Summer of Sam
Three urns stand on stage. From each, a head protrudes - a man and two women. May, wrapped in tatters, paces back and forth, engaging in conversation with the disembodied voice of her mother. A disembodied mouth, suspended eight feet in the air, delivers a long stream of consciousness in which the mouth’s chief endeavour throughout the play is a “vehement refusal to relinquish the third person”.
With such piercing and utterly non-naturalistic visual images striking an audience across his cycle of works, it is no wonder that as Samuel Beckett’s work in the theatre reaches its centenary year, it is in danger of becoming alienated from a modern consciousness driven by individuality, and consumed by a hunger for realism.
Working together in directing a cycle of six of Beckett’s rarely performed short plays for the OFS in fi rst week of Trinity Term 06, we have cut through the chaotic surrealism and accessed the way in which he addresses basic questions of human existence. Beckett tests the audience as much as the performers.
In the world that we live in, there is an ever increasing opportunity to have the work done for us as an audience member, and as a result, there is the potential that we will end up with a society less and less able to respond to the dramatic challenges Beckett poses. The beauty of Beckett’s drama is that as a viewer you are empowered to search for meaning, you have to work to get into the play.
The mouth in Not I will not whisper the secret of her scrambled conscious to you, the protagonist of Beckett’s haunting A Piece of Monologue will not give up his meaning beyond his enigmatic mantra “birth was the death of him”. As Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot ponder their fate, and the audience engages in the challenge of attempting to decode whom or what Godot is, a truth to Beckett’s work seems to be revealed.
The character • or absence of character • of Godot reveals a fascinating truth: that Beckett’s work has a function rather than a meaning. It stands for what keeps us bound to our existence, the unknowable in an age where there seems to be no hope. As Vladimir and Estragon actively wait for Godot, their work in trying to decode the character for whom they wait, justifi es their existence.
Beckett’s characters are not the psychologically detailed characters of Ibsen or Chekhov, but are no less deeply human. Though Beckett reverses traditional character development, increasingly stripping away details of personality, his purpose is not concerned with aspects of individual identity, but with the quintessence of what it’s like to be alive and how we try to cope with it. As we hear the cry of the mouth, “What!.. Who?.. No!..
She!” in Not I, we are offered the chance to realise that these characters are full of self-doubt, feel lonely, vulnerable, raw, and babble in a vain attempt to extinguish this desperation. Beckett’s characters however, fi nd little respite and have nowhere to go. They question themselves, their decisions, and the situation in which they fi nd themselves, yet must continue in their babble simply because they exist.
They seem to sense the brevity of living and yet the fear with which they await events or endings makes existence seem interminable.
20th Apr 2006