1Around 2003 I was commuting daily between Oxford and Reading to transcribe and try to make some sense of the complex, multi-layered archival materials on Samuel Beckett’s Play and Film, then held by the Reading University Library archive. Since I could not travel as far afield as Washington University in St. Louis, I was fortunate that Reading also held photocopies of some of the crucial typescripts in the evolution of both works, even if relying solely on them limited my analysis of the revision layers when different writing tools had been used. Some of the materials lodged in other archives (Texas, Syracuse, Dublin) were also inaccessible to me at the time. My initial reaction at opening Olga Beloborodova’s magnificently comprehensive The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Play / Comédie and Film, therefore, was one of joyful relief. There is a full list of manuscript holdings, published editions, key productions and translations. The genetic development for all of these has been painstakingly reconstructed — amounting in the case of Play to no less than twenty distinct revision stages. This has been done with the aid of a phenomenal range of surrounding documentation and correspondence which establishes an unprecedentedly detailed chronology of composition. Finally, an accompanying digital module dedicated to both works is eventually intended to be published online, with scans, transcriptions, searchability and all its other prize-winning functionality. It is worth taking a moment here, in a review of another important instalment of the BDMP — Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, to appreciate the massive scholarly progress that all of this represents. Instead of spending countless hours travelling, transcribing, sorting and cataloguing, scholars will now be able to go straight to the core of the matter: the extant record of Beckett’s creative process.
2Beloborodova’s analysis aims to show “how the composition process of Play and Film changed Beckett’s modus operandi as a writer and completed his transformation into a truly multimedial author” (26). Indeed, the development of the two works turned out to require a degree of collaboration that Beckett had never quite undertaken before. In the case of Play, he kept on changing key aspects of staging and formal conception alongside the productions in Ulm, Berlin, New York and London, experimenting with (and second-guessing) the precise role of the speech-extorting spotlight, the notorious instruction to “Repeat play” (Beckett 1990, 317; qtd. 64, 68 and passim) and the breakneck speed imposed on the actors along with it. The experience made him feel that a play could not be put into final form until he had worked with it in the theatre. With Film, Beckett’s elaborate reconfiguration of Bishop Berkeley’s philosophical contrast between perceiver and perceived into “pursuing” E[ye] and “fleeing” O[bject] in his script — as explained to director Barney Rosset, in a letter of 21 June 1963 (Beckett 2009–16, Vol. 3: 550; qtd. 275) — was developed via an inherently collaborative medium, involving numerous hands-on practical challenges. Beckett demonstrated great flexibility towards his collaborators, adapting and refining together with director and crew to reach a result that he judged a failure, as an expression of the original concept, but also a qualified success, as an independent sequence of images with its own formal integrity. In documenting the overlapping genetic stages of both Play and Film between 1962 and 1965, Beloborodova fully details the parallel development of the formal concepts of these works (torturing light/camera), noting how Beckett’s concerted struggles with these media generated a whole new genre of writing for him, which we may dub the Elaborate Concept Note. This attempts to distil the result of practical struggles with a medium into useable instructions for future productions. Paradoxically, while such instructions may read in publication like the undiluted single will of the modernist author, the process underlying them was remarkably fluid and experimental.
3As I argued in Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama (2007), these two works were also pivotal in Beckett’s creative development of new abstract forms for both stage and screen. Yet the development away from realism towards ambiguity and abstraction was by no means linear. Beloborodova’s compelling analysis confirms my own tentative intuition that Beckett developed abstract form tentatively and step-by-step, through a compensatory logic whereby formal innovations were often surrounded by explication and sometimes fresh realist detail, before the next step was taken. Furthermore, what Beloborodova’s superbly documented study, together with her forthcoming digital module, will finally allow us all to do is to become active, archival readers of the whole continuum of Beckett’s versions and formal struggles. On one level, this enables a more precise aesthetic appreciation of the many underlying ideas that are summed up and elaborated within Beckett’s formal choices. At the same time, the archival reader’s experience of these works will henceforth be indelibly haunted by the ghosts of versions and decisions and productions past: behind the sleek grey urns and impassive faces designed to merge into stone in Play, for instance, we remain aware of the white boxes of the earliest versions as well as the (to Beckett) unacceptably realist faces of the first production in Ulm. Or, behind the first close-up shot of the eye in the final Film, there hovers a whole street of objects consumed by an accidental strobe effect. This too can generate a peculiar kind of aesthetic enrichment, comparable perhaps to exposure to the multiple drafts and versions of some of Kandinsky’s early abstract canvases. Finally, the archival reader will be able to appreciate the contingencies, uncertainties and fluidity that accompanied each developmental stage, manuscript version, publication and production context. This is especially useful if a particular archival reader is also, like Beckett, a theatre producer or filmmaker. In the full record of Beckett’s struggles with his media, there is clearly a rich resource for well-informed artistic experimentation and adaptation in creative dialogue with Beckett’s own process.
4Beloborodova’s approach in this study is, like the BDMP generally, admirably systematic and methodologically restrained. She carefully describes each genetic stage, and only then goes on to elaborate her own interpretation of the logic behind their development. This produces a wealth of fine readings and original juxtapositions of Play and Film. But perhaps even more importantly, her work will surely be instrumental in making them accessible in new ways, to a new generation of scholars and practitioners.