Images of Beckett - Index of

presented ‘as if seen from above outspread’; this powerful, floating image is
accompanied by a fragmented text that relates a haunting tale of solitude and
alienation. 94 In Not I, Mouth was placed upstage ‘about 8 feet above stage
level, faintly lit from close-up and below, rest of face in shadow’, while the
‘tall standing figure’ of the Auditor stood downstage on ‘a podium about 4
feet high’. 95 This unusual configuration and contrast of size is reminiscent
of the distortions that often characterise Expressionist painting. The
simplicity, two-dimensionality, purity of line and emphasis on horizontals
and verticals that are found in Kirchner’s paintings and the starkness of his
dramatically simplified black-and-white woodcuts are aspects of his work
that are also worth considering as possible influences on Beckett. One thinks
of the use made by Beckett of the vertical tree and the horizontal stone in his
own Schiller Theatre production of Waiting for Godot. Come and Go, with its
three women dressed in long violet, red and yellow coats, is reminiscent of a
Kirchner painting, such as Two Women in the Street (1914) or even Berlin Street
Scene (1913–14).
It is difficult, then, to look at Beckett’s late plays without thinking of
some of the features of Kirchner’s, Feininger’s or Munch’s paintings. The
focus that Beckett brings to the isolation of whole figures or parts of figures;
the alienation of one human being from another; the fragmentation of the
human body, with its separation of the head from the rest of a body or the
mouth from the head (as in Play, That Time and Not I); the sculptural, spectral
quality of the figure of May in Footfalls, with its emphasis on what Billie
Whitelaw called the ‘dinosaur-like pose’ of her awkwardly curved, pacing
body; the seated, then slow-moving figure in the television play, Ghost Trio:
all of these elements of Beckett’s later stage or television paintings – for that
essentially is what, quite knowingly, he was doing – are difficult to imagine
without his experience of modern and, more specifically, of Expressionist art.
Although I deal more fully with Beckett’s interest in the silent screen in
the third essay of this book, it is worth mentioning in this context that he was
also very familiar with Expressionist and Surrealist cinema. If Come and Go
(Left) Natasha Parry in Oh les beaux jours, 1998
IMAGES OF BECKETT 91