Images of Beckett - Index of

cage’. 108 At one moment he even considered having
the ‘faint shadow of bars on the stage floor’, 109 in
the end deciding that this was much too explicit.
Beckett’s characters were, as Lucky’s dance
suggested, imprisoned in a net, able to move only
along the strands of its mesh. Their movements to
and fro resembled, then, those of the caged owls,
bears and apes that appear in his early poems and
prose. When, in the Schiller Theatre production,
the two friends go offstage during Lucky’s ‘think’,
they merely beat their wings like trapped birds,
bouncing back, as if on elastic, into the stage space
to which they are inextricably confined.
The theme of imprisonment is one that
pervades almost the whole of Beckett’s theatre.
In Godot, Estragon and Vladimir are (whatever they
say) ‘tied’ to Godot. Pozzo and Lucky are, literally
and metaphorically, linked one to the other by the
rope. In Endgame, Nagg and Nell are physically
imprisoned in their dustbins, just as Hamm is
confined to his wheelchair. Hamm and Clov are
also both mentally tied to the room. The figures
in Play are stuck in funeral urns, immured in a
strange kind of limbo, each of them a victim of the
interrogating beam of light. As a director, Beckett
underlined this aspect of his writing while again
seeking not to make it too explicit. He wrote, for
instance, to Rick Cluchey when he was about to
play Krapp in Berlin under his direction that ‘he
should make the thing his own in terms of
incarceration, for example. Incarceration in self.
Greg Hicks and Denis Quilley in Waiting for Godot, 1997
BECKETT AS DIRECTOR 139