Microdramas: Crucibles for Theater and Time by John Muse

Author:John Muse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

VLADIMIR. That passed the time.

ESTRAGON. It would have passed in any case.

VLADIMIR. Yes, but not so rapidly.60

On Beckett’s stages, as in the pages of his novels, the business of life is largely the struggle to give a tolerable shape to duration, to punctuate the unrelieved elapse of events by imposing beginnings or endings, and this struggle is waged more directly in the beats and pauses of theatrical performance than in a series of written words.

Beckett’s plays depart from measurable time in a number of mutually reinforcing ways. First, they are wedded to an exacting and measured pace in performance yet unmoored from calendrical and natural time. Second, the plays imagine time as a divisible, accumulating substance, both impossible to ignore and impossible to reckon. To imagine time as a succession of identical grains helps undermine the logic that would make any collection of moments cohere into a whole, posing a fundamental challenge to conventional theatrical assumptions. Third, Beckett’s alternative timepieces exfoliate duration to its fundamental emptiness and dramatize habitual if ultimately illusory struggles to fill it.61

All dramatists use time to represent time. What sets Beckett apart is his tendency to use the oddity of theatrical time—yoked to the present yet able to represent any time—to pry time away both from the clock and from nature. Beckett’s early plays are deeply concerned with time and likely to have timepieces on stage. In the first act of Waiting for Godot, Pozzo checks his watch, a relic from his grandfather, but by the second act, he has lost it. The world of Endgame is further divorced from timekeeping but retains a pivotal alarm clock. In Act Without Words II, figure B compulsively consults and winds a “large watch” (DW, 216). Krapp’s first action in Krapp’s Last Tape is to sigh and look at a “heavy silver watch” (DW, 221). But the presence of clocks only magnifies the sense that time in these spaces cannot be measured using traditional means. Despite Beckett’s extraordinary, exacting attention to the pace of performance—an attention that grew more intense as the plays themselves grew leaner—the time represented could hardly be more ambiguous. These are precisely paced non-times.62 The year is irrelevant, the date unclear. It’s impossible to discern whether it is day or night. Characters struggle to pin their moments to any natural or calendrical anchor. Vladimir exclaims, “Time has stopped!” (DW, 30). He has a hunch it’s Saturday, but Gogo is unsure: “But what Saturday? And is it Saturday? Is it not rather Sunday? (Pause.) Or Monday? (Pause.) Or Friday?” (DW, 9). Regard the grim indeterminate light that illuminates these stages and you often come to the same conclusion as figure B in Rough for Theatre I: “Day . . . Night . . . (Looks.) It seems to me sometimes the earth must have got stuck, one sunless day, in the heart of winter, in the grey of evening” (DW, 238). Happy Days unfolds in a belated world where “the old style” of measuring time has

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