The Future of Performance
“the bourgeoisie will recuperate [the avant-garde] altogether, ultimately putting on splendid evenings of Beckett and Audiberti (and tomorrow Ionesco, already acclaimed by humanist criticism).” Roland Barthes
One question that surfaces in the early years of the 21st century, 50 + years after the premier of En attendant Godot, in the 15th year of the after Beckett, especially among theatrical directors, is whether Beckett is rapidly becoming theatrically irrelevant. Put another way, will the year of celebrations of Samuel Beckett’s work in the centenary year of 2006, including innumerable productions, presumably all authorized and monitored by his Estate, be its headstone as well. Put yet another way, is there a future for Beckettian performance? Can it be re-invented again in the after-Beckett, and if so what might such reinvention look like given the restrictions on performance imposed by the legal heirs to the work, heirs who function with all the droits de l’author, but none of his flexibility. Must the avant-garde accept its own impotence, as Roland Barthes asked, or worse bring about its own death? In addition to their most publicized interventions into performance, the Executors have all but kept from the public the principal work of the final two decades of Beckett’s creative life, his continuation of the creative process on the stage, his full revisions of his dramatic texts, work which constitutes a reinvention of his own theater. These revisions are, of course, available in a limited capacity, in the very expensive editions of The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, which Beckett himself had not only authorized but financed as well, but their expense restricts their availability. They remain all but unavailable to all but the most academically inclined theatrical directors. Even libraries resist such expenditure under current budgets. The Estate has refused permission to publish the revised or acting texts separately or to re-issue the Notebooks in affordable, paperback editions.
Amid the restrictions on performance imposed by the Beckett Estate, its attempts to restrain if not subdue the recalcitrant artwork by its insistence on faithful and accurate performances, a faith and accuracy no one seems able to define, a resilient and imaginative set of theatrical directors and artists continues to re-invent Beckett by developing a third way, through radical acts of the imagination, by folding the authorized object, like a ready-made in a gallery, into another context, like storefronts or museum installations. They thus assert the heterogeneity of Beckettian performance without violating the dictates of an Estate-issued performance contract. This paper examines the problems of staging Beckett for a new century and offers some solutions in the works of Egyptian born Canadian film maker Atom Egoyan and a pair of visual artists based in Brasilia, Brazil, Adriano and Fernando Guimarães, who have maintained an on-going and evolving dialogue with Beckett’s work since the premier of “Happily ever after” in 1998.
International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006
September 29 – October 1