Images of Beckett - Index of

that this was particularly necessary with the late, delicate, highly condensed,
experimental dramas such as Not I, That Time or Footfalls, in which he
consciously felt that he was testing the limits of what was thought possible in
the theatre. But he also hoped to correct what he regarded as deficiencies in
the stagecraft of his earlier plays. He always maintained, for instance, that he
had written Waiting for Godot at a time when he was ignorant about the theatre
(the play was ‘messy’, he told Ruby Cohn 9 ) and that many things in it could,
and should, be improved. Once he had discovered how much directing the
plays could reveal about them even to himself, he came to regard their
staging as an important, continuing phase of the creative process, not as
something separate from it. As early as November 1963, he wrote to Alan
Schneider about his new work, Play: ‘I realise that no final script is possible
till I have had work on rehearsals’ 10 and, increasingly, this came to be the
attitude that he adopted towards all the plays that followed.
Part of the attraction of directing his own work was also that it allowed
him not only to ‘get right’ what was written down, but also to work with what
could not be expressed on the printed page: the echoes or contrasts of
balancing or differing voices, using them like musical instruments; the tone
and pitch of an inflexion; the precision and shape of gesture; the quality of a
look; the frequency and duration of a silence or a pause; the direction, speed
and manner of a stage move; the pace and rhythms of a section of dialogue,
or even, in the case of Play or Not I, of an entire play. It also offered him the
opportunity to relate these different elements to dramatic themes that
perhaps only he could fully identify.
Although Beckett welcomed the opportunity to realise his personal
vision more fully on the stage, he always had a curious love–hate relationship
with the theatre. He loathed all the fuss that surrounds theatrical events, the
social dimension of theatre-going, the pressures to meet a first-night
deadline, and the need for publicity for the sake of the theatre and the
production – although, in later years, in Britain, France and Germany, the
news that he was directing one of his plays was usually enough to guarantee
both ticket sales and press coverage. On the other hand, although he found
the rehearsal process challenging and exhausting, he also found it deeply
100 IMAGES OF BECKETT