Samuel Beckett, Breath (1969)

- Premiered at the Eden Theatre, New York

- Opened in Britain in the Close Theatre Club, Glasgow.
- A huge influential theatre critic
- A champion of the Angry Young Men as well as Beckett
- Involved in the struggle against censorship and taboos

Leaving gaps: meaning is not “given”, it is “destabilised”

Becoming otherwise engaged spectators must “make meaning”
5 essential ingredients
- silence/sound
- light/dark
- repetition
- symmetry
- rhythm
INSTEAD OF:
Realistic conventions regarding:
- dramatic shape
- characters/actors
- language/dialogue
- stage directions
- stage image

“A new play by Smuel Beckett has opened at the Arts Theatre. Directed by 24-year-old Peter
Hall, the play, Waiting for Godot, is the cause of some of the most astonishing scene ever
seen in British theater. During the course of each performance, approximately half the
audience walk out, shouting abusively”

Horizon of expectations:
- Spectators comprehend any play based on cultural codes and conventions to their time
- they approach a new play armed with the knowledge and experience gained from
interactions with other texts, whose formal rules give rise to expectations fr them
- Beckett’s plays: a non-realistic aesthetic/form that challenged the existing horizon of
expectations
- early audiences and critics: often shocked and frustrated

3 paradigms
1. Theatre of the Absurd
- Context:
● the traumatic experience f WW2 and the holocaust
● the shock of living under the threat of nuclear annihilation
- “absurd”: from Albert Camus “The Myth of Sisyphus”
- The human condition as basically meaningless and futile
 - man inhabits and indecipherable universe, where he feels bewildered, troubled,
obscurely threatened
- former certainties and beliefs are shattered: religious, metaphysical, political, faith in
progress, faith in reason.

Theology logocentrism
- anti-logocentric vs. a language based on logic and rationality
- anti.teleological vs. realistic dramatic shape (act/Scene, division, plot, time)
- stage image: an emphasis on non-realistic visual (and aural) components vs. realistic
character construction: the “death” f the rational, coherent subject.
- aim: to shock spectators into realising that existence is unintelligible, meaningless.

Dramatic theatre
- dominant paradigm of Western theatre
- the text is central

Postdramatic theatre
- the text may be one element of the scenic creation, but is never its centre
- pushing non-realism to its limits
- extreme self-reflexivity

Radical theatre
- trangresses the conventions governing the constructions of bourgeois /Realistic plays
 - it challenges the realistic horizon of expectations
- it needs to be “read” differently by the reader: form, form + than content
- Waiting for Godot as the emblematically radical play

According to Kenneth Tynan

- “WFG forced me to re-examine the rules which have hitherto governed the drama;
and, having done so, to pronounce them not elastic enough”

WFG
- originally written in French
- first staged in Paris 1953
- translated into English by Beckett: published in 1954
- first performed in London in 1955
- Critical reaction: mostly bafflement or contempt
- two enthusiastic reviews: Harold Hobson and Kenneth Tynan

Aston and Savona (WFG) go through 5 formal categories

- dramatic shape
- character
- language/dialogue
- stage directions
- stage image
And they compare how they work in realistic vs. non-realistic drama

Chapter 2: dramatic shape in radial theatre

-disrupts the teleological construction of plot and the corresponding act/Scene division
- disrupts the linear treatment of time
- includes non-realistic openings and endings

Chapter 3: character in radical drama

- from character to “character”
- character is dangerous word: “it implies a coherence, a consistency and an individualit
wich may not be there”
- reality effect of psychological depth
- spectator: emotional engagement or identification with characters

Chapter 4: dialogue/language in radical drama

- expressive
- referential
- communicative
- pragmatic

Chapter 5: stage directions

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