Images of Beckett - Index of

106 IMAGES OF BECKETT
manages to be at once concrete and suggestive. In
Krapp’s Last Tape the poetry does not primarily arise
out of Krapp’s lyrical accounts of his experience
with a woman in the punt or the death of his
mother, however touching these may be, but from
the direct encounter between a man and his
recorded past, a fascinating conjunction of like
and unlike.
When Beckett turned to direct his own plays,
he aimed above all to create a unified, musically
organised, poetic structure. It is quite possible that
he simply evolved his own methods of directing as
a result of a combination of impulse and
experience. His usual practice, however, was to
read widely, then to think deeply about the literary
or theatrical problems involved before coming up
with his own solutions. He had already done this
in the early 1930s in the case of the novel, before
writing, first, the posthumously published Dream
of Fair to Middling Women and then Murphy (1938).
There is, as yet, no real evidence to prove that
Beckett read Edward Gordon Craig’s The Art of
Theatre, although this seems very likely. There is
much in Craig’s writings on the theatre that finds
either an echo or a parallel in Beckett’s own
practice as a director. 32 Beckett would certainly
have discovered in The Art of Theatre an important
distinction between a theatre of words, of
literature, and a truly poetic theatre that
incorporated all the different elements of theatrical
art. ‘The art of the theatre’, wrote Craig, ‘is neither
John Hurt in Krapp’s Last Tape, 1999