Special Section:
Howard Barker
Access to the Body
The Theatre of Revelation in Beckett, Foreman, and Barker (1)
by George Hunka
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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2010. Copyright © 2010 George Hunka and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
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The speaking body on stage as the irreducible condition of theatrical experience is a trope so general as to verge on the meaningless. It is applicable to any theatrical event from a play by Neil Simon or Alan Ayckbourn to the farthest reaches of the work of the Complicite company, Jan Fabre, or Romeo Castellucci. In some theatre of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, however, it is this condition which itself becomes the focus for dramatic exploration. The speaking body’s status as both subject and object, as both autonomous consciousness and as a spiritual artifact for the spectator’s meditation and contemplation, becomes the basis for imaginative possibility. Schopenhauer’s concept of the individual body as the “immediate object,” the source for all that can know and is known for the subject, acquires new significance with the threat by politics and culture to its autonomy.(2) Especially after the catastrophes of the two world wars, the decline of the nation-state in the years following and the rise of a corporatized post-capitalist ideology, the speaking body becomes a special issue of theatre as an art. As individuals themselves have been subjected to a catastrophic fracture of their autonomy in the community, the theatre has now become a self-conscious locus of individual redefinition.
This theatre represents an alternative post-World-War-II theatre tradition, a tradition that exists parallel to both the social realism that arose on English-language stages in the wake of that war and the collectively conceived and politically progressive work exemplified in the United States by the Becks, in the United Kingdom by Peter Brook and Joan Littlewood, and in continental Europe by Artaud and Grotowski. Beginning with Beckett’s mature theatrical theory and practice, this theatre posits a unique triangulation of theatrical experience, from character to character to spectator, as the lyrical depiction of suffering, desire, and love become, through the fracture of both social realism and collectivity, a means of poetic compassion. As this tradition develops through the work of the British dramatist Howard Barker and the American dramatist Richard Foreman, contemporaries in the English-language theatre, the body as autonomous perceptual and erotic object, known inwardly by the performer and outwardly by the spectator, is celebrated as the site of imagination. In the wake of the catastrophic twentieth century, the individual is encouraged to seize once again his or her body for him or herself, a body that has become a possession of the state under both totalitarianism and the post-capitalist culture industry.
Neither Foreman nor Barker, in their theoretical writings, explicitly point to Samuel Beckett’s plays as a pervasive influence. Foreman’s early work was based in an aesthetic borrowed from Gertrude Stein and Bertolt Brecht;(3) discussing the literature and music that informs his own practice, Barker cites Shakespeare and the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, and as more contemporary influences he names the composers Bela Bartok and Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as the writers Paul Celan, George Oppen, and especially Louis-Ferdinand Celine.(4) And indeed, Foreman and Barker’s work little resemble Beckett’s pre-1962 dramatic writings. But they share with Beckett’s post-1962 work a codification of the body as physicalized language, an explicit concern with the physical body in metaphysical space. It is not Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, or Endgame to which the plays of Foreman and Barker look back, but to Play, Come and Go, Not I, and radio plays such as Cascando and Words and Music—works that owe both form and content to a specific acknowledgement of theatrical metaphysics.
The body in Beckett’s late work is not, at first, presented full-blown but as a series of fragments. The bodies in his early plays, as innovative as these plays were, still existed in a recognizably quotidian world: the two tramps on the road, four figures in a post-apocalyptic landscape. Happy Days of 1961 ends with Winnie buried to her neck in sand, only her head visible. Play of 1962 begins with these speaking heads, dis-embodied, rehearsing the memory of an extramarital affair. It is only with Play that Beckett’s dramatic and theatrical practice seizes upon the innovations of his fiction. The man and two women of Play are wrested from any recognizable realistic context and trapped now in urns, in some non-realistic, unspecified locale.
What draws the spectator’s attention, more radically than before, is the condition of the body and the speed, inflection, and vocabulary of the expressed spoken word. Language, like the body, is a series of disconnections, fragments that remain to be experienced and reassembled by an individual auditor. Play’s spotlight, a self-consciously theatrical technology, becomes a fourth character in the performance, the object through which the suffering of the characters is brought forth to consciousness. If the light is a ray of recognition, of consciousness, what then lies within the darkness that surrounds both the figures and the shaft of illumination?
Light sculpts the disembodied heads in Play, as well as the hands of Come and Go, the mouth of Not I. But it also sculpts the negative space of the darkness that surrounds these speaking heads. In his later plays like Footfalls and That Time, words emerge from this darkness as well, rendering the body on the stage itself an auditor. The space in which these plays transpire is not a crossroads, or an underground bunker, or a searing desert, but the theatre auditorium itself. The second half of the theatrical subject/object equation, the spectator, is now consciously assumed in the theatrical experience. The fourth wall is not so much broken as moved to a place behind the spectator as well.
Bodies in a darkened space, perhaps conceived as an unconscious. But not, it is important to note, as a collective unconscious. As extraordinary as Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Endgame were, the notion of audience as collective was still an element of Beckett’s dramaturgical practice, and elements of popular entertainment such as the music hall and the silent film shaped the structure and performance of these plays. As Beckett explored the more profound implications of the speaking body as primary element in theatre, however, these popular cultural accretions were shorn away from his practice, leaving mere presence and physicality as the severely restricted palette for his theatrical explorations.
Language, the means by which Beckett’s characters tell their stories in the late plays, is no longer an avenue towards intelligibility. Instead, words become experiential, riven by anxiety and catastrophe, fragmented and unable to contain physical experience. Nonetheless, in the theatre, these words are the only means by which his bodies can define themselves, can present themselves to the spectator. The mouths sputter their words out ceaselessly as if driven by a need to define the bodies that express them. One is reminded of his 1937 letter to Axel Kaun:
It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. [...] To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. [...] At first it can only be a matter of somehow finding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words. In this dissonance between the means and their use it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All.(5)
Ultimately, I suggest, the theatrical body was that means by which, though language, language was undermined to feel the whisper of that silence: a tactile conclusion that assumes a spectator, a bodied consciousness that sees and listens.
The written text serves as origination for Beckett’s theatrical work, as it does for that of American dramatist Richard Foreman. In both his written plays and his directorial and design work for his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre founded in 1968, Foreman’s explorations of the dynamics between two bodies begin in his work with the word. Most instructive in terms of the body in the theatre and the triangulation of desire is Foreman’s description—perhaps better described as an epiphany—that led to his theatrical practice:
I saw a particular static moment from my seat in the Circle in the Square where I watched a rather dreadful production of The Balcony. And I remember seeing [Shelley] Winters, on one side of the stage, and Lee Grant on the other, and it was just a moment of stasis, and a moment of a kind of tension between them, and I just wanted to make a whole play that had nothing except that unresolved tension between them. And I wrote out of that. I said that’s what I want in the theater, just that moment, and it doesn’t develop into any of the other awful stuff, the psychological stuff, the narrative stuff, the adventure stuff that it always develops into. But it’s just that.(6)
If Beckett fragments and deconstructs the body in post-war Western culture, Foreman attempts to reconstruct it, particularly within the politically progressive culture that surrounded his downtown New York theatre in 1968. Further, Foreman’s presentational rather than representational practice—his performers often face squarely towards the audience, their dialogue often pre-recorded and played through loudspeakers (by which means, Foreman said, he frees his non-professional actors from the rigors of memorizing his elliptical dialogue to concentrate on stage placement and movement)— serves explicitly to triangulate what he refers to as “tension” between performers and spectators. Within a few years, his stage work was eroticized with the appearance of Kate Manheim, Foreman’s second wife, who frequently appeared nude, tension then gaining the additional quality of erotic desire, which dynamic then entered the performance space.
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