Film, Media and Music
Despite being the best-known and most widely produced play by Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot can boast of few adaptations in other media, and even less research in the field of adaptation studies. Although Beckett’s transformation of theatrical vocabulary has incited playwrights and directors to redefine his work, Linda Hutcheon has argued in her Theory of Adaptation that experimental texts such as his are less easily and less frequently adapted than linear realist novels. As a media-specific artist, Beckett was not always welcoming towards adaptations of his plays and, of the few transpositions of Godot to other media, most have been ‘reverent’ and ‘faithful’. We focus on two ‘irreverent’ texts that stray from Beckett’s play and that represent different phases in intertextual and intermedial engagement with Godot: Matei Vișniec’s Le dernier Godot (play, 1987/1998) and Rudi Azank’s While Waiting for Godot (webseries, 2013). A postscript to Beckett’s play, Vișniec’s Le dernier Godot recreates and recontextualizes Godot and, by ‘toning down’ the violent vocabulary originally employed, indirectly explains why he, in Beckett’s text, needs to remain absent. Azank’s While Waiting for Godot instead focuses on the dominance of audio-visual, cinematic narration over Beckett’s dialogue in this transcoding of Godot to the media vocabularies of transmedia storytelling – and adapts the theatrical play for a web audience.
Tania Bruguera’s work combines performance with installation art, addressing the imbalance between politics and power on a one-to-one human scale. For Bruguera, a Cuban artist and activist, Endgame is a tool for examining and discussing mind-structures around and about control. This chapter focuses on her recent approach to Endgame, which explores violence, domination, servitude, authority, transgression and the possibility of challenging power. Respecting Beckett’s text completely, Bruguera challenges public and spectator through a setting reminiscent of Foucault’s ‘Panopticon’. Through detailed description and in-depth analysis of Bruguera’s stage proposal, this chapter provides elements to approach the point of view of an artist ready to bring Beckett to the contemporary art arena as well as to the contemporary post-democratic chorus.
Beckett notoriously opposed stage performances of All That Fall because it was intended to ‘come out of the dark’. By assessing two productions of the radio play by Mouth on Fire from 2019, performed to a wholly blindfolded audience at Tullow parish church in Beckett’s native Foxrock and Áras an Uachtaráin, the official residence of Irish president Michael D. Higgins, this chapter argues that the effect of transposition is not merely confined to visually distracting an audience from the dialogue and soundscape. Rather, the effect of where it was performed, and the necessary setting of its transposition, demanded that the play inevitably formed part of a broader event beyond its original intent. As a consequence, the two performances, which embraced the idea of using the play as the centrepiece of a commemorative event, amplified both the subject matter of the play (a meditation on Beckett’s childhood community) and a revisiting of the play’s production history (Beckett’s unilateral withdrawal of permission to perform his work in Ireland in the 1950s). The dialogue between audience and performance ultimately enabled local acknowledgement of Beckett as an Irish writer and a member of the community which he described in the play, and also allowed for a reappraisal of his central concerns about what might be lost in transferral from radio to stage in comparison to what might be gained. In addition, these productions are situated against the background of two earlier stagings by Out of Joint and Jermyn Street.
This chapter analyses the 2018 performance of Beckett’s novel Company directed by Sarah Jane Scaife with Company SJ. This production is particularly interesting in relation to adaptation for performance, as it created an intermedial dialogue between the original textual medium of the work and its theatrical performance through voice-over and the projection of phrases from the novel onto the back of the stage. Moreover, the live actor, Raymond Keane, was doubled not only by a voice-over but also by a sculptural figure, which enabled the ontological instabilities and layers of creature/creator in Beckett’s text to be presented on stage. Company SJ’s Company is therefore an apt case study for exploring how intermedial scenography can potentially challenge the association of live performance with the presence of the actor and the material space of the stage, forging new performance languages and embodiments that address our contemporary digital age.
This introductory chapter responds to the proliferation and diversification of adaptations of Beckett’s work across different genres and media since the author’s death in 1989. It summarises recent debates in the field of adaptation studies which has likewise expanded, reflecting critically on earlier debates and taking account of new media, while clarifying terminology that will return in the chapters that follow. These approaches resist the traditional value-laden hierarchy between ‘original’ and ‘adaptation’, offering instead different frameworks for analysing the cultural, aesthetic, political and media-specific, intermedial or transmedial contexts of each new version and its relationship to its source text/s or inspiration. Issues relating specifically to the status of Beckett as a canonical author in relation to cultural authority and ‘authorisation’ are included. These theoretical discussions lay the foundation for an introduction to this collection of essays on Beckett’s ‘afterlives’, which is the first book-length study to be devoted to Beckett and adaptation, although existing scholarly work in this area is noted as well. The rest of the Introduction summarises each chapter and the rationale for how they have been grouped in order to encourage resonances and dialogues between them.
Gare Saint Lazare Ireland’s adaptation of How It Is (Part I) flips the theatre in every sense: the audience remains on stage for the duration of the performance along with the technical crew, while the performers lay claim to the auditorium, the stage and the light box. From the opening soundscape of near-white noise to the weaving of recorded or live voices and the shadowy doublings of the cast, the premiere production eschews all the traps of a ‘direct’ adaptation, instead attempting to make mud in the mind. From this densely rich, disconcerting, at times disturbing sump of voices and visions, the occasional flash of sublimity emerges. This chapter will examine the Gare Saint Lazare Ireland productions of How It Is Part I and Part II (premiering September 2019) as groundbreaking examples of both inter- and multimedial adaptations of Beckett’s work. Detailed analysis of the production, directorial and technical choices will be used to question the specific challenges of adapting Beckett’s prose for the stage, the status of the original text and the concept of adaptability; a willingness to seek out alternative techniques, technology and music to dig into the complex layering of the text. It will also consider the theatrical uses of uncertainty, hesitancy and apparent improvisation in the stage adaptation to reinforce the notion that, as in the original text of How It Is, there is no ‘last state’, no ‘finished version’, no ‘resting place’ that can or should be achieved.
Rather than being an addition to the already copious literature on the subject of Beckett and music, the present chapter analyses György Kurtág’s 2018 opera Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie, scènes et monologues as a particularly interesting case study to examine the relationship between the original and the adaptation. To investigate this general issue, the chapter considers Kurtág’s intention to remain faithful to the text as much as possible, despite the need to transpose the play into a completely different genre and medium. In particular, it takes issue with John Bryant’s ‘fluid text’ principle, which argues for the inclusion of all forms of adaptation (whether authorial or not) into the work’s genesis. The detailed account of the libretto highlights Kurtág’s subtle yet significant additions to Beckett’s original text, mostly for the purpose of enhancing the dramatic effect and fleshing out covert intertextual allusions. Both these interventions go against the Beckettian spirit that the great composer holds in high regard, the stance that is corroborated by his interest in the manuscripts of Fin de partie. Taking into account Kurtág’s ‘un-Beckettian’ libretto and seemingly unorthodox scenography, the question the chapter attempts to answer is whether there are compelling arguments to consider Kurtág’s opera a ‘fluid text’ and thus to implicitly treat Samuel Beckett as a posthumous co-author of his play’s transgeneric and transmedial adaptation.
This chapter looks at how experimental theatre companies, directors and artists channel Samuel Beckett’s sensitivity to the ways women lose their agency when exposed to the patriarchal gaze. Through casting and spatial locations, Mabou Mines, Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne have transformed the quiet and mysterious Come and Go into a blistering look at the audience’s narrowly focused gaze. Patricia Rozema’s film Happy Days and Arlene Shechet’s installation piece Passing By are vibrant site-specific performances that seek to transform the gaze of the audience into one of compassion. These four adaptations, when looked at together, appear to turn the gaze from the characters to the audience. These adaptations managed to blur the borders of what is Beckett and what is theatre by exploring the gaze in his work, and in doing so the audience find themselves looking at the way they look at Beckett’s women.
This chapter examines how three choreographers from different generations as well as countries – Maguy Marin with May B (1981) and Dominique Dupuy with La petite dame (2002) in France, Joanna Czajkowska (Sopot Dance Theatre Company) with All This This Here (2015) in Poland – have re-enacted Beckett’s works for theatre and television through dance gestures, engaging in a creative dialogue with them. Rather than the one-to-one correspondence or relationship typically associated with ‘adaptation’ or (intermedial) ‘transposition’, these productions are analysed as what Bruno Genetti calls ‘choreographic projections’, i.e. performative extensions and transfigurations of the works on which they are based, sometimes beyond the point of recognition. These three choreographers are similar in that their encounter with Beckett’s work was very important for their own artistic careers. It urged them to question norms, to dance differently. It changed their aesthetics, creating new possibilities of gesturing for dancers and choreographers. As such, this chapter will examine not only how Beckett has transformed dance but also to what extent choreographic art has transformed our reception of his work, and how it has been historically influenced by dance.
Using political and critical theory, this article identifies in James Baldwin a model for citizenship unique to the Black artist who assumed the dual responsibilities of art practice and political activism. I engage with Baldwin’s fiction and his writing about other Black artists working in theater, film, dance, and music during the period of the civil rights movement. Across his career, Baldwin’s prevailing view was that, because of their history, Black artists have the singular, and indeed superlative, capacity to make art as praxis. Baldwin explains that the craft of the Black artist depends upon representing truths, rather than fantasies, about their experience, so that they are at once artists pursuing freedom and citizens pursuing justice. This article pays particular attention to the tension between living a public, political life and the need for privacy to create art, and ultimately the toll this takes on the citizen artist. Baldwin demonstrates how the community of mutual support he finds among Black artists aids in their survival. In his writings on Sidney Poitier and Lorraine Hansberry, his friendships with Beauford Delaney and Josephine Baker, as well as his reviews of music and literature, Baldwin assembles a collective he refers to as “I and my tribe.”