achieving an electrifying energy that called to my mind Beckett’s favorite actress Billie Whitelaw. This work was supposed to inspire a “helpless compassion,” and it did. A pity that this interpretation was not recorded on video. Robert Scanlan movingly reminisced about his friendship and theatrical collaborations with Beckett and touched on certain “principles of dramaturgy” (which happens to be the title of Scanlan’s own forthcoming magnum opus, one I am looking forward to). He is also writing a memoir of Beckett. Scanlan, who first met Beckett in 1980, told us how during the early part of their acquaintance Beckett was open to a degree of deviation from his original intentions and stage directions in a number of productions of his dramatic works. However, Beckett eventually began to insist on strict adherence to his original instructions. He also disallowed any “genre-jumping” (Ruby Cohn’s term for transferring a work to a medium for which it was not originally intended, e.g. staging a novel or turning it into a film, adopting a radio play for the a stage, etc.). In particular, Beckett forbade a production of Waiting for Godot with a female cast. Moreover, he asked Scanlan to “police” on his behalf various American productions of his plays. Scanlan emphasized that there were deep reasons for this. All actors in and directors who collaborated with him shared “the experience of working under extreme pressure to achieve the minute precision necessary to capture something that is very hard to capture” in works that “reassemble the self and the initial conditions of existence.” Christopher Ricks’s talk was about Samuel Beckett’s short prose text, “Ceiling,” written in September 1981, and its French version, “Plafond.” Dedicated to the artist Avigdor Arikha, a close personal friend of Beckett’s, this miniature masterpiece was originally included in one of Arikha’s art catalogues, and was eventually published with a note by Ricks in the Beckett issue of Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics (#6, 2007). As Ricks put it, this is “a piece about coming to, wondering if it is a good idea.” He commented on the text’s “extraordinary equanimity” and on the “great variety of gates” of meaning and expression that it contains. “Everything in Beckett it is about the pangs of birth and death,” said Ricks, and, just as I was about to propose that “breath” go between the other two, he turned to discussing the phonetic “breath” of this prose poem, which he associated with the repetition of the word “white”: “On coming to the first sight is of white”; etc. “Breath” here is in the word “white,” said Ricks, pronouncing it old-school, “hwite.” He pointed out that wh conveyed a sound different from w, and it would not have worked the same way with a plain w. Similarly, the title of Melville’s novel is “The Hwite Hwale, not The Wite Wale,” Ricks articulated. Another breath rhythm is created by the recurring sentence “On” that follows each paragraph on a line of its own. The vision’s progress resolves in a “dread darling sight,” “‘darling’ being a very Irish word,” remarked Ricks. He also commented that Beckett’s advice to a young author was, “Despair young and never look back.” Philip Nikolayev
Posted on: Thu, 17 Apr 2014 03:52:44 +0000
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