English Studies Forum

What Where: Reading Faces and Surfaces

on the Beckettian Stage and Screen

            Katherine Weiss

            When entering into a discussion about Samuel Beckett’s position on the transference of texts into an alternate medium, most scholars quote Beckett’s letter to his American publisher Barney Rosset. In this letter Beckett writes that to stage his radio play All That Fall would be “to kill it” because it is a play written for voices, not bodies (Fehsenfeld 229). Despite his refusal to stage All That Fall and his disapproval of other such projects, nonetheless Beckett did grant some artists whose work he respected permission to experiment with his works in different media. The most notable of these are David Warrilow’s staging of Beckett’s short story The Lost Ones, Jean Reavey and Alan Schneider’s staging of the television play Eh Joe and Billie Whitelaw’s remarkable television performance of the stage play Not I. Despite the change in the medium, Warrilow’s, Reavey and Schneider’s and Whitelaw’s experiments do not tamper with the spoken text. The Lost Ones was read in full by Warrilow, W’s spoken words in Eh Joe remained identical to the original television production, and Not I was altered only slightly. While the Auditor was eliminated in the BBC television production and in subsequent stage productions, the spoken text remained the same. However, the genesis of Beckett’s late dramatic work What Where is unusual in that the switch from one medium (theatre) to another (television) and with it the reduction of the spoken text and visual image was initiated by Beckett. Originally What Where was conceived as a stage play, but two years after its première in 1983 Beckett completely reworked the visual image and drastically reduced the spoken text of this obscure work for German television under the title Was Wo (1985).

            In her essay “‘Everything Out but the Faces’: Beckett’s Reshaping of What Where for Television,” Martha Fehsenfeld speculates that Beckett from the onset “had the small restricted place of the television screen in mind as the setting for this play,” and claims that the overt repetitions on the vast and empty stage produced “an unexpected element of comedy” which was resolved in the televisual image (230). However, Beckett’s own struggle to reconceptualize the play for television suggests a much more complicated genesis of the work which perhaps can never fully be understood. In my analysis, I will not speculate as to why Beckett transferred the play to television. Instead, I will analyse how in each version of the play, technology and the different media conventions are incorporated in the work to produce a text critical of the politics of inscription, apparent in interrogations that rely on torture.

What Where opens with V, a megaphone on stage and a distorted head on the television screen, setting up the “action” of the play. Throughout his narrative, he stops and corrects himself, trying to get the torture sequence right. What he narrates and the audience sees performed is quite simple. He tells us that Bam (who is V in the narrative) asks another, Bem, whether he was able to extract information from an unseen man. He is told that the victim, despite being tortured, never gave in to the demands of his torturer. Not trusting Bem, Bam calls in another, Bim, to take away and torture Bem to extract the information he believes is being withheld. This cycle continues with Bim being tortured by Bom, Bom being tortured by Bam and in the end Bam being tortured by himself. While this cycle is, at times, absurd, the focus on a torturer giving the tortured “the works” until he “wept,” “screamed,” “begged for mercy” and eventually “passed out” (472, 473, 474, 475) recalls techniques used by governments such as South Africa during Apartheid and Communist Eastern Block nations. Indeed, a year earlier Beckett wrote a highly political play, Catastrophe (1982), for a benefit in honor of Vaclav Havel who, at the time, was under house arrest.

Both the stage play and television play invite a comparative reading of the technologies they use. Technology, in the stage play and television play, examine the spectator’s role in the production of political narratives. More so than in any previous Beckett text, the technology of writing becomes aligned with senseless political interrogations.  Fehsenfeld is one of the few Beckettians who considers the mechanical imagery in this work. Sharing her experience as an audience member, she describes the stage première of What Where as being hindered by mechanical images: “I wanted to ‘go in’ to the story of the play, and I was constantly being ‘pulled out’ by the megaphone and by this intrusive comic quality — both of them external, mechanical hindrances” (231). She goes on to speculate that these “mechanical hindrances” probably contributed to Beckett’s choice to move the play from the stage to the television screen. Yet, although Beckett eliminated the megaphone and freed the ghostly figures from their bodies which Fehsenfeld believes saved the play from being “too mechanical,” Beckett did not want to eliminate the mechanical effect on-screen. In an interview, Jim Lewis, Beckett’s cameraman for the Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) production of Was Wo, explains that Beckett initially wanted “every movement [in the television production] to be rigid — a kind of mechanical ballet” (Fehsenfeld 232). Walter Asmus, who worked with Beckett on several German theatre productions, defends the mechanical movement, though he is not convinced of its effectiveness. He explains that in the stage play and, more successfully, in the television play, Beckett presents his audience with “the tension between the animate and the inanimate” (Fehsenfeld 239). Indeed, on-stage, the inanimate is present in both the “robotlike quality” (Fehsenfeld 230) of the entrances and exits of the characters, which mocks the conventions of theatre, and in the megaphone, reminiscent of a circus.

            The circus metaphor recalls, for Graley Herren, W.B. Yeats’s poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” Herren argues that like Yeats’s poem, Beckett’s play is a return to old themes:

Memory, identity, and spectatorship are all “given the works” one more time. Beckett’s œuvre is remarkably consistent, but it is never redundant. In the play What Where he hauls the usual suspects out on stage for interrogation. But he varies his formal methods of questioning, shedding new light on the “old themes.” (107)

Although his analysis is often insightful, Herren surprisingly does not discuss the connections between the circus and theatre. The circus is a type of theatre, constructed around a series of entrances and exits which are announced by a “ring master” usually using a megaphone. By alluding to the circus megaphone, Beckett not only alludes to Yeats but also parallels circus theatrics with political rituals and performance.

            By mocking theatrical and circus conventions in these cycles of torture, Beckett asks the spectators to interrogate his play, and what they are asked to question within the play is their own role within political structures. In effect, Beckett reveals that theatre and television are political institutions and that political institutions are theatrical. Ironically, however, by actively questioning the work, the spectator becomes one of the interrogators. For Beckett, existing outside political systems is impossible. The spectator is never innocent. On the contrary, even the passive spectator is inscribed into the system by his/her complicity in the interrogation.

            Both the stage and television play successfully attempt to activate, or in Beckett’s words, “switch on” (470, 471, 472) the spectator’s awareness of his/her role in political torture chambers. Terry Eagleton argues in “Brecht and Rhetoric” that theatre always represents “routine actions” (468); theatre mirrors social behavior and draws attention to the act of representation. However, only when theatre is either intentionally or unintentionally played “badly” – that is when the acting is “hollow,” “void” and even “amateur” (468) – is the audience able to fully “dismantl[e] the ideological self-identity of our routine social behaviour” (468). Beckett hopes to do just this. His B-ms speak without emotion and without distinction. While “political society does not recognize itself as a production” (468), by having his figures act “poorly” Beckett not only draws attention to the production of theatre but also reveals political interrogations as a performance of cruelty.

Moreover, through repetition, the megaphone and its efforts to turn on the interrogation, Beckett draws together memory and habit with the politics of torture. The torturer subjects the torturee to “the works” until he “confesses”; his confession acts as the inscription which the black hole of the megaphone tries to absorb in order to break out of this mechanical structure. Herren is correct in that the act of remembering is an act of personal and political interrogation. As a circus ring master, the megaphone is Bam’s mind re/collecting memories. When V, the voice of Bam, thrice says, “I switch on” (470, 471, 472), he activates the cycles of torture to recall the memories of “anything” (472), “it” (472) and “where” (474) in the staged version, and “what” and “where”[1] in the revised text for television. What is the story, and where does it take place are probably the two most crucial questions for any stage or screen play. Yet these are two questions that often remain unanswerable in Beckett. In this stage and television play, the audience never discovers the what or where of the plot. These memories, like the information that Bam tries to extract from Bem, Bim, Bom and himself are locked into Bam’s mind represented in the “lampblack” (Fehsenfeld 230) hole of the megaphone in the stage play and the distorted face in the television play.

            The mechanical and routinized structure of politics depicted in this play imprisons its participants. V’s narrative provides slight variations from its repetitions, but these deviations are manifestations of V’s struggle to get his narrative right like so many of Beckett’s narrators. V’s narrative production is both a political system of torture and an attempt to inscribe meaning into this political dead-end without becoming a political “subject” to be inscribed upon. V’s attempt to break the cycle through his highly repetitive narrative, however, simultaneously locks him and the other characters into it. As Herren posits, when “each suspect becomes ‘free’, Bam enlists him to torture one of the failed interrogators” (110).

            According to several critics, pointing to the text’s repetitions and V’s attention to the seasons at the onset of each new cycle, What Where, like Beckett’s other works, is another example of an endless cycle (Fehsenfeld 235, Klaver 380, Herren 107). While the repetition and mention of the seasons suggest a continuity, nevertheless, unlike cycles in his previous work, this cycle does end, but in ending becomes enveloped in a shroud of darkness, emitting no light, no matter, no information: “It is winter/Without journey” (476). The black hole of the megaphone, while emitting a voice, pulls into it all possible meaning. Caught in this whirlpool, each character becomes absorbed inside the black hole of subjectivity visible in their execution of their tasks.[2]

            Elizabeth Klaver convincingly argues that the textual loop in What Where revolves “through series of signs and images [which] also inscribe the technological properties of television” (378). Beckett is, indeed, hyper aware of the technological properties and conventions of television, demonstrated in the repetitions and, even more so, in his reduction of the visual image on-stage from the ghostly figures in long grey gowns with long grey hair to television’s trademark — the close-up of their faces. Beckett further eliminated all marks to distinguish these faces from one another. With the use of make-up and by cutting a small hole in pieces of cardboard later placed in front of each of the four cameras as Jim Lewis describes (Fehsenfeld 237), these faces fade in and out like floating specks refusing to be fixed onto the black backdrop. On the one hand, Beckett has reversed Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s white wall/black hole system of faciality. Deleuze and Guattari use the metaphor of a white wall/black hole to explain that meaning is read through both spoken words and the automatic, unconscious facial expressions that accompany both the speaker and the one spoken to. The surface of the face becomes a white wall which reflects the appropriate facial expression, and the black holes are the eyes and mouth which absorb meaning (186-190). However, in the television production of What Where, what we see is a black wall and white holes. While the black backdrop suggests that the wall cannot be inscribed upon and the white faces suggest that these holes cannot absorb subjectivity, the faces themselves reflect white walls that seek inscription. Indeed, with the elimination of the megaphone and the emphasis on the faces, Beckett’s television version of the play prioritises the white wall represented in the close-ups over that of the black hole. Herren observes:

                        We stare straight at the screen to see talking heads, face-forward, never looking at one another, always staring straight back at us. We see them asking for one another the same questions that we ask of them: Who are these people? Where is this supposed to take place? What is going on here? How can it be resolved? When will this end? And, like V, we are guaranteed little success in providing answers to these questions. Not that this keeps the hordes of Beckettians from trying. Yet even these desperate attempts to make sense are reflected on screen. (121-22)

In television, the close-up functions as an indicator of emotion and psychological development within the character; however, Beckett’s faces remain disturbingly impassive, and as such position the spectator within a struggle to make sense of what he/she sees. We struggle but cannot read these impenetrable faces.

            Fehsenfeld recalls Beckett mentioning to her that “the faces were like masks — death masks” (234), and V’s distorted face particularly gives this impression. V (the megaphone), too, is replaced by a face, but his face, unlike the B-ms, is larger and distorted which, according to Lewis, was achieved “by using a mirror-reflected image plus [an] old pane of glass” (Fehsenfeld 236). Lewis has commented that “The image of Bam in the beyond or beyond the grave or whatever you want to call it — the death-mask thing that wasn’t originally planned at all — that gave us the biggest trouble” (236, Fehsenfeld’s italics). While I agree with both Fehsenfeld and Lewis that the faces resemble death-masks, Lewis equates the death-mask with the image of a ghost, but the two are not synonymous. What Lewis’s contradiction reveals is the television play’s staging of the tension between the animate and inanimate. Playing on televisual conventions of the close-up through the emotionless faces, Beckett blurs the distinction between animated faces and inanimate masks.

            This metaphor of the death-mask brings us back to Deleuze and Guattari. For them, the death-mask represents the ultimate white wall/black hole system. Unlike the process of sealing all the gaps in the face of a corpse to keep from being absorbed into the horror of the face and the horror of death, the death-mask invites inscription. Whereas in rituals the death-mask helps to animate a narrative around death, in Beckett’s television play these death-masks function to expose the production of narrative, like this cycle of torture, as mechanical and ineffectual. The faces and voices of the characters remain “emotionless,” and the information of what and where, which is needed to break out of the stifling cycle, remains obscured. The death-mask veils “the things (or the Nothingness) behind it” (Disjecta 171) much in the same way Beckett accuses language of doing in his letter to his friend Axel Kaun in 1937. While Beckett once strove to tear off the veil and bore holes into language to discover what lie underneath the shroud, here Beckett seems more interested in the permanence of the mask. In other words, through the image of the death-mask as a white wall, Beckett points to the inability of revealing and uncovering meaning. V’s final words “Make sense who may/I switch off” (476) invite the audience to puzzle out the play, provided they bring their own aspirin (Harmon 24),[3] but before any certainties can be inscribed onto the face/page/screen, V deactivates the machine of faciality by switching off.

V’s position is ambiguous. On the one hand, V inscribes the B-ms into a political inquisition; he pins them to the black backdrop that does not allow for “free” inscription. On the other hand, in both inscribing the others into a position of torture and by keeping his eyes shut throughout, he tries to keep them from becoming subjectified into the engulfing and inescapable black hole.[4] He struggles to keep them from becoming political subjects consumed within a higher author/ity. It is through the tension between the white wall/black hole and the animate/inanimate that Beckett suggests that politics is a theatrical production that must be interrogated.

            As an image processing and generating machine, What Where gyrates in endless repetitions of voyeurism and subject/object relations. The audience finds itself embedded in this repetition as it tries to become the narrative subject by inscribing sense into Beckett’s images but while meaning is constructed by reading surfaces, the machine of faciality only provides answers which are already known. In effect, the white wall becomes a barrier and the black holes become political prisons because in inscribing meaning other possibilities are closed off.

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1986.

---. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder, 1983.

---. “What Where: The Revised Text.” Ed. S.E. Gontarski. Journal of Beckett Studies n.s. 2.1 (1992): 2-10.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press, 1999.

Eagleton, Terry. “Brecht and Rhetoric.” Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. Eds. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. New York and London: Longman, 1994. 467-71.

Fehsenfeld, Martha. “’Everything Out but the Faces’: Beckett’s Reshaping of What Where for Television.” Modern Drama 29.2 (1986): 229-40.

Harmon, Maurice, ed. No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Herren, Graley. Ghosts in the Machine: A Study of Samuel Beckett’s Plays for Television. Unpublished Manuscript, 2002.

Klaver, Elizabeth. “Samuel Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu, Quad, and What Where: How It Is in the Matrix of Text and Television.” Contemporary Literature 32.3 (1991): 366-82.

Weiss, Katherine. “Bits and Pieces: The Fragmented Body in Samuel Beckett’s Not I and That Time.” Journal of Beckett Studies n.s. 10.1-2 (2000-2001): 187-95.