Playwrights: Beckett & the Theater of the Concrete

Each time a Samuel Beckett play has a world première, the world turns a deeper shade of black. Once his people were hopefully waiting for Godot; later they crouched in garbage cans in Endgame; Krapp was moribund while listening to his last tape; then in Happy Days, the female lead kept sinking deeper and deeper into a mound. Now Beckett’s characters have gone all the way to hell in a play called Play, which has just opened in West Germany.

Only the heads of the three actors could be seen. Their bodies were inside giant clay urns. Spotlights kept picking out the appropriate urn as the dialogue developed like this:

“Puffy face, tits, hanging cheeks, false blonde. I can’t understand why he went for her. He had me.”

“Ha ha ha ha. Can you see me? Why can’t I be seen in this muddy light of hell?”

“We were all together (burp), pardon me, for such a short time.”

Solemn Zeal. Unlike Sartre’s No Exit, where hell becomes a perpetuation of emotions suffered in life, Beckett’s Play presents its posthumans as essentially bored, driven solely by an excessive urge to repeat themselves, as they gradually spill out what proves to be a conventional story about a man, his wife and his mistress. The urge is so strong, in fact, that the second half of the play is a verbatim recapitulation of the first half. Nonetheless, at the opening night curtain, a scattering of hisses and boos was obliterated by eager applause.

This might have been the reaction anywhere, but it was predictable in the particular community where Play opened, the ancient Danube town of Ulm, where the municipal theater rivals the famed Gothic cathedral as a source of civic pride. Most German cities and towns think of their municipal theaters as U.S. cities regard their libraries—a permanent and serious public responsibility. There are 130 in West Germany. Audiences attend them with solemn zeal for Kultur, a turn of mind that ignores entertainment for the sake of education. The result is a theater unique in the world.*

Independent Whim. Ulm’s particular specialty has been the theater of the absurd, and absurdity—:the existentialist-born notion that only the moment matters and the moment is meaningless —reaches great heights in Ulm, so great in fact that writers like Beckett, Jean Genet (The Blacks) and Eugene lonesco (The Bald Soprano) are actually regarded as “old fuddy-duddies” by some residents. Beckett’s new Play, in their view, has a plot and is therefore blighted.

They are coming to prefer something they call the Theater of the Concrete, experimental plays wherein the actors often take a spontaneous part in events as they develop onstage.

The script of one recent Ulm play consisted of words viewed through punch cards and spoken under orchestral direction. In another, actors mounted the stage and began reciting the opening chorus, each at his own pace. “Come. See and stand. Lie down. Sleep. Lift, eat, drink and walk. It is light enough to see everything. Hear, talk, speak clearly, breathe, move. Toward, back . . .” Director Claus Bremer, 39, explains it all simply. “If there is nothing more today that is absolute,” Bremer says, “then I would like nothing more to be formed onstage that is absolute.”

“Stop, stop, stop,” chanted one touristy audience in the midst of a night in Ulm. But Ulm’s town fathers defiantly contribute 1,400,000 marks ($350,000) a year to keep the theater happily independent of public whim.

* Says British Actor-Playwright Peter Ustinov: “Nothing is easier or better for a person’s morale than having one of his plays produced in Germany. You are asked to write notes for the playbill, like those for a symphony, and in them you can say, ‘The second act slows because here I mix Theme A with Theme C, resulting in a pace that approaches utter boredom.’ Then the audience studies the program and at intermission you can hear them saying, ‘Ustinov is a genius. See! Here where he says it would be boring, it is boring.’ “