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SAMUEL BECKETT’S PLAY IN DIGITAL CULTURE: TECHNOLOGIES OF INFLUENCE In Beckett’s letter to George Devine of 9 March 1964, he writes in a postscript: “Perhaps some form of manual control after all,” referring most likely to a line within the letter when he writes of the variations he was considering within the da capo, “The whole idea involves a spot mechanism of greater flexibility than has seemed necessary so far.”* Perhaps the concept of the play required a mechanism of greater flexibility than had been invented yet. A first opportunity to experiment with Beckett’s Play in theatrical performance arose as part of the Ethica project (2012-2013), a collection of four Beckett shorts that began in Dublin and toured to Bulgaria and Northern Ireland.’ Considerations about the role of the light as interrogator began early on in that process, with a key aim of both rehearsal methods and technical design being to make sure that actors responded directly to the light as a key stimulus (and not to a textual cue of their next line), enacting the fundamental system that is the essence of the play. The rehearsal technique used to achieve this was that actors memorised their texts independently as a continuous monologue, rather than individual alternating lines. In rehearsal, the director would use a flashlight or other instrument to provoke speech; the actor was not given agency over their own text in rehearsal. Finally, the sequence remained unpredictable for the actor for as long as possible, never rehearsing Beckett’s actual order until a late stage of the process. Technologically, the interrogator was given a physical (mechanical) form on stage as a single visible movable light, programmed digitally to sweep in search of the heads, pass over them to invoke the chorus, and then finally pinpoint an individual head to start the stories.'? Intermedial Play intentionally used none of the same actors who had performed the roles in the 2012—2013 production, but we did adopt the same rehearsal method, asking actors to learn monologues — in one case working remotely on the text via online video — and only rehearsing together at the last possible stage. For the actors, in spite of the technological mediation of the project, this did not function any differently than it would have for theatrical preparation. The greatest technical challenge to overcome directorially was that when performing for a camera rather than a light, the actor has no “goad” or prompt to let them know that they are being observed. Before even asking the question of what the audience viewing the piece might see on their screen, it was necessary to confirm that the actors could be made aware, during the performance, that they were “active.” In that sense a camera cannot simply 8 Ibid., 595. ° The project, funded by Trinity College Dublin and produced in collaboration with Sugarglass Theatre, included Play, Come and Go, Catastrophe, and What Where. With the overall production co-directed by Nicholas Johnson and Marc Atkinson, Johnson was responsible for Play and Catastrophe, while Atkinson rehearsed and staged Come and Go and What Where. Atkinson designed lights for the overall production, while Johnson designed sound. 1 The name of the device in question was the MAC250, linked via a DMX cable to an Ion lighting desk. + 149 +
