Page 157 [157]
OCR
NICHOLAS E. JOHNSON, NEILL O’DWYER, AND ENDA BATES through a digital model of an electric guitar amplifier, as the sonic effect of the virtual loudspeaker cabinet again suggested a more significant physical weight to the sonic gesture, compared to the original timbre. In the final production, this real-time approach to the sound design successfully retained the liveness of the performance, while also embodying the physicality of the camera’s role as interrogator. As such, Intermedial Play demonstrates the usage of new digital technologies to augment and reinterpret Beckett’s work in a new context, different from traditional theatre yet also different from the more abstracted cinematic adaptation of Minghella. CONCLUSION It is now almost a truism of writing about Beckett and technology that he always considers the ontology of his medium. Because Play appeared in Beckett’s lifetime in so many different media — not only different productions, but also in versions for print, recordings, cinema, radio, and television — it is an excellent source material for investigating how specific technologies exert influence on a work, as well as discovering how these configurations alter the experience of subjectivity for performers and audiences. It is logical that the media that continue to develop after his lifetime would generate new possibilities, affordances, and constraints, and this project implies that certain values apply when undertaking such translations. We observed Beckett’s own admonition to Alan Schneider ahead of the American premiere, which seemed to acknowledge that the play lives not in technological specificities as much as it does in ideas: “What matters is that you feel the spirit of the thing and the intention as you do. Give them that as best you can, even if it involves certain deviations from what I have written and said." The spirit of practice-as-research (PaR) within universities, especially in robust interdisciplinary research configurations like the Samuel Beckett Laboratory, enables a freedom with experimentation that the commercial theatre cannot easily mimic. What initially began as a single PaR project, conceived mostly as a demonstration of a technology in which Beckett’s presence was incidental, has now evolved into an entire multi-year research strand linking creative arts practice with creative technologies, encompassing Intermedial Play as well as the later Virtual Play (which used the same performers). In 2018 and 2019 this work progressed further into Augmented Play, which integrates volumetric video content into a location-based spectacle 16 Beckett to Alan Schneider, 26 November 1963, The Letters, Vol. 3, 585.
