Images of Beckett - Index of

outside in order to direct it. However, looking at the evolution of the play’s
manuscripts, it is difficult to believe that he was not already fully aware of the
dualistic divisions, which were an essential part of Gnostic thinking, while he
was writing or (at the very least) while he was revising it. And to anyone who
knows the play at all well, it is impossible to accept that the analytical
remarks in the notebook were the ‘ravings’, that, either self-deprecatingly or
self-defensively, he once described them as to me. 126 In fact, writing to Alan
Schneider about the play in advance of the New York production, and years
before he directed it himself, he revealed how crucial these contrasts seemed
to him.
With regard to costume it should be sufficiently clear from text (don’t be afraid of
exaggerating with boots). Black and white (both dirty), the whole piece being built up
in one sense on this simple antithesis of which you will find echoes throughout the text
(black ball, white nurse, black pram, Bianca, Kedar – anagram of ‘dark’ – Street, black
storm, light of understanding, etc.) Black dictionary if you can and ledger. Similarly
black and white set. 127
Rudolf Arnheim in his book on film had already drawn attention to how
effective such contrasting imagery was in Josef von Sternberg’s 1928 silent
film, The Docks of New York. He wrote that ‘the primitive but always effective
symbolism of Light versus Darkness, white purity versus black evil, the
opposition between gloom and radiance, is inexhaustible. In Sternberg’s
“The Docks of New York”, for example, the two chief characters in the film
are characterised in this way. The pale face, the white dress, the light hair
of the girl are in optical contrast to the black figure of the ship’s stoker.’ 128
The Gnostic oppositions of light and darkness (identified in Beckett’s
notes as ‘light and dark emblems’ and mentioned sometimes as separate,
sometimes as integrated) were incorporated in Beckett’s productions into the
set, stage props and Krapp’s costume. Moreover, he added other light and
dark elements additional to those already present in the published texts: the
den at the back of the stage was lit by a white light and was separated from
the stage by a black curtain; the tin boxes, white envelope and dark wooden
table picked up even more of these light and dark oppositions; the ledger
BECKETT AS DIRECTOR 143