Beckett did not necessarily need Noh. With silence as the norm, with nothing to say , Noh would seem to be completely indifferent to Samuel Beckett. What does really connect the two of them?
In Noh plays, there are dances together with masks, drama, songs and music being performed on stage while in Beckett’s plays, masks, songs, music, and sometimes even the play itself are rarely seen on-stage. Nevertheless, something universal can be found on both the Noh stage and on Beckett’s stage.
Noh plays were first developed in Japan. Although the subjects of Noh plays are almost totally rooted in Japanese history and culture, many of them are situated in foreign countries as in ancient China, India and in other countries too .
Although Noh has been seen as traditional since it originated as an avant-garde and contemporary theater form about four hundred years ago. Yet, at the same time, it has been a new experience for people of different generations, different eras and even different countries.
The most typical feature of Noh may be the ‘ghost’. In many Noh plays, especially the Mugen-Noh style, a dead man or a dead woman appears and tells his or her story to a priest or someone who is passing by the place where something happened to them.
That voice from the dead is precisely what you can hear in plays of Beckett’s such as Not I , Play , What Where , Ohio Impromptu and in fact in almost all of his works.
It’s not only Beckett and Noh that cross borders. Almost all cultural masterpieces in the fields of literature, plays, music, the fine arts and other areas also do so.
Both Beckett and Noh intend that the dead talk. In this sense, they both try to cross that border that lies between the dead and us, the living.
International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006
September 29 – October 1