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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. + 147 +
