But what are the plays about?

In 1978, the actor David Warrilow asked Beckett to write him a play about death: the result was A piece of monologue which begins with "Birth was the death of him." According to many scholars, Warrilow's request was a tautology since all of Beckett's dramaticules are "about" death. But as spectators watch these playlets, what the piece is "about" is not so clear. They are not alone in their confusion. Billie Whitelaw, one of the most accomplished Beckett actors, admits that when she looks at a text in preparation for a role, "it's gobbledygook." Beckett himself is unable to offer an explanation. About What Where? he once said, "I don't know what it means. Don't ask me what it means. It is an object." The dramaticules challenge reader and spectator alike with their ambiguity and their possibilities. Beckett admitted that "the key word in my plays is 'perhaps'."

Who was this man?

By the time of his death in 1989, Beckett's fame was legendary. His writings had been translated into dozens of languages; his plays had been produced around the globe; he had been awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize; and the body of critical literature on his work had almost developed a life of its own. Yet Beckett consistently shunned publicity and jealously guarded his private life. He even remarked, in a rare interview, that writers, especially himself, were not interesting, only the work mattered. But that refusal to become a public icon, inevitably drew attention to itself, and a myth grew up around the persona of Beckett­reinforced by his somewhat haunted look­that he was an arrogant, insensitive, and gloomy intellectual. An often repeated anecdote confirmed this aura of pessimism. Legend has it that on a magnificent, sunny day, Beckett strolled with a friend in a London park. His friend remarked that it was the kind of day that made one glad to be alive, to which Beckett replied, "I wouldn't go that far." The image of the impenetrable man translated into incomprehensibility in his writing, and that impression has frightened many away from exploring its depth and unpredictability. But both Beckett and his works are amusing and passionate as often as they are demanding and grim, so some knowledge of the man can provide clues to his writings. That is not to say that the plays and novels are autobiographical, although references to incidents that occurred in Beckett's life and to places he frequented are recognizable in his works. Rather, it is to highlight the basic humanity of what on the surface seem to be incomprehensible and bleak musings.

Beckett was born in a suburb of Dublin in 1906, and the time he spent in Ireland in his youth influenced the language, locales, and sensibility of his writing regardless of whether he wrote in English or in French. He settled in Paris in the 1930's and soon became a familiar face at the Left Bank cafés frequented by artists. In 1938, he was stabbed on a Paris street by a panhandler who later confessed that he had no reason for the assault. This event haunted Beckett and epitomized the randomness of life that often appeared in the plays. Another decisive experience was his involvement in the French Resistance which forced him into hiding with Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, later his wife, for the remainder of the war. His survival depended on his ability to pass for a French peasant, and this constant proximity to death, fear, and suffering had a major impact on the Beckettian world view. After the war, Beckett began writing in French because he wanted "to keep his words simple," and the next decade marked his most productive period. He completed his trilogy of novels and began writing drama to escape from "the blackness of prose." The result was Eleutheria, never produced in his lifetime, and Waiting for Godot.

Beckett had trouble getting his plays produced, but Roger Blin agreed to direct Waiting for Godot. It opened in Paris on January 5, 1953, and while it received one positive review, most were dismissive or worse. The first truly successful production occurred in 1957 at San Quentin Prison where the audience of inmates intuitively understood the meaning of waiting. By 1964, Beckett abandoned the full-length play format and began to write dramaticules, radio and television plays, and narrative fragments until 1984. In 1989, at the age of eighty-three, Beckett died and was buried in a private ceremony in Montparnasse Cemetery.

What is a dramaticule?

The dramaticules break with dramatic conventions as they explore the limits of theatrical representation and expose performance as a mode of self-consciousness. These playlets focus on the body as a theatrical space, but these bodies do not represent individual identities. Instead they act as visual images. One frequently used image is the "tête-morte"­the old, disheveled head which closely resembles a death mask. Rough for Theatre I introduces two têtes-mortes, desperate for human contact but unable to sustain it. Come and Go and What Where? present têtes-mortes that are almost carbon copies of each other; Catastrophe (Beckett's most overtly political play written for Vaclav Havel) details the creation of a tête-morte who then challenges the audience with its complicity in the death process. In Play, the heads are disembodied as they rest on urns; in Not I, the image is reduced to a mouth. Sometimes the body and voice are separated, as in Krapp's Last Tape and Rockaby, to create the sensation that consciousness exists outside the physical body; sometimes the sounds that the body makes become another voice, as in Footfalls. Even when inanimate objects play a large role, such as the rocking chair in Rockaby, the lamps in Rough for Theatre II, the wheelchair and fiddle in Rough for Theatre I, or the bags in Act Without Words II, the props act almost as extensions of the body. All these bodies suffer from some sort of restricted or repetitive movement, yet limited physical action has not slowed their words. Each has an unquenchable need not only "to tell," but also "to listen" to his or her own story. All these images are surrounded by darkness to highlight that the plays have "no outside," no recognizable frame of reference, no definable boundaries. The plays seem to display a bleak pessimism about the absurdity of human existence, but Beckett refuses to assert that life is hopeless since that assertion would imply knowledge which he insists he does not have. Instead he strives to dramatize uncertainty as he reveals the impossibility of knowledge.

So how is a spectator to respond?