CHRIS ACKERLEY

‘Ever Know What Happened?’:

Shades and Echoes in
Samuel Beckett’s
Television Plays

Even to contemplate annotating Samuel Beckett’s television plays

seems an impertinence, an attempt, as Beckett puts it in Watt, to eff
the ineffable (Beckett, 2006a, 218); for these six pieces (Eh Joe; Ghost
Trio; . . . but the clouds. . . ; Quad; Nacht und Träume; and What Where)
are effervescent in their presence and subtle in their tonalities.
These are plays to be seen, then heard (or overheard), rather than
read. Further, the uncertain status of published versions, with cuts
and changes made in production but never replicated in print,
complicates any definitive text. Shades are not images, nor echoes
allusions, and the diminuendo al niente effect of Beckett’s references
is even more attenuated in these late works. Yet shades (perceived)
and echoes (heard) shadow and echo something; bones and stones
that give rise to voices.
Behind Beckett’s images and echoes is the ghostly paradigm
of ‘Echo’s Bones’, as in his anthology, Echo’s Bones and Other
Precipitates (1935), the last poem therein, and a story rejected
for More Pricks than Kicks (1933) because of its obscurity. Ovid’s
Metamorphoses III.395ff tell of the nymph, Echo, who fell in love
with Narcissus. Enamoured of his reflection, he rejected her; she
pined away and turned into stone, but was permitted the partial

DOI: 10.3366/E0309520709000326
 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays 137

power of voice. The myth offered Beckett a lasting visual and aural
image of poetry as the calcified or petrified residua of what no
longer is, the trace or footfall of what once was.
However attenuated the echoes, annotations presume a text.
I cite, for convenience, The Collected Shorter Plays, published by
Grove Press and Faber (1984), even though some texts remain
unrevised. Manuscript details derive from Beckett at Reading (1998),
the catalogue of the collection at Reading University; or from
the Grove/Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (2004/ 2006). Other
works are cited by author or short title, as appropriate. These
annotations attempt to locate and anchor visual analogies and
verbal echoes. Even in his latest and most ethereal works Beckett
was aware of the condition that he defined during his 1967 staging
of Endgame: ‘The play is full of echoes, they all answer each
other’ (Knowlson, 551). Yet their origin often remains obscure,
ill-seen, ill-heard. The megaphone of the published What Where
(shimmery lights or holograms were later preferred, though the
latter proved in practice impossible to produce) announces: ‘In the
present as were we still’ (Beckett, 1984, 310). Even this is an echo,
of the Ottolenghi’s ‘where we were, as we were’ in ‘Dante and the
Lobster’ (Beckett, 2006d, 86); and so of Dante’s ‘fui, fui’; as evoked
in the sixth of the Texts for Nothing: ‘I was, I was, as they say in
Purgatory’ (Beckett, 2006d, 315); and reiterated by the Animator
of Rough for Radio II: ‘There all sigh, I was, I was’ (Beckett, 1984,
118). There is no single source of such echoes, so to capture them
is to seek to weave the wind. This is of dubious consolation to the
would-be annotator; but in a final echo of the unpublished (hence
unheard) ‘Echo’s Bones’: so it goes in the world.

Eh Joe (1965)

Title: echoes the threatening ‘Eh Billy’ of the end of Rough for
Theatre I (Beckett, 1984, 73; Worth, 25). The incessant voice in Joe’s
head, with its staccato repetition, is the weapon that assails him,
stabbing his conscience. Beckett told Alan Schneider: ‘Attacking.
Each sentence a knife going in, pause for withdrawal, then in
again’ (Harmon, 201). In early drafts, ‘Voice’ speaks to ‘J’ or
‘Jack’ (UoR MSS1 1537/1, 1537/2; the play was written for Jack
138 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

MacGowran). ‘Joe’ is the conscience of the unnamed narrator

in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds; it anticipates ‘Mary’ and
intimates the Catholic theme, making potent a sense of guilt and
‘Joe’s woe’: his responsibility for a suicide’s eternal damnation
(Ackerely and Gontarski, 2006, 164). Ruby Cohn sums up the
dramatic situation: ‘A Christian womanizer imagines an accusing
female voice’ (Cohn, 294); the text is thus witness to a crisis of faith.

sitting on edge of bed: in a note to the first holograph, Joe spends the
night in a chair (Gontarski, 1985, 112), thereby suggesting Film and
such texts as Murphy and Rockaby. Compare Mr Knott’s room; its
furniture: bed, window, door and fire; his actions: stood, sat, knelt
and lay; and his symmetrical movements (Beckett, 2006a, 335ff).
The ‘siege in the room’ (Beckett’s phrase for the Three Novels) is a
recurrent motif.

opening window, looking out: compare Clov’s mime at the beginning

of Endgame; or O in his room at the end of Film, as he tries to exclude
perception, or being perceived. The action recurs in Ghost Trio.
Gontarski notes the common source in Berkeley’s esse est percipi
(Gontarski, 1999, 266); Beckett is still thinking through the imagery
of Film (Gontarski, 1985, 112). Eh Joe was Beckett’s first piece for
television, and, as so often when first working in a new medium,
he returned to familiar content.
Face: Beckett’s fascination with portraiture is manifest in his last
plays, physical details stripped away to leave only the talking or
listening head. Such images were inspired by the old masters but
appear strikingly post-expressionist because Beckett distorts them
radically, isolating head or mouth from body (Knowlson, 625). As
in Film, the insidious approach of the camera enacts a process
that becomes more threatening as it finally focuses on the head
alone.
Woman’s voice: described in the 1976 production handbook as
‘unstillable’, like the voice of God (Beckett in Gontarski, 1999, 259);
Beckett noting Joe’s ‘passion to kill the voices which he cannot
kill’ (Ackerley and Gontarski, 162). Cohn accentuates the overtones
of ‘passion’, and the ‘residual Christian morality’ of Joe’s mind
(Cohn, 294). As Gontarski observes, Beckett’s statement counters
the ostensible thrust of the play and opens an unexpected Chinese
 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays 139

box-like structure: ‘Beckett devised Joe, who devised Voice, who

devised the girl in green’ (Gontarski, 1985, 118). The problem
is that of the voice without (God, Christ) as the voice within
(conscience, remorse). Its mechanical quality is not unlike Krapp’s
tape recorder (Fletcher, 187), but Voice (and so the girl in green)
seems to come from within. Voice represents for Joe an aspect
of psychological duality. Knowlson calls her ‘a Jungian anima or
inner self’ (Knowlson, 534), less his dark side than his feminine
opposite. She suggests that what he has abandoned was a genuine
and eternal love, greater than that of God (Cohn, 295), and now
made permanent through suicide (Ackerley and Gontarski, 163).

The best’s to come: as in the opening lines of Robert Browning’s

‘Rabbi ben Ezra’:
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand
Who saith, ‘A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!’

For Browning’s speaker, ‘A spark disturbs our clod’; otherwise ‘A

brute I might have been’. Joe senses that ‘I shall know, being old’;
but, the Voice reminds him, she went young.

that penny farthing hell you call your mind: a farthing was a small coin
current in Beckett’s childhood but later phased out, a quarter of a
penny; ‘penny-farthing’ implies the paltry. The comment combines
Mephistopheles’s ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it’ (Marlowe’s
Dr Faustus) with Lucifer’s sense of hell within (Milton’s Paradise
Lost IV.20), reducing both to insignificance. As Gontarski notes, hell
is finally not other people but one’s self (Gontarski, 1985, 113).

your father: in Embers (1959) Henry, alone on the margins of land

and sea, speaks to his drowned father, who may be just a voice
in his head. Henry is a failed writer, wrestling with his creativity;
Joe, hearing the ‘Faint lap of sea through open window’, is forming
an imaginative construct, ‘a devised tale, a fiction, created by
the Voice created by Joe’ (Ackerley and Gontarski, 164); and so
responding creatively to the situation that overwhelmed Henry.
140 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

The production notebook reads: ‘Juninacht (father)’ (Beckett in

Gontarski, 1999, 260); Beckett’s father died in June 1933.

Mental thuggee: ‘Thuggee’ (Hindi thag, ‘thief’) was the practice

of a gang of Indian bandits (Thugs, or Dacoits), who killed
unsuspecting travellers by strangling them with a yellow scarf.
Beckett defined a ‘Rupture formula . . . Voices in head – behind
the eyes. Mental thuggee’ (Beckett in Gontarski, 1999, 259). The
sinister camera movement, ‘say four inches each time’, enacts this
metaphor.

Such love he got: echoing John 15:13: ‘Greater love hath no man than
this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. The recurrent
allusion puns upon ‘laid’.

Penny a hoist: compare ‘Mrs. Penny-a-hoist Pim’ of Watt (Beckett,

2006a, 366); and Fanny, a ‘Bony old ghost of a whore’ who comes in
for Krapp (Beckett, 1984, 62).

That lifelong adorer: echoing the dictum, usually attributed to Oscar

Wilde, that to fall in love with oneself is to begin a life-long
romance.

the Green: St. Stephen’s Green, or College Green, near Trinity

College in central Dublin; a popular rendezvous for lovers
(O’Brien, 129).

That’s the worst: King Lear (IV.i.28–29): ‘the worst is not / So long
as we can say, “This is the worst” ’. Compare, for the aesthetics of
failure, Worstward Ho (1983).

The passion of our Joe: in a late typescript (UoR MS 1537/6) ‘Our’ is

capitalised, thus ‘juxtaposing Joe’s minor suffering against that of
Christ’ (Ackerley and Gontarski, 165).

bubo: Gk. boubon, ‘groin’; an inflammatory swelling of the lymph

node in the axilla or groin.

‘Thou fool thy soul’: Luke 12 : 20: ‘But God said unto him, Thou
fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee; then whose shall
those things be, which thou hast provided?’ This is the foolish rich
man who lays up earthly treasures but forsakes spiritual ones. The
reference is explicit (‘Du Narr!’) in the notebook (UoR MS 1739)
 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays 141

for the Süddeutscher Rundfunk production (1979); Beckett adds:

‘Gleichnis des reichen Narren’ (‘Parable of the rich fool’). This is the
first ‘Voice of God’.

The green one: the Smeraldina, the ‘little emerald’ of Dream of Fair
to Middling Women and More Pricks than Kicks; recalling Beckett’s
first love, his cousin, Peggy Sinclair, who died of tuberculosis in
1933, but whose image (often in a green coat) recurs in the poem
‘Ascension’; in ‘Text 6’; and in Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett, 1984, 58):
‘A girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway-station platform?’

her Avoca sack: a coat woven in the village of Avoca, County

Wicklow.

the Independent: changed in a later typescript (UoR MS 1537/6), and

losing a distant echo, from the Herald, the Dublin evening tabloid
from which the face of ‘McCabe the assassin’ stares up at Belacqua
in ‘Dante and the Lobster’ (Beckett, 2006d, 78). The Independent,
founded 1906 and strongly Catholic in its outlook, was Dublin’s
best-selling daily.

‘On Mary’s beads we plead her needs, And in the Holy Mass’: the death-
notice, ‘a treacly doggerel prayer, the sort Irish schoolchildren
might learn’ (Gontarski, 1985, 119), hits the requisite Catholic note.
It earlier read: ‘Guard her, Oh Mary, don’t leave her alone, / Love
her, dear Jesus as we did at home’ (Ackerley and Gontarski, 165).

That old bonfire: in the etymological sense of a fire of bones.

His Nibs: here, Death, as in Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’,

a presence Krapp suddenly feels behind him (Ackerley and
Gontarski, 516).

‘Mud thou art’: Genesis 3:19: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat
bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken:
for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’. The reference
is explicit (‘Dreck bist du’) in the production notebook (UoR MS
1730). This is the second ‘Voice of God’.

her face in the wash: compare Woburn in Cascando, making his way
to the sea in what (as in The Calmative) might be a suicide bid: ‘. . .
face in the mud . . . ’
142 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

Slip clinging the way wet silk will: a distant echo of Dream, ‘Nicolette
in the dew’ (Beckett, 2006a, 199); the poignant scene in Auscassin
et Nicolette where Nicolette steals out before dawn to see her
imprisoned lover, raising her silk dress for the dew.

the beaten silver: thus the ‘long silver carpet’ of the moon, trembling
across the calm ‘repoussé’ sea in Malone Dies (Beckett, 2006b,
273).

Imagine: echoing Imagination Dead Imagine (1965); the opening line

of Company (1980): ‘A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine’;
and the horror should imagination cease, as in the mirlitonnade:
‘imagine si ceci . . . cessait’ (1977).

the Rock: Whiterock, a cove near Killiney beach, its cave frequented
by Molloy (Beckett, 2006b, 70), and its nearby viaduct (illustrated
in O’Brien, 97). Compare the penultimate line of ‘Serena III’: ‘hide
yourself not in the Rock keep on the move’.

In the stones: in Rough for Radio II (1976), under interrogation,

Fox returns to the depths, ‘all stones all sides’, with little lichens,
tunnels, and a voice (‘Vox’: the voiced form of ‘Fox’), his own,
or that of his foetal twin, yelling: ‘Let me out! Peter out in the
stones!’ Gontarski notes Beckett’s preoccupation with Jung’s theory
of multiple personalities that might take on lives of their own
(Gontarski, 1985, 114); Joe may have within him some sort of
undeveloped or unborn opposite.

Image fades: for the 1966 BBC production, Beckett asked Alan
Schneider to ignore this direction and instead introduced a faint
smile, Joe first looking at the camera. This links the teleplay with
Ghost Trio, Catastrophe and That Time, where the smile suggests an
end, if only for the moment, to the interrogating voices. Zilliacus
calls this effect ‘a little sneer’ (Zilliacus, 190). Joe is forced into
a kind of hell: having opted, like Krapp, for selfish detachment
he experiences remorse for hurt done to dear ones and regret for
love unrequited (Knowlson, 534). Yet the smile, or sneer, undercuts
that moral conclusion, for the camera’s presence, Tonning suggests,
implies further assaults (Tonning, 104–07). The change reflects a
considerable formal complexity, as it helps create a sense of voice
within a voice within Joe: Joe’s struggle is not simply with his past
 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays 143

but also with his creativity, the whispered words that assail him
being equally the fountainhead of his inspiration (Ackerley and
Gontarski, 164–65).

Ghost Trio (1975)

Title: from Beethoven’s fifth piano trio, ‘Der Geist’ (Opus 70 #1),
in D-minor; so-called because of its mysterious slow movement,
Largo assai ed espressivo. Except for the coda, used to conclude the
play, Beckett selects passages from the ‘ghostly’ second theme,
to foreshadow the climax: the presence of a small boy who
comes and goes as if in response to the music (Ackerley and
Gontarski, 225). Beckett specifies the music (Beckett, 1984, 254);
the elaborate integration of music and theatre is detailed by
Fletcher (Fletcher, 214–16). Tonning suggests that if we think of
the passages in terms of the ‘spirit world’, they waver between
intense perturbation and eerie, uncanny calm, forming a dialectic
between obsessive Romantic passion and continuous structural
questioning thereof (orchestrating Beckett’s ambivalent attraction
to the German Romantik) (Tonning, 186). Brater (93) and Fletcher
(214) sense the spectral presence of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata,
Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata and/or Ibsen’s Ghosts; Brater notes the
encounter between an old man and a boy in Yeats’s Purgatory,
and raises a ghost from Ulysses, as ‘One who has faded into
impalpability through death’ (Brater, 94).
Until the last drafts the play was entitled ‘Tryst’ (UoR MSS
1519/1–3, 2832). On a first typescript Beckett penned ‘Macbeth’;
explaining that in his version of the trio, by Daniel Barenboim, the
music was linked to Beethoven’s projected opera on Shakespeare’s
Macbeth. According to the liner notes (by Hans Christoph Worbs)
for that Phillips recording by the Beaux Arts Trio, the D-minor
largo (the key proposed for the witches’ chorus) plunges the piece
into the spirit world of the night: ‘Outlines become blurred, softly
flickering expanses of sound, piano tremolos, and descending
chromatic scales conjure up an uncanny, oppressively deathly
mood’ (Knowlson, 621–22, 891). The music reflects the camera’s
approach to and retreat from F, thereby dramatising (but leaving
inviolate) his inner world.
144 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

Female voice (V): the voice is female, as in Eh Joe; but its source
is external; it may originate from an inexplicable beyond. ‘V’ is
the Voice in What Where and Rockaby, each ‘beyond the grave’ (or
‘nearly there’, as Beckett reportedly said to Billie Whitelaw). Voice
is ‘strangely imperative’ (Brater, 89), and not without wry humour;
but she is challenged in II when F defies her mandate.

Male figure (F): ‘F’ was earlier used of the Factotum of ‘Avant Fin de
partie’ (Ackerley and Gontarski, 32). In the 1975 BBC production
he wore the old greatcoat typical of Beckett’s protagonists. F’s
moves are puppet-like; Beckett in rehearsal stressed Kleist’s ‘Über
das Marionetten-theater’ (1810), and the lack of self-consciousness
of F before seeing himself in the mirror (Ackerley and Gontarski,
470). An early draft (UoR MS 1519/1) added: ‘He moves bowed
through space with no visible propulsion’, giving an incorporeal
or immaterial quality to his actions. Gontarski adds: ‘Most likely,
of course, we have not a single ghost but a trio’ (Gontarski, 1985,
123–24).
I Preaction / II Action / III Re-action: the three ‘acts’ reflect Beckett’s
reworking from Murphy of the tenets of the Würzburg School of
Denkpsychyologie, called ‘the School of imageless thought’, from
its contention that states of awareness have no sensory content,
representation or image (Ackerley and Gontarski, 306). In the
tea-room in Murphy (51), the seedy solipsist pauses after his
‘preparatory signal’ to ‘let the fore-period develop, that first of
the three moments of reaction in which, according to the Külpe
School, the major torments of response are undergone’. Robert
Woodworth’s Contemporary Schools of Psychology (1931) suggests
(Woodworth, 36) that in controlled associations more experience
may be expected from the period of preparation than from that of
action or reaction.

the mirror: in I, the mirror plays no role; but in II, as F thinks of ‘her’,
he looks into it, V expressing surprise; and in III Direction 24 reads:
‘Cut to close-up of mirror reflecting nothing’, before the apparition (or
mirage) of the boy in the corridor opposite. The hint of another
dimension echoes 1 Corinthians 13:12: ‘For now we see through a
glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I
shall know even as I am known’. In Watt, a rare glimpse of Mr Knott
 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays 145

is caught ‘as it were in a glass’ (Beckett, 2006a, 288); but the present
reference is curiously devoid of irony.

The light: faint and omnipresent, like that of The Lost Ones: ‘Its
dimness. Its yellowness. Its omnipresence’ (Beckett, 2006d, 381).
Nor is there any visible source. The faint echo of Milton’s ‘darkness
visible’ (Paradise Lost I.62) suggests an antechamber of hell.

No shadow: those in hell (as Belacqua in ‘Echo’s Bones’) cast no

shadow. Fletcher (213) likens the room to a seventeenth-century
Dutch interior; equally, it reflects the abstraction of later Dutch
art, Mondrian or the Van Veldes: a study in grey. Cohn notes that
this instruction was removed as it proved impossible in production
(Cohn, 338).
the colour grey: forgive my stating the obvious, but as Beckett (and
V) know full well, grey is technically not a colour. Although Ghost
Trio was originally shot in colour, it was finally printed in black and
white (Brater, 108). Television in 1975 was predominantly black and
white, though this was changing.
Smooth grey rectangle: the rectangles (floor, door, wall, window and
pallet) are curious, given that the play is otherwise composed in
triads; the TV screen, itself rectangular, imposes a ‘fourth wall’
around the three frames within it. Cohn notes the element of
cubism, each rectangular shape set against another larger one
(Cohn, 338). Tonning notes, citing Wilenski’s An Introduction to
Dutch Art (1929), the relation of Beckett’s set to Vermeer’s feeling
for architectural form: his conception of picture-space as a ‘box’
(the TV set is another); and within the box the scientific use of light,
colour, perspective and mirrors (Tonning, 168–70).

Dust: as in Genesis 3 : 19: ‘for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou
return’.
a small cassette: like Krapp’s spools, the cassette captures on
celluloid images of yesterday, the past imprisoned in a kind
of Proustian vase but (like a ghost or involuntary memory)
inexplicably accessible: an ‘accidental and fugitive salvation’, as
Beckett puts it in Proust (Beckett, 2006d, 524). F is the focus of the
music, but as that can be raised and lowered (unlike Voice) the
cassette cannot be its source (Brater, 89). There is no winding or
146 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

rewinding (contrast Krapp’s Last Tape), so the music may be more

imagined than real, a reminder of the Beloved (Tonning, 188).

He will now think he hears her: but because the attempt, in Proustian
terms, is voluntary, there is no outcome: ‘No one’.

Ah!: as Cohn notes, this may be F’s ‘cue to rebellion’ (Cohn, 338)
(compare Act without Words, I), for instead of obeying V’s ‘Now
to door’ he returns to his stool and cassette. The sequence is re-
visited, but at the critical point F ignores V, whose ‘Repeat is ‘so
flagrantly ignored’ that she is heard no more; instead, in the final
scene, ‘Action is subverted by the bruitage of the Re-action. Pure
form is assailed by the outer world’ (Cohn, 339). It is arguable,
however, that the ‘repeat’ is an instruction to repeat the action from
a closer perspective, and so not an ignored command.

Same as I.31: as in Play, the da capo effect: ‘a testimony to the

intimate and ineffable nature of an art that is perfectly intelligible
and perfectly inexplicable’, as Beckett argues in Proust (Beckett,
2006d, 554). The actions ‘typically occur in pairs’ (Brater, 95): F’s
raising and bowing the head; his movements round the room; his
face seen twice; the boy’s knocking on the door and shaking his
head.

Faint sound of rain: as in The Merchant of Venice, an intimation of

mercy, the gentle rain that falls from heaven; or, alternatively, the
natural world in which death and desolation is inevitable. The play
reflects a tension between these extremes.

small boy: an unexpected intimation of grace, but enigmatic. The

boy is like the messenger (Gk. angelos) from Godot (Beckett insisted
that he look angelic), whose arrival complicates any conclusion that
Godot (or, here, the woman) is an illusion. Compare the end of
‘Circe’ in Joyce’s Ulysses, where Bloom unexpectedly sees his dead
son, Rudy, as a changeling child. Whatever his origin, the child in
glistening black and white stands out in sharp relief against the
world of grey.

shakes head faintly: the boy is telling F, ‘not with words but with a
negative shake of the head that she will not be coming – not that
night at least’ (Knowlson, 621).
 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays 147

Face seen clearly for second time: this time, in both Beckett’s
Süddeutscher Rundfunk production (1977) and the BBC version,
F raises his head to stare into the camera and offer an enigmatic
smile. This links the ending of Ghost Trio to That Time, Eh Joe and
Catastrophe, suggesting an element of agency in F’s performance,
that he has somehow evoked the apparition. As Tonning concludes,
the ending is ambiguous: ‘Does it mean that F has established
some kind of contact with “her”, whether real or surrogate? Or that
hearing the end of the Largo has offered some consolation for his
loss, perhaps (as in Schopenhauer’s theory of music) by allowing
him to regard his emotions sub specie aeternitatis when thus re-
played or re-presented?’ (Tonning, 190) F remains ‘a personality
and an emotional situation beyond our grasp’, or ‘a mere shade-like
pattern of dots acting as a fulcrum for our projections’ (Tonning,
190). It is a moot point whether this is a triumph, as often affirmed,
of image and music over word (compare Words and Music), or if
Cohn’s cynicism is warranted: ‘Beethoven’s Largo is all very well,
but I miss Beckett’s verbal largo’ (Cohn, 339).

. . . but the clouds. . . (1976)

Title: from the end of Yeats’s ‘The Tower’, where the ageing poet
makes his soul (that is, prepares for death), the body failing but the
mind intently aware:

Now I shall make my soul,

Compelling it to study
In a learned school
Till the wreck of body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come–
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath–
Seem but the clouds of the sky
148 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

When the horizon fades;

Or a bird’s sleepy cry
Among the deepening shades.

Beckett told Eoin O’Brien that these were Yeats’s greatest lines
(O’Brien, 352). The play was first entitled ‘Poetry only love’ (UoR
MS 1553/2), which sentiment shapes the final work. Beckett told
Jocelyn Herbert that ‘. . . but the clouds. . . ’ had the same mood as
Ghost Trio: a solitary figure returning to his ‘sanctum’; his longing
for a woman, or perhaps a ghost, to appear to him; and a voice
commenting on the action (Knowlson, 634). In a letter dated 13
December 1976, sent to Reinhart Müller-Freienfels, the director of
Süddeutscher Rundfunk at the time, Beckett made it clear that the
protagonist of . . . but the clouds . . . was ‘ “the same as in Ghost Trio,
in another (later) situation”’ (Maude, 184 n47). The play was first
broadcast on BBC TV (17 April 1977) with Ghost Trio and Not I on a
bill entitled ‘Shades’.

M / M1: aspects of the same man (‘M’), with the voice (‘V’) of an
old man who tells of his daily round of arriving home at night
after having roamed the back roads all day; shedding his greatcoat
and hat; then sitting (like Belacqua) in the foetal position, trying
(with minimal success) to evoke a lost loved one; in the morning
reversing that process (Esslin, 41). As Brater notes, M1 effectively
becomes M when he crouches in his sanctum; but he is not alone,
for the camera has become the unseen voyeur, recording M as
frozen in the gesture of listening (Brater, 99).

Hat and greatcoat: the familiar insignia of the Beckett hero, from
Murphy to Ghost Trio and Stirrings Still (‘same old hat and coat of
old’); asserting identity even as character and memory fade.

skullcap: the touch of Judaism (or the caul?) is curious, given the
contrast of light robe and skullcap with the dark hat and greatcoat,
which hints at the Manichean play of light and dark in Krapp’s
Last Tape. V’s ‘assume robe and skull’, with its faint suggestion
of Christ’s robe and Golgotha (the place of the skull) is a further
intimation of mortality.

woman’s face: a forgotten face, suddenly recalled or manifested for

an instant in cloud (‘Enueg II’) or ashes (Words and Music), is a
 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays 149

recurrent motif. The vigil in ‘Still 3’ (1973) leads to the apparition

of the faces of the long dead emerging from the dark (Ackerley and
Gontarski, 191). In the 1977 BBC production, the fleeting image of
the woman’s face was that of Billie Whitelaw. Knowlson suggests
that the sentiment of the play may have been evoked by a family
photograph sent to Beckett recently by his cousin John: ‘All the
Beckett forebears, long since dead’ (Knowlson, 634).
Set: the visual echo of Krapp’s Last Tape is accentuated by the
circular set, surrounded by deep shadow (deepening shades),
with ‘a gradual lightening from dark periphery to maximum
light at centre’. Gontarski describes it as ‘a pool of mandala light
(Gontarski, 1985, 125); Brater, as a Dantean dark circle in hell
(Brater, 102). The pattern inverts the structure of Murphy’s mind,
its descent into the deeper dark.
When I thought of her: the spirit of this play, indeed, of all Beckett’s
teleplays, is captured in Yeats’s question in part II of ‘The Tower’:
‘Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman won or
woman lost?’ The question answers itself, the uncanny half-rhyme
between ‘most’ and ‘lost’ accentuating the loss.
When she appeared it was always night: as Fizzle 2: ‘Horn came always
at night’ (Beckett, 2006d, 406).
the roads: the back roads of the Dublin mountains, full of memories,
where Beckett had walked with his father (O’Brien, 55). Compare
Company: ‘That dear old back road. Somewhere on the Ballyorgan
Road in lieu of nowhere in particular’ (Beckett, 2006d, 434).
to beg, of her, to appear, to me: compare the failure of the woman in
Ghost Trio to materialise. The comma accentuates perception, as in
Watt, when Arsene ‘appeared again, to Watt’ (Beckett, 2006a, 219).
Brater neatly points out the pun on ‘wont’ (Brater, 98).
those unseeing eyes: like those of the woman in the punt, recalled by
Krapp: ‘I asked her to look at me . . . the eyes just slits . . . Let me in’
(Beckett, 1984, 61). Brater suggests the mystery of ‘unseeing’ when
Murphy stares into Mr Endon’s eyes (Brater, 98).
uttering inaudibly: W does not speak audibly, but the phrases she
struggles to articulate are finally spoken by M at the end, almost as
a blessing.
150 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

Speak to me: Brater hears two echoes. The first, from Hamlet
I.ii. 128–33, as Horatio addresses the ghost of Hamlet’s father,
supplications met with silence:

Stay, illusion!
If thou hast any sound, or use of voice,
Speak to me.
If there be any good thing to be done
That may to thee do ease and grace to me,
Speak to me . . .

The second, from Eliot’s The Waste Land, the neurotic woman (also
met with silence): ‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with
me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak’ (see Brater, 101).

cube roots: compare the art or con of Mr Nackybal, in Watt,

extracting as from the ancestral half-acre of moraine the maximum
of nourishment from various cube roots (Beckett, 2006a, 311).
Consider, too, Enough, where the speaker takes flight in arithmetic:
‘Whole ternary numbers we raised in this way to the third power . . .
Graving themselves in his memory as best they could the ensuing
cubes accumulated’ (Beckett, 2006d, 367).

nothing, that MINE: ‘an inexhaustible treasure house’ (Fletcher, 218),

the mine of the mind, of imagination. Brater hears an echo of ‘Mene,
mene’ (Daniel 5:6), Endgame’s writing on the wall (Brater, 102). But
‘nothing’ is (in Malone’s words) one of those ‘little phrases that
seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of
speech’ (Beckett, 2006b, 186). The infinite experience of the Nichts,
the atomist void or realm of calm indifference beyond the tumult
and commotion of the mind (Beckett, 2006, 192), offers an ironic
gloss on the vacuity of M’s experience, of nothingness. The tension
between plenitude and the void is finally all that M has left.

Quad (1982)

Title: otherwise, Quadrat I & II, the title(s) under which

Süddeutscher Rundfunk (1982) transmitted this ‘crazy invention
for TV’ (Knowlson, 672); technically, two distinct but closely
 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays 151

integrated plays with much the same design. They are more like
modern dance than traditional dramatic form, until ‘we remember
that one of the origins of Western theater lies in the dithyramb
and the choral dance’ (Brater, 107). The title reflects the ancient
distinction between arithmetic as that which unfolds in time, and
geometry, the ground of which is extension, in space. Quad is
ordered geometrically, but the players move arithmetically, with
precise timing: ‘The dramaticule offers a metaphor of coincidence,
of meeting in time and space, and hence the “danger zone” where
this might happen’ (Ackerley and Gontarski, 348, 356). Knowlson
notes Beckett’s increasing distrust with the word, and his growing
fascination with the visual image and musical structure (Knowlson,
672–73).
Area: the action takes place on a square (or quadrilateral) marked
out on the stage (a ‘quad’ is ‘a playground’). The diagram derives
from the unpublished ‘J. M. Mime’ (1963), where Beckett outlined
a quincunx (a ‘quink’), as in The Lost Ones (1970). That mime was
conceived for Jack MacGowran but abandoned ‘in the absence of all
inner need’ (Knowlson, 505); the reprise rejects its impulse towards
complexity in favour of the utmost simplicity. An element of the
Pythagorean irrational enters the triangulation (the quad consists
of several triangles) as each player avoids the centre, preferring to
‘circle’ about it.

Course: each of the four players has his own course, the movements
outlined with reference to the corners (A, B, C and D) of the
square and its centre (E). The centre was originally ‘O’, as in the
earlier mime; and the original eight steps were reduced to six
(UoR MSS 2198, 2199), perhaps to avoid the infinitude implicit
in the rotated figure ‘8’ (the first notebook refers to ‘Circuit’
rather than ‘Course’; compare the prose-poem, ‘The Way’). The
outcome is ‘prescribed, determined, enforced motion’ (Ackerley
and Gontarski, 472). There are four series, each beginning with one
player; the pattern is worked through logically until completed;
whereupon it begins again, intimating (a) that what has unfolded
is but a ‘repeat’; and (b) that the action will continue indefinitely
(‘Unbroken movement’) in precisely this pattern. Each turn is to
the left, a helicoidal pattern like that of Dante’s damned (Gontarski,
1985, 180); Dante and Virgil, in the Inferno, invariably turn left. This
152 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

‘choreography of madness’ and ‘feverish monotony’ (Brater, 107)

recalls serial patterns in Watt, with a like intonation of the narrow
line between excessive rationality and madness.

Four possible solos: {1, 2, 3, 4}

Six possible duos: {12, 13, 14, 23, 24, 34}
Four possible trios: {123, 124, 134, 234}
Light: the familiar pattern of a lit arena surrounded by darkness,
as in Krapp’s Last Tape, Footfalls, Ghost Trio and . . . but the clouds. . . ;
Beckett during filming at Suddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart paid
close attention to how the figures emerged imperceptibly from the
surrounding dark, made their moves impassibly, and remerged
with the darkness. Quad I features colour, ‘Say 1 white, 2 yellow,
3 blue, 4 red’; but no green (Dante’s colour of hope). The text
specifies ‘Four sources of differently coloured light’; each player
with his own light, to be turned on when he enters, and off when he
exits. In practice, this proved impossible: ‘the combination of white
plus blue plus red plus yellow produced an effect of an indefinite
shade of orange’ (Brater, 109); hence: ‘Abandoned as impracticable.
Constant neutral light throughout’ (Beckett, 1984, 293).
Percussion: each player is associated with one instrument (drum,
gong, triangle, wood-block); the permutations precisely match the
movements. The structure is like a canon, or fugue, with each figure
pursuing a prescribed path (Esslin, 43).

Footsteps: compare Footfalls (1976), the ‘clearly audible rhythmic

tread’ of the pacing May, whose steps follow an obsessive pattern
(Beckett, 1984, 239).
Costumes: Knowlson calls the gowns ‘djellabas’, intimating a link
to the Auditor of Not I, even as the players anticipate the cowled
figures of What Where. Knowlson sees something ‘eminently
Dantesque about the imagery’, as in Gustave Doré’s engravings
of Dante and Virgil in hell (Knowlson, 673). Russell Davies,
in an early review (1982), called them ‘preoccupied Capuchins’
(Cooke, 61).

Some ballet training desirable: as Brater notes, the piece was

composed for the Stuttgart Preparatory Ballet School, and was
 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays 153

produced there in June 1981 (Brater, 109). The Companion calls it

a ‘Ballet for four people’ (Ackerley and Gontarski, 472).
Problem: Beckett notes: ‘E supposed a danger zone. Hence
deviation’; that is, when the players approach the centre they
deviate left around it, before continuing diagonally to the opposite
corner. This suggests (‘E’ as Eye, or ‘O’ as Object), Berkeley’s esse est
percipi, and similar attempts (Film) to escape being seen. Gontarski,
calling it ‘Beckett’s most vivid image of postmodern literary theory
and literal decentering’, indicates how ‘something terrifying’
emerges from the potentially comic mimed action, chilling any easy
assumptions about it (Gontarski, 1985, 180). Esslin describes it as
‘wildly funny and deeply frightening’, asking if these are figures
in a Dantesque hell, doomed to repeat their prescribed circuit to all
eternity; or if it is an image of human destiny, pre-ordained paths
destined to collide with all those whose preordained paths they are
preordained to cross at preordained moments; the centre that must
be avoided signifying the impossibility of genuine contact between
the endlessly journeying figures (Esslin, 44). Tonning shows how
the serial patterning reflects the Leibniz monad and pre-established
harmony: the myth of self-individuation (the emanation of the
Many from the One) and the ‘fall into being’ (entry from darkness
into the light, then out again); each player (or nomadic monad)
perfectly co-ordinated but none interacting; each in perpetual
motion about an undefinable centre; and driven by a form of
appétition towards a climax that (like the serial Frog-Song of Watt)
finally has no significance whatsoever (Tonning, 241).
Quad II: the published text acknowledges (without describing) the
da capo variation of the Stuttgart production (Beckett, 1984, 293),
whereby the action was retaken in a minimalist manner, with
‘the neutrality of a dehydrated image’ (Brater, 109): no colour, no
percussion, the tempo mono-rhythmic, the movements half those
of the first piece, ‘series 1 only’; a ‘continuing beginning towards
transparency’ (Brater, 109). The repeat dramatises the entropy of
motion (Ackerley and Gontarski, 472), and links it to Play and
Happy Days (compare Winnie’s ‘What a curse mobility’). Beckett
was delighted with the stark black and white effect, commenting
that Quadrat II (as he called it) took place ‘ten thousand years later’
(Knowlson, 674). Brater applies to Quad II Beckett’s ‘Abandoned as
154 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

impracticable’ (Beckett, 1984, 293), which relates only to instruction

‘2’ about the lights; but, he argues, the televised version including
this brief sequel is the text, fixed (unlike live performances,
designed to be re-produced) in the ‘impermutability of screened
presentation’ (Brater, 109–10).

Nacht und Träume (1983)

Title: ‘Night and Dreams’: a play Beckett first called ‘Nachtstück’

(‘Nightpiece’), in which the only sound is that of a male voice
first humming and then singing the last seven bars of Schubert’s
late Lied, Nacht und Träume (D.827, Op.43–2), words by Matthäus
Casimir von Collin (1779–1824):

Heil’ge Nacht, du sinkest nieder

Nieder wallen auch die Träume
Wie dein Mondlicht durch die Räume
Durch der Menschen stille Brust.
Die belauschen sie mit Lust
Rufen, wenn der Tag erwacht:
Kehre wieder, heil’ge Nacht!
Holde Träume, kehret wieder!

In Martin Esslin’s translation: ‘Holy night, you do descend / And

dreams descend as well, / Like the darkness throughout Space, /
Into men’s silent, silent breast. / They listen to them with pleasure
/ And cry out, when day awakens: / Come again, you holy
night, / Lovely dreams, oh come again’ (Esslin, 45). Knowlson,
following Esslin, mis-attributes the poem to Heinrich Josef von
Collin (Knowlson, 681). Only the last two lines are invoked, with
an emphasis on the ‘kehret wieder’ of the last three bars. Beckett’s
images capture the essence of the dream play and emphasise
its phenomenological quality, ‘their substantive primacy over the
terms a waking world uses to describe them’ (Brater, 106); these are
images that approach the condition of music. But the text is more
complex than this implies.

Dreamer . . . His dreamt self: compare the abandoned ‘Mime du

rêveur, A’ (1954), in which A represents a dreamer who falls
 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays 155

asleep, whereupon the action was to have switched to his dreamt

self, B, whose mime endures until A awakens (Ackerley and
Gontarski, 371). Reworking this thirty years later, Beckett divested
it of crude comedy and mimetic movement, presenting instead a
dramatic image with action pared down to a few fundamentals.
The common point is that when the dreamer (A) falls asleep he
dreams of his dreamt self (B), the image in the top right corner
assuming (but in left profile) the same posture as that of the
dreamer. Beckett did not object to Reinhart Müller-Freienfels’ query
to whether different actors could be used for the two players. As
Beckett put it in a letter dated 5 August 1982, A (the dreamer) ‘may
be supposed to dream himself somewhat other than he is’ (Maude,
129).

Dreamt hands: Knowlson notes that hands in painting fascinated

Beckett, who had in his bedroom at Cooldrinagh a reproduction of
Dürer’s ‘wonderful etching of praying hands’ (Knowlson, 682). The
painting is alluded to in ‘What a Misfortune’ (Beckett, 2006d, 184)
and Company (Beckett, 2006d, 433). Beckett insisted to Dr Müller-
Freienfels (of SDR, Stuttgart) that the sex of the hands must remain
uncertain (‘One of our numerous teasers’), but later conceded that
they had to be female: ‘Large but female’ (Knowlson, 282–83).

a window: compare the opaque window of Ghost Trio (CSP 248),

which opens in Part III to permit the noise of rain (Beckett,
1984, 248); the window here allows the ‘evening light’ to enter.
Tonning relates the settings of Beckett’s TV plays to earlier concerns
for Leibniz and the ‘metaphysical impenetrability’ of the monad,
specifically as reflected in its quality of ‘windowlessness’, as in Watt
(Beckett, 2006a, 292), the condition of hermetic enclosure that offers
no window to the world (Tonning, 228–29).

a man seated at a table: as Knowlson suggests, the dark, empty room

with its rectangle of light and the black-coated figure hunched
over the table, resembles ‘a schematised, seventeenth-century
Dutch painting’ even more explicitly than does the setting of Ohio
Impromptu (1981) (Knowlson, 682). The posture and dress of Reader
and Listener in that play closely match that of A in Nacht und
Träume; compare also the position adopted by the protagonists of
‘Mort de A.D.’, Still and ‘Still 3’.
156 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

Right profile: compare the ‘left profile’ of the dreamt self, as if to

suggest the lateral inversion of an image as seen through a glass,
darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12).

right of centre: as Knowlson points out, in religious paintings a

vision often appears in a top corner of the canvas: the Virgin Mary,
Christ in His glory, or a ministering angel (Knowlson, 682). The
influence of the Old Masters is marked; as Martin Esslin observes:
‘this is a kind of painting, the creation of an “emblem” to be
deciphered by the viewer, except that the image moves and has
sound’ (Esslin, 47).

kinder light: literally, a softer lighting, intimating compassion;

but echoing Cardinal Newman’s ‘Lead, kindly light / Amid the
encircling gloom’.

a cup: with intimations of the chalice or Holy Grail, used at the

Eucharist; but also the cup of sorrow that Christ begs God to take
from Him (Luke 22 : 42).

a cloth: with intimations of the veronica, the cloth with which St

Veronica wiped Christ’s brow on the road to Golgotha, the cloth
retaining the imprint of His face; hence the ‘true icon’ (Ackerley
and Gontarski, 605). Beckett had used the image previously:
‘Enueg II’ (one wipe, ‘for the love of Jesus’); ‘What a Misfortune’
(2006d, 193), a buttonhole (‘Gone west’); Watt (2006a, 193), his ‘little
red sudarium’ to staunch the blood; and Endgame, Hamm’s face
covered by his bloody ‘stancher’.

joined hands: indicative of priestly ministration (the ‘laying on of

hands’) and the advent of grace; B is vouchsafed such grace.
However, A is not, and when he awakes he seems more poignantly
isolated than before. The feminine hands imply the Virgin Mary,
as intercessor between humanity and God, as advocate for
grace. Herren shows that Nacht und Träume embraces traditional
depictions of Christ’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane (Herren,
2001, 58): the ‘cup’ of sorrow; and an angel sent to strengthen
Him in His hour of need, ‘when his sweat was as it were
great drops of blood falling down to the ground’ (Luke 22: 44).
Citing these persuasive religious icons and the Catholic sensibility,
Tonning notes their terrifying implications: ‘while comfort is
 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays 157

indeed being emphasised, this comfort is also connected with the

fact of being in the midst of, or preparing for, terrible suffering’
(Tonning, 246)

in close-up: again, the da capo effect, but here, unusually, more

slowly, with the image previously in the right top corner now in
the centre of the screen. The scene, as Maude notes, is shot in
soft focus and slow motion, as if to emphasise its ‘virtual nature’
(Maude, 129–30). Herren argues that the images of B are summoned
by A, who controls them artistically (Herren, 2000, 188); Tonning
disagrees, insisting that such readings ‘push the piece towards the
sentimental’ (Tonning, 250). But both Herren and Tonning identify
a dialectic of agony, wherein ‘the desire for redemption exacerbates
suffering’ (Tonning, 248); if their reading is valid (this depends
upon how one reads the ‘true icon’ presented on screen), a serial
patterning (Tonning’s phrase) of wakening and dream undermines
any relief; for on awakening A will be compelled to re-present the
dream sequence in response to the enduring need to seek signs of
comfort. This may be read in two ways: (i) that the persistence
of hope, as in Waiting for Godot, is the cruellest joke of all; or
(ii) in terms of the Christian iconography, wherein all suffering
is encompassed by that of Christ (Tonning, 250). These are by no
means contradictory.

What Where (1983)

Title: echoing ‘who, what, where, by what means, why, in what

way, when’; the first words of the Ur-Watt, repeating the scholastic
memoria technica (quis, quid, ubi, quibis auxilis, cur, quomodo, quando),
by which any subject can be divided into parts for analysis, or
patterns extended infinitely. Compare the Unnamable’s ‘Where
now? Who now? When now?’ (Beckett, 2006b, 285). Arguing that
the play translates to the stage the problems of Beckett’s late
fiction, Cohn comments: ‘The imagining self seeks distance from
his work, and yet he tries to pierce to the whatness and whereness
of that work’ (Cohn, 377). Like Rough for Radio II (1961) and
Catastrophe (1982), it might be called a ‘torture’ play, with a victim
coerced to speak; Beckett briefly considered the players wearing
a tarboosh, like the Armenians (Ackerley and Gontarski, 642).
158 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

This was originally a stage play, written first in French, and later
adapted for TV. The version filmed for Süddeutscher Rundfunk as
Was Wo (1985) is very different from the stage version, and is, in
effect, a re-creation (Ackerley and Gontarski, 640). There are thus
important differences between the published text (Beckett, 1984,
307–16) and that later performed and televised; the revised text
appears only in JOBS 2.1 (1992): 1–25, and the Theatrical Notebooks
IV (Gontarski, 1999, 408–14).
Bam. Bem. Bim. Bom: Bim and Bom were Russian clowns of the
1920s and 1930s, who had licence under the Soviet regime; they
became for Beckett emblems of cruelty beneath a comic garb
(Ackerley and Gontarski, 56–57). They appear in ‘Yellow’; then,
red and whiskered, in Murphy, as Thomas ‘Bim’ Clinch and
his relatives, Bom and Bum. They return in deleted drafts from
Waiting for Godot and Endgame; as Pim and Bom in How It Is;
and are heard faintly in Ping. Beckett proposed that the characters
should be ‘Differentiated by colour’: BAm – black; BEm – white;
BIm – red; and BOm – blue (Beckett in Gontarski, 1999, 427, 449), as
in Rimbaud’s sonnet ‘Voyelles’, where each vowel is colour-coded:
‘A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu’. But ‘U vert’, Dante’s
colour of hope, is absent: there is ‘no green’ (Knowlson, 686),
no ‘BUm’.
Voice of Bam: the voice is, perhaps, from beyond the grave
(Knowlson, 686); Beckett told Walter Asmus: ‘One could imagine
it coming out of the grave, trying to reconstruct how it was. And
what it was. And where the way out is’ (Tonning, 255). He added
on revision: ‘This is Bam’ (Beckett in Gontarski, 1999, 409). The
voice of Bam is meant to be similar to but different from that
of (player) Bam (Beckett in Gontarski, 1999, 451). In a letter to
Reinhart Müller-Freienfels, dated 13 March 1984, Beckett stated
that Bam’s voice should be distinguished from the other voices
by ‘some form of microphonic distortion’ (Maude, 130). In revision
the speaking voice became ‘a huge, refracted, diffuse face of Bam
dominating half the television screen’; this became in the French
stage production ‘a ring of diffuse light the size of a human
head, upstage right’ (Ackerley and Gontarski, 642). Bam seeks
perspective (‘Good . . . Not good’) on his fictional creations and
resorts to (offstage) torture to penetrate their secret being; but they
 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays 159

are unable to articulate their identity or their abode (Cohn, 377,

378). As Tonning notes, with reference to Proust, such ‘voluntary
manipulation’ is unlikely to reconstitute the ‘total past sensation’ of
involuntary memory; Bam’s control, he suggests, is ‘too perfect’; so
the question of what and where can never be answered (Tonning,
256).

Players as alike as possible: in the staged play, with long gray hair and
in long gray gowns; ‘Same’ intimates a visual echo of That Time and
Ohio Impromptu. This inspiration reportedly derived from Beckett’s
fascination with the statue of John Donne in St Paul’s Cathedral.
The revised text reads: ‘Only oval faces. Hair, etc. eliminated by
make-up and invisible black material’ (Beckett in Gontarski, 1999,
409, 431). In a letter to Reinhart Müller-Freienfels, dated 13 March
1984, Beckett stressed the ‘ghostliness’ of the four figures and their
speech (Maude, 130). In the TV revision, cowled heads fade in and
out of the screen; in the post-TV French stage production (1986)
these became shaved skulls (Ackerley and Gontarski, 642).
a small megaphone: a ‘stage icon for the inner voice of the artist’
(Ackerley and Gontarski, 641), but not unlike the megaphone
of How It Is, where it is an emblem of the voice without
(Beckett, 2006b, 488). In revision it disappeared, Beckett noting:
‘Loudspeaker out’ (Beckett in Gontarski, 1999, 415), in favour of
an enlarged and distorted death mask (also based on that image of
John Donne).

Playing area: the rectangular playing area, dimly lit and surrounded
by shadow, has affinities with those of Krapp’s Last Tape and the
other late television plays. Tonning, citing Beckett’s analogy to
this work in conversation with Asmus, likens it to the arena of
The Lost Ones (Tonning, 256). The geometrical design of the stage
production was translated into the grey ground of the television
screen, against which the figures come and go. Beckett called it the
experimental field of memory, on which all is remembered as from
a distant past. He invoked Thomas Moore’s ‘Oft in the stilly night’,
emphasising the shift from ‘Fond memory’ to ‘Sad memory brings
the light / Of other days around me’ (Knowlson, 685–86); for him,
the play was integrally related to the memory of departed friends,
fallen ‘Like leaves in wintry weather’.
160 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

Stage right as seen from house: a confusing direction, eliminated on

revision (Gontarski, 1999, 450), arising because the ‘Playing area’
constitutes a stage within the stage.

Light on V: like the Opener in Cascando, or the voice in Ghost Trio,

V controls the action and the light, calling the four characters into
being, as projections (or ‘figments’) of self.

In the present as were we still: a re-enactment, a re-representation of

earlier events, until Bam is finally alone: ‘In the present as were I
still’. I start again: ‘Even this is an echo, of the Ottolenghi’s “where
we were, as we were” in “Dante and the Lobster” (Beckett, 2006d,
86); and so of Dante’s “fui, fui”; as evoked in the sixth of the Texts
for Nothing: “I was, I was, as they say in Purgatory” (Beckett, 2006d,
315); and reiterated by the Animator of Rough for Radio II: “There all
sigh, I was, I was” (Beckett, 1984, 118). There is no single source of
such echoes, so to capture them is to seek to weave the wind’. Add
to this the last words of Company: ‘And you as you always were’
(Beckett, 2006d, 450).

We are the last five: only four (Bam, Bem, Bim, Bom) appear; the
fifth may be ‘Bum’, who has been given ‘the works’ off-screen;
or perhaps the Voice of Bam, in addition to his visual presence,
completes the quintet (Cohn, 277). Brater notes a possible textual
pun on ‘V’ (a Roman five) (Brater, 155).

It is spring: the seriality of the four seasons matches that of the four
players, as the movement progresses from Bam alone until he is
alone once more. In the televised and later staged versions, ‘the
seasonal changes undergo acceleration’ (Cohn, 379).
Time passes: as in Waiting for Godot: ‘It would have passed in any
case. / Yes, but not so rapidly’ (Beckett, 2006c, 40).
haught: defined by the OED as archaic; from Fr. haut, ‘high’; as in
the head held high, or haughty. Compare the end of Ping: ‘Head
haught eyes white fixed front’ (Beckett, 2006d, 373). Brater notes
that the bowed heads assume the posture adopted in Ping, Ill Seen
Ill Said and Worstward Ho (Brater, 154).

Not good: because Bom is at 1 with head bowed, thus contradicting

Bam’s later ‘I am alone’. Bam ‘appears’; but the immediate
 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays 161

qualification, ‘reappears’, may acknowledge that the earlier

appearance cannot be entirely negated. Compare the reiterated
‘Something wrong there’ of How It Is.

First without words: the published version features a mime, which

enacts the sequence to come (as in Hamlet, the mousetrap or the
play within the play) (Beckett, 1984, 311). This was dropped for
television, but restored in a later American production (1986) and
also in the SDR version, thereby creating, in effect, a new version,
‘What Where II’ (Ackerley and Gontarski, 642). Beckett told Stan
Gontarski: ‘It’s a puppet play’ (Gontarski, 1985, 214).

You gave him the works: the self-inflicted pain, the anguish of Bam’s
need to tell again his story. What the players in turn must confess is
perhaps the crime at the heart of existence and in all Beckett’s early
works: that of being born.

And he didn’t say it?: compare Rough for Radio II, where, trying ‘to
ensure full neutralization of the subject’ (Fox, under torture), the
Stenographer reads: ‘The least word let fall in solitude and thereby
in danger, as Mauthner has shown, of being no longer needed, may
be it’– three words underlined’ (Beckett, 1984, 116). Brater cites The
Unnamable (286): ‘It, say it, not knowing what’ (Beckett, 2006b, 286;
Brater, 1987, 156).

And what: the second sequence adds (in rehearsal, after V resumes):
‘And what’; but ‘what’ does not persist, as the third and fourth
sequences bring in ‘where’. The serial patterning of ‘it . . . what
. . . where’ is not explicit in the published text (Beckett, 1984, 315),
but Beckett’s revisions for TV eliminated this potentially confusing
repetition, substituting a balanced ‘He didn’t say what?’ (Beckett in
Gontarski, 1999, 412–13).

Ah!: compare Ghost Trio II.22, where V is surprised by F’s failure

to follow instructions; Brater suggests that V’s ‘Ah!’ in both texts
expresses delight at a particularly felicitous delivery; but, equally,
Bim may have been expecting ‘what’ and so questions V’s ‘where’
(Brater, 157).

And where: in CSP (315), at the end of the summer series, this phrase
enters, Beckett explaining the apparent tautology to Stan Gontarski
162 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

not as a mistake but as Bam wanting to know both ‘That he said

where to him’ and also ‘where’ that information was conveyed to
Bem (Gontarski, 1999, 418–19).

I am alone: with the sad memory of lost friends and days; but
also, as Tonning argues, extending the Leibnizian conceit of the
windowless monad by playing off the desire for ‘company’ (Bam’s
manipulation of the players) against solitude (the voices switched
off) (Tonning, 251).

It is winter / Without journey: completing the cycle of the seasons

(Bam at his journey’s end) and echoing Franz Schubert’s Winterreise
(1827; D.911, Op.89, words by Wilhelm Müller), which Beckett
knew in Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s recording with Gerald Moore
(Knowlson, 685), and which he regarded as Schubert’s masterpiece:
‘Eine Strasse muss ich gehen / Die noch keiner ging züruch (‘Der
Wegweiser’: ‘There’s one road I must follow / From which no-
one came back’). The cycle features a disconsolate winter wanderer
who has lost his love and whose ‘winter journey’ is now to death
(Gontarski, 1999, 452), with no end or rest save the translation of
suffering into song. The Winterreise is earlier heard in the Texts
for Nothing, 2 and 12. What Where shares with the other television
plays ‘a nightly or wintry setting, deepening solitude, the haunting,
spectral presence of lost “others”, and a longing for some release
from the pain of the present’ (Tonning, 253). Yet the mystery of
Schubert’s music finally offers a comfort (an indefinable what and
where) that tortured recollection cannot provide.

Make sense who may: the attribution of significance to serial

repetition that has run its course is fraught; compare Quad, or the
final words of Watt: ‘no symbols where none intended’. These were
Beckett’s last words for the stage.

NOTE

1. ‘UoR MSS’, which is used throughout this essay, refers to manuscripts

held at the Beckett Archives at the University of Reading. The number
and page numbers that follow indicate the reference numbers to particular
manuscripts.
 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays 163

WORKS CITED

References to Beckett’s plays are to The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel

Beckett (New York: Grove Press, and London: Faber, 1984); the texts, though
sometimes erroneous, are most readily available in this edition. Beckett’s
other writings are cited from the four volumes of the Grove Centenary
Edition (New York: Grove Press, 2006). References to the Bible are to
the Authorised King James version; general comments and allusions to
standard works are documented only if there is good reason to do so.
Acheson, James, and Kateryna Arthur (eds) (1987), Beckett’s Later Fiction
and Drama: Texts for Company, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski (2006), The Faber Companion to Samuel
Beckett, London: Faber.
Beckett, Samuel (1984), The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, New
York: Grove Press; London: Faber, 1984.
Beckett, Samuel (1992), Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ed. Eoin O’Brien
and Edith Fournier, Dublin: Black Cat Press.
Beckett, Samuel (2006a), Grove Centenary Edition, Volume I, New York:
Grove Press.
Beckett, Samuel (2006b), Grove Centenary Edition, Volume II, New York:
Grove Press.
Beckett, Samuel (2006c), Grove Centenary Edition, Volume III, New York:
Grove Press.
Beckett, Samuel (2006d), Grove Centenary Edition, Volume IV, New York:
Grove Press.
Brater, Enoch (1987), Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater,
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bryden, Mary, Julian Garforth and Peter Mills (eds) (1998), Beckett at
Reading: Catalogue of the Beckett Manuscript Collection at The University
of Reading, Reading: Whiteknights Press and the Beckett International
Foundation.
Cohn, Ruby (2004), A Beckett Canon, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Cooke, Virginia (1985), Beckett on File, London and New York: Methuen.
Esslin, Martin (1987), ‘Towards the Zero of Language’, in Acheson and
Arthur, Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama, pp. 35–49.
Fletcher, Beryl S., John Fletcher, Barry Smith and Walter Bachem (1978),
A Student’s Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett, London: Faber.
Gontarski, S. E. (1985), The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic
Texts, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gontarski, S. E. (ed.) (1999), The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett:
Volume IV: The Shorter Plays, London: Faber; New York: Grove Press.
164 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

Herren, Graley (2000), ‘Splitting Images: Beckett’s Nacht und Träume’,

Modern Drama 43.2, pp. 182–91.
Herren, Graley (2001), ‘Nacht und Träume as Beckett’s Agony in the
Garden’, Journal of Beckett Studies 11.1, pp. 54–70.
Harmon, Maurice, ed. (1998), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of
Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Knowlson, James (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London:
Bloomsbury.
Maude, Ulrika (2009), Beckett, Technology and the Body, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Milton, John (1904), Paradise Lost, London: Dent.
O’Brien, Eoin (1986), The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Ireland, Dublin:
Black Cat Press.
Tonning, Erik (2007), Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and
Screen 1962–1985, Oxford: Peter Lang.
Woodworth, Robert (1931), Contemporary Schools of Psychology, New York:
The Ronald Press.
Worth, Katherine (1987), ‘Past into Future: Krapp’s Last Tape to Breath’ in
James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (eds), Beckett’s Later Fiction and
Drama: Texts for Company, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 18–34.
Zilliacus, Clas (1976), Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel
Beckett for and in Radio and Television, Åbo: Åbo Akademi.