Oldal 148 [148]
SAMUEL BECKETT’S PLAY IN DIGITAL CULTURE: TECHNOLOGIES OF INFLUENCE
underlying contexts also change how people receive the work; audiences may
not be aware of the first layer of influence, tending to read what is seen on
stage as meaningful choices, attributing agency to the artists rather than to
the surrounding context. The chain of events that thus arises, in the case of
the long-term reception of a work by a canonical author like Samuel Beckett,
forms a third influence, which we might call “tradition.” However exigent
or localized the original circumstances of production were, performance
histories (and sometimes performance contracts) exert weight on the present.
When contemporary artists seek to stage a canonical work, especially one
that is still in copyright, there is always a risk that such traditions, with the
ongoing pressures on artists and audiences from the changing culture around
them, can tend to calcify into what is sometimes called “museum theatre.”
Such risk generally increases as an artist grows in stature.
One of the strongest constraints on what is possible in performance is
technological. Theatres are not only architectural configurations that make
space visible and flexible in specific ways; they are also semi-industrial spaces
that generally contain engineered equipment for quickly altering the spatial,
sonic, and visual environment. The practices of twentieth-century aesthetic
modernism that fed into Beckett’s theatrical vocabulary are heavily indebted
to the existence of electric light and recorded sound, for example, but these
were so normalized by the end of the century that their historic specificity
is easily forgotten. As new media expanded in Beckett’s time, he tended to
adopt and explore them in his writing, so much so that one can say that these
media influenced Beckett’s writing; new technologies were “affordances”
that at least informed, if not generated, script concepts. Though Play is the
clearest example of a Beckett play that is inconceivable without the influence
of theatrical lighting, it was not the first time that this technology had
appeared in a key role. In their early Beckett criticism, James Knowlson and
John Pilling identified the trend:
Earlier in Beckett’s theatre, light had been a more or less constant factor, grey
in Endgame, ‘blazing’ in Happy Days, and used spatially in Krapp’s Last Tape to
create a zone of light separate from the darkness. But Play reveals the dramatic
effectiveness of a rigorously and rhythmically controlled interplay of light and
darkness, produced in this case by the spotlight switching rapidly from one head
to another and so governing the dramatic tempo of the play.*
The question of how this light would operate, and how it would change
dramaturgically through the course of Play (especially in the da capo section
3 James Knowlson — John Pilling: Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel
Beckett, London, John Calder, 1979, 111.
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