“No colour… Don’t act!”
By Ian Butcher
Question 1: In which play has the main character no body, no arms or legs, no eyes or nose…? Only a mouth?
Question 2: What is the shortest play in the world?
Both plays are by Samuel Beckett.
Answer 1
Not I, a short dramatic dialogue written in March-April 1972 and premiered at the “Samuel Beckett Festival” by the Repertory Theater of the Lincoln Center, New York in November 1972. Beckett, as was his custom, subsequently self-translated it into French as Pas Moi in 1974. Beckett claimed that he had begun writing in French around 1947 as he wanted to write “without style”. Even Beckett was somewhat concerned about the play and said that he would direct the London production of the play himself “to find out if this is theatre or not” (Dwan). Beckett wrote in a letter that he had been inspired to think about the play after seeing Caravaggio’s The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (Brater).
As Beckett’s precise stage directions state “Stage in darkness but for MOUTH…about 8 feet above stage level, faintly lit from close-up and below, rest of the face in shadow” (Beckett). The disembodied Mouth, a woman’s, ceaselessly recites a repetitive, jumbled stream of consciousness at ferociously high speed, piecing together fragments of memory, referring to herself in the third person and asking herself questions “what?…who?…no!…she!…”. It begins
Out…into this world…this world…tiny little thing…before its time…in a god for-…what?…girl?…yes…tiny little girl…into this…out into this…before her time…godforsaken hole called…called…no matter…parents unknown…unheard of…
The woman, probably once one of the “waifs” that she describes, is now “coming up to seventy”. She describes events which come back to her in a field full of cowslips and the sound of larks: being born “a tiny little thing” and being abandoned by her parents, lying face down in the grass in a field, being sent to shop in a supermarket, sitting on a “mound in Croker’s Acre” crying in her hands, and “that time at court”. The unspecified experience in the field appears to be traumatic for she keeps going back to try to make sense of it. The title, the words of which do not appear in the text, comes from the woman’s repeated denials that the events described happened to her.
She describes a continual “buzzing” in her skull and a light of varying intensity which torments her. She assumes that she is being punished by God but cannot think for what but accepts that God does not need a “particular reason” for what he does. She claims to feel no pain, to be “not suffering”, having felt no pleasure in life. It is as if she believes that she has something to confess and that if she goes back over her life for long enough, it will be revealed to her. The monologue is punctuated by laughs and screams, pauses and choreographed micro-movements. Beckett provides and insists on exacting stage directions.
Beckett claimed that “I knew that woman in Ireland. I knew who she was – not ‘she’ specifically, one single woman, but there were so many of those old crones, stumbling down the lanes, in the ditches, beside the hedgerows” (Bair 662).
The actress given the role for the first production in the US was Jessica Tandy, directed by Alan Schneider. She delivered the piece in twenty-four minutes. For Beckett this was far too slow, and he ungallantly said to Tandy that she had “ruined my play”. He wanted it to be delivered at “the speed of thought” (Lezard).
Beckett’s “fetish” actress for this role was Billie Whitelaw, who became Beckett’s go-to choice for many of his plays. He coached her intensely. She did not have the Irish accent that Beckett originally envisaged but instead was allowed to use her own gritty northern, Bradford English. Whitelaw described the experience to “falling backwards into hell”, hearing her own “inner scream” and admitted to suffering panic attacks, her head clamped into a vice so that she could not move from the pinprick ray of lighting. The delivery was to be flat and emotionless. Beckett kept saying to Whitelaw “No colour…don’t act!” (Dwan). When Whitelaw made the televised version of the play in 1975, Beckett himself expressed the resemblance of Mouth to a vagina (Weiss).
It is arguably the most difficult role an actor can be asked to play. Another accomplished Beckett actress, Lisa Dwan, describes being prepared to go on stage
Every pore of my face and neck is smothered in thick black grease and cloaked in charcoal…pull down the opaque tight shroud…blinded… My forehead is pushed forward, pressed between a thick blindfold and a plank of wood. My arms are placed inside metal clasps…my stage manager pushes my neck forward through a gap large enough for only a third of my face and fastens the second strap of the head harness. My ears are closed off (Dwan).
Dwan performed the play at breakneck speed in nine minutes. The fastest that it has ever been played. She was coached by Billie Whitelaw who used Beckett’s notes. Dwan likened it to “driving the wrong way down a motorway with no brakes. I don’t think there’s another role which asks so much of an actor”. Because of its speed “it bypasses the intellect and plays on the nerves of an audience” (Trueman). Just as Beckett planned. Ben-Zvi called the play, and some other Beckett radio plays, a “skullscape”, exploring thoughts inside the heads of his characters (Lockwood).
Beckett’s stage directions also call for a character (usually a male), referred to as the Auditor, who wears a black robe and who can be dimly seen stage left. Beckett allowed subsequent directors to omit him. Beckett wrote to two US directors in 1986 “He is very difficult to stage (light –position) and may well be of more harm than good. For me the play needs him but I can do without him. I have never seen him function effectively” (Gontarski).
Answer 2
Breath. The English premier was held at the Close Theatre Club in Glasgow in 1969. A previous altered version had been used in New York in 1969 by Kenneth Tynan who had asked several authors for anonymous contributions to his controversial production of Oh! Calcutta! Beckett and Tynan had a major disagreement about the liberties that Tynan had taken with the piece, including nudity.
Breath is an unusually brief work lasting – according to Beckett’s detailed instructions – about thirty-five seconds. It consists of a “recorded vagitus” or birth cry; a recording of a voice slowly inhaling and exhaling, accompanied by an increase and decrease in the intensity of light. Then a second identical cry and the piece ends. There are no actors on stage, but Beckett specifies that the stage should be “littered with miscellaneous rubbish”. There were to be “no verticals” and the rubbish was to be “scattered and lying”. Beckett specified that various segments should last “about five seconds…about ten seconds”, then fade to black. The all-important lighting “Not bright. If 0 = dark and 10 = bright, light should move from about 3 to 6 and back” (Beckett).
In some ways it could be considered as a sort of joke, perhaps a triumph of mise-en-scene over content, in the same absurdist spirit as John Cage’s 4’33” of silence. In another sense it is a reductio ad absurdum of Beckett’s nihilistic philosophy, reflecting the lines from Waiting for Godot “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more” (Beckett).
The producers of Beckett on Film asked Damian Hirst to film a version in 2000, but Hirst was perhaps not quite faithful to Beckett’s vision. Several versions of the play have been produced, many have erroneously tried to embroider on the minimalistic work by adding unnecessary detail. Beckett was always extremely litigious if unsanctioned changes were made to any of his works.
Beckett’s Trajectory Towards Silence
After the 1930 publication of his poem Whoroscope, Beckett first started his career writing novels: Murphy (1935), Watt (pub.1953), Mercier and Camier (1946), Molloy (1951), Mallone Dies (1951), The Unnamable (1953). All these were rather heavily influenced by the florid style of his friend, James Joyce, both lifelong exiles from their country. He began to write Waiting for Godot “as a relaxation, to get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time” (Bair 381). Whereas Joyce’s style was additive, he was constantly adding and adding even to the printer’s proofs of his work, Beckett’s work is subtractive, trying to strip away anything but the essential to focus on the human condition. The sparse theatre sets also reflect this minimalism. His plays are characterised by a departure from the traditional plot structures, focusing on the futility of human existence. His plays usually lack and clear beginning, middle and end, using unconventional staging techniques. The bleak staging reflects how the characters are trapped, unable to break free from their existential predicament.
This deep scepticism about the inadequacy of language to convey meaning and truth continued throughout his work. His characters struggle to express themselves and silence seems to be the inevitable result and escape. In 1965 Beckett made a twenty minute, almost totally silent movie called Film featuring the great silent film actor, Buster Keaton, whom Beckett admired. There is no dialogue or music, just one audible “shhh!”. His Act Without Words I and II, was first performed in 1957 in London. It is totally without words and is mimed around the myth of Tantalus. There is no exit, and the character experiences a series of disappointments before being resigned to his fate.
The trajectory from verbiage to silence is complete. As Boulter observes “Beckett is interested in analysing the human being at moments of intense self-awareness and anxiety” (Boulter).
Works Cited
Bair, D. 1990. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Vintage, p.662.
Beckett, Samuel. 2006. The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett. London: Faber & Faber.
Boulter, Jonatha. 2013. Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Bloomsbury.
Brater, E. 1975. “Dada, Surrealism and the Genesis of Not I”, Modern Drama 18. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Dwan, Lisa. 2013. “Beckett’s Not I: how I became the ultimate motormouth”, The Guardian, 8 May.
Gontarski, S. E. 1998. “Revising himself: Performance as Text in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre”, Journal of Modern Literature 22.1, pp.131-155.
Lezard, Nicholas. 2009. “Play Samuel Beckett’s Mouth? Not I”. The Guardian, 8 July.
Lockwood, Alan. 2003. “Beckett in the living room, Beckett up your earhole”, The Brooklyn Rail, Winter.
Trueman, Matt. 2013. “Beckett’s Not I returns – faster than ever”. The Guardian, 12 April.
Weiss, Katherine. 2001. “Bits and Pieces”, Journal of Beckett Studies Vol.10, No.1 and 2, pp.187-195.
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Ian Butcher is English-Belgian independent scholar. He has qualifications from the Universities of Kent and York, and from The Open University in the UK. He was a lecteur d’anglais at the University of Nice and taught at a number of institutions throughout Europe. He has published several academic articles on Beckett, Pinter, T.S. Eliot, Annie Ernaux, Virginia Woolf, and on working titles and Titology. He worked for over thirty years as a Senior Vice President in the Brussels office of a US management consulting company. He lives in Belgium and Denmark with his Danish wife.