Catastrophe (play)
Encyclopedia
Catastrophe is a short play by Samuel Beckett
, written in French in 1982 at the invitation of A.I.D.A. (Association Internationale de Défense des Artistes) and “[f]irst produced in the Avignon Festival
(21 July 1982) … Beckett considered it ‘massacred.’” It is one of his few plays to deal with a political theme and, arguably, holds the title of Beckett's most optimistic work. It was dedicated to then imprisoned Czech
reformer and playwright
, Václav Havel
.
The Assistant has arranged the man as she has seen fit to, atop a “black block 18” high”, draped in a “black dressing gown [down] to [his] ankles” and – peculiarly – sporting a “black wide-brimmed hat.” The bulk of the drama consists of the Director wresting control from her and moulding the man on stage to suit his personal vision. “The Director call for light, both for his cigar
which is constantly going out and for the spectacle of the Protagonist on stage.”
The Director is an irritable and impatient man, his annoyance likely exacerbated by the fact that he has another appointment, “a caucus
”, to attend and his time there is limited. He expresses concern with the overall appearance and demands that the coat and hat be removed leaving the man “shivering” in his “old grey pyjamas
.” He has the man’s fists unclenched and then joined, the only suggestion of his Assistant’s that he pays any heed to; once arranged at breast-height he is satisfied. (Beckett explained to James Knowlson that when he was composing Catastrophe, “In my mind was Dupuytren’s contracture
(from which I suffer) which reduces hands to claws.”) The Director dismisses his Assistant’s proposal to have the man gag
ged (“This craze for explicitation!”) or to “show his face … just for an instant.” He also has her make notes to whiten all the exposed flesh.
In a moment of respite, when the Director leaves the stage, his Assistant collapses into his chair then springs out and wipes it vigorously, as if to avoid contamination, before reseating herself. This helps the audience appreciate better her relationship to each of the parities. She is after all the one who dressed the Protagonist warmly and who – twice – highlights the fact that he is shivering. In some ways she is just “another victim rather than a collaborator.”
Finally they rehearse lighting with the theatre technician
(the never-seen "Luke"). The play-within-a-play lasts only a few seconds: from darkness, to light falling on the man's head and then darkness again. Finally the Director exclaims: "There's our catastrophe! In the bag" and asks for one last run through before he has to leave. He imagines the rising of the expectant applause on the opening day (“Terrific! He’ll have them on their feet. I can hear it from here). The man has become, as John Calder
puts it, “a living statue portraying, from the director’s point of view, the quiescent, unprotesting victim, a symbol of the ideal citizen of a totalitarian regime.”
However, in an act of defiance, the man looks up into the audience (after having been looking down the entire time); the “applause falters and dies.” A Pyrrhic victory
perhaps. However “the figure’s unexpected movement seems to happen not in the director’s imagined timespace but in the timespace of [actual] performance. The moment is unsettling … We do not know why the figure has reacted like this; we do not know when the reaction happens; we do not know where the reaction takes place.” Beckett told Mel Gussow
that “it was not his intention to have the character make an appeal … He is a triumphant martyr
rather than a sacrificial victim … and it is meant to cow onlookers into submission through the intensity of his gaze and stoicism
,”
: ‘catastrophe
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/catastrophe is an action bringing ruin and pain on stage, where corpses are seen and wounds and other similar sufferings are performed,’”. Malone
refers to “Catastrophe … in the old sense … [t]o be buried alive in lava
and not turn a hair, it is then a man shows what stuff he is made of.” The more obvious definition applies of course to the act of defiance itself; the effect is nothing less than catastrophic.
The play is often singled out amongst the Beckett canon
as being overtly political even though similar claims could be made for What Where
and Rough for Radio II
. The play is still a Beckett play and as such it is unwise to limit ones reading of it. "When ... asked about the political significance of Catastrophe, he raised his arms in a gesture of impatience and made just one remark: 'It is not more political than Pochade Radiophonique’”, Rough for Radio II, as the latter is known in English."
on the power of totalitarianism and the struggle to oppose it, the protagonist representing people ruled by dictators (the director and his aide). By "tweak[ing] him until his clothing and posture project the required image of pitiful dejectedness"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0243166/, they exert their control over the silenced figure. “The Director’s reifying of the Protagonist can be seen as an attempt to reduce a living human being to the status of an icon of impotent suffering. But, at the end of the play, he reasserts his humanity and his individuality in a single, vestigial, yet compelling movement.” In answer to a reviewer who claimed that the ending was ambiguous Beckett replied angrily: “There’s no ambiguity there at all. He’s saying, you bastards, you haven’t finished me yet.”
It is interesting to note that, after the fall of the communist
government in Czechoslovakia
, crowds famously chanted, "Godot
has arrived!" as a rallying cry, in reference to Beckett's most famous play. Havel himself would later make allusions to the importance of Beckett's work in terms of his struggle, and his work. In a speech addressed to the Institut de France
on 27 October 1992, for example, the President cites Beckett and Godot repeatedly with direct reference to the Czechoslovakian experience: “I should make it clear that citizens of the communist world could not be divided into dissidents and those who merely waited for Godot. To a certain extent, all of us waited for Godot at times, and at other times were dissidents. It's just that some of us might have been more the former, and others more the latter. Nevertheless, this experience can be simplified to the recognition that there are different kinds of waiting.” Following his release from prison, Havel wrote a play in response, which he dedicated in his turn to Beckett. It was called The Mistake.
for the Beckett on Film
project. It starred playwright and Beckett enthusiast Harold Pinter
as the Director, and featured the last on-camera appearance of famed British
actor
, John Gielgud
as the Protagonist (he would die only a few weeks later).
This version has been somewhat controversial, as Mamet chose to film it as a realist piece: the scene takes place in an actual theatre, and the principals are dressed as a director and his assistant might look. “When the director (D) made his peremptory demands for light from his female assistant (A) he received it not for his cigar, as in the original, but in the form of torchlight for his script. This weakened the sense of gratuitous offensiveness hanging about the character. D., played by Pinter, received rather too much camera attention and a patient John Gielgud rather too little, above all at the final moment” when he raises his head in defiance. Some critics have argued that this interpretation takes away from the tyrannical theme of the play.
This is not the only version that has taken liberties with the staging. “When Catastrophe was performed in the Beckett Festival on 15 September 1999, the director Robert O’Mahoney, interpreted the climax very differently [from the way Beckett had]. After Johnny Murphy raised his head and glared with great dignity at the audience, his lips parted and stretched into an imitation of Edvard Munch
’s The Scream
. This nullified the impact of the ending, as Protagonist was reduced to nothing more than an abject silently screaming victim.”
Catastrophe is not only about a political situation and the place of the artist in it. The victim or “protagonist” is also representative of all actors, having to portray what writers write for them in the way directors tell them to do it (Beckett is not unaware of his own relationship with actors, particularly those who in the past have resisted his stage directions). The director in the play catches two prototypes, that of the political commissar and of the all-powerful personality director like Peter Brook
, Vitez, [Mamet or O’Mahoney], who bend a performance to their own interpretation, where often the victim is the author himself; there are many “in” theatrical jokes. The director’s assistant coolly carries out her instructions, and it matters little if we are in a concentration camp
or a film studio: all humane considerations are ruled out to achieve the ultimate work of art. The two-pronged metaphor
is incredibly effective for all its surface simplicity. In time, as with all of Beckett’s work, more strands and allusion
s will be discovered.
said, Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness”
“The cigar-smoking Director's first command is also for " Light"; further such demands and repetitions of the phase "For God's sake" help to build a conception of the Director as God, while sustaining his theatrical gestus
of a bourgeois
and chauvinistic
impresario
. His identity with the Creator is further effected by his command over language and light, determining the structure of the play so as to conform to the order of Creation, and by the inclusion of a lighting technician named Luke … The presence of Luke
, like an inspired evangelist
, receiving the will of Director-Creator
, translated into intelligible terms by Assistant-angel
, completes the absurd metaphysical motif. His lighting operations correspond to the technical application of a divine morality.
At one point Protagonist’s hands are adjusted to convey the attitude of prayer
. From the Director’s perspective he has simply chosen the most aesthetically pleasing pose of course.
Conversely the play has also been interpreted “as an attempt by the devil
to strip man of his own soul.”
for Literature were: “Quelle catastrophe.” She fully realised the effect such attention would have on this most private of men.
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, written in French in 1982 at the invitation of A.I.D.A. (Association Internationale de Défense des Artistes) and “[f]irst produced in the Avignon Festival
Festival d'Avignon
The Festival d'Avignon, or Avignon Festival, is an annual arts festival held in the French city of Avignon. Founded in 1947 by Jean Vilar, it is the oldest extant festival in France and one of the world's greatest...
(21 July 1982) … Beckett considered it ‘massacred.’” It is one of his few plays to deal with a political theme and, arguably, holds the title of Beckett's most optimistic work. It was dedicated to then imprisoned Czech
Czech people
Czechs, or Czech people are a western Slavic people of Central Europe, living predominantly in the Czech Republic. Small populations of Czechs also live in Slovakia, Austria, the United States, the United Kingdom, Chile, Argentina, Canada, Germany, Russia and other countries...
reformer and playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
, Václav Havel
Václav Havel
Václav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic . He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally...
.
Synopsis
An autocratic Director and his female Assistant put the “‘[f]inal touches to the last scene’ of some kind of dramatic presentation”, which consists entirely of a man (The Protagonist) standing still onstage.The Assistant has arranged the man as she has seen fit to, atop a “black block 18” high”, draped in a “black dressing gown [down] to [his] ankles” and – peculiarly – sporting a “black wide-brimmed hat.” The bulk of the drama consists of the Director wresting control from her and moulding the man on stage to suit his personal vision. “The Director call for light, both for his cigar
Cigar
A cigar is a tightly-rolled bundle of dried and fermented tobacco that is ignited so that its smoke may be drawn into the mouth. Cigar tobacco is grown in significant quantities in Brazil, Cameroon, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Indonesia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Philippines, and the Eastern...
which is constantly going out and for the spectacle of the Protagonist on stage.”
The Director is an irritable and impatient man, his annoyance likely exacerbated by the fact that he has another appointment, “a caucus
Caucus
A caucus is a meeting of supporters or members of a political party or movement, especially in the United States and Canada. As the use of the term has been expanded the exact definition has come to vary among political cultures.-Origin of the term:...
”, to attend and his time there is limited. He expresses concern with the overall appearance and demands that the coat and hat be removed leaving the man “shivering” in his “old grey pyjamas
Pajamas
Pajamas, also spelled pyjamas , can refer to several related types of clothing. The original paijama are loose, lightweight trousers fitted with drawstring waistbands and worn in South and West Asia by both sexes...
.” He has the man’s fists unclenched and then joined, the only suggestion of his Assistant’s that he pays any heed to; once arranged at breast-height he is satisfied. (Beckett explained to James Knowlson that when he was composing Catastrophe, “In my mind was Dupuytren’s contracture
Dupuytren's contracture
Dupuytren's contracture , is a fixed flexion contracture of the hand where the fingers bend towards the palm and cannot be fully extended...
(from which I suffer) which reduces hands to claws.”) The Director dismisses his Assistant’s proposal to have the man gag
Gag
A gag is usually a device designed to prevent speech, often as a restraint device to stop the subject from calling for help. This is usually done by blocking the mouth, partially or completely, or attempting to prevent the tongue, lips, or jaw from moving in the normal patterns of speech. They are...
ged (“This craze for explicitation!”) or to “show his face … just for an instant.” He also has her make notes to whiten all the exposed flesh.
In a moment of respite, when the Director leaves the stage, his Assistant collapses into his chair then springs out and wipes it vigorously, as if to avoid contamination, before reseating herself. This helps the audience appreciate better her relationship to each of the parities. She is after all the one who dressed the Protagonist warmly and who – twice – highlights the fact that he is shivering. In some ways she is just “another victim rather than a collaborator.”
Finally they rehearse lighting with the theatre technician
Stagehand
A stagehand is a person who works backstage or behind the scenes in theatres, film, television, or location performance. Their duties include setting up the scenery, lights, sound, props, rigging, and special effects for a production.-Types of stagehand:...
(the never-seen "Luke"). The play-within-a-play lasts only a few seconds: from darkness, to light falling on the man's head and then darkness again. Finally the Director exclaims: "There's our catastrophe! In the bag" and asks for one last run through before he has to leave. He imagines the rising of the expectant applause on the opening day (“Terrific! He’ll have them on their feet. I can hear it from here). The man has become, as John Calder
John Calder
John Mackenzie Calder is a Canadian and Scottish publisher who founded Calder Publishing in 1949.-Biography:John Calder was a friend of Samuel Beckett, becoming the main publisher of his prose-texts in Britain after the success of Waiting for Godot on the London stage in 1955-56...
puts it, “a living statue portraying, from the director’s point of view, the quiescent, unprotesting victim, a symbol of the ideal citizen of a totalitarian regime.”
However, in an act of defiance, the man looks up into the audience (after having been looking down the entire time); the “applause falters and dies.” A Pyrrhic victory
Pyrrhic victory
A Pyrrhic victory is a victory with such a devastating cost to the victor that it carries the implication that another such victory will ultimately cause defeat.-Origin:...
perhaps. However “the figure’s unexpected movement seems to happen not in the director’s imagined timespace but in the timespace of [actual] performance. The moment is unsettling … We do not know why the figure has reacted like this; we do not know when the reaction happens; we do not know where the reaction takes place.” Beckett told Mel Gussow
Mel Gussow
Melvyn H. Gussow was an American theater critic, movie critic, and author who wrote for The New York Times for 35 years.-Biography:...
that “it was not his intention to have the character make an appeal … He is a triumphant martyr
Martyr
A martyr is somebody who suffers persecution and death for refusing to renounce, or accept, a belief or cause, usually religious.-Meaning:...
rather than a sacrificial victim … and it is meant to cow onlookers into submission through the intensity of his gaze and stoicism
Stoicism
Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early . The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions.Stoics were concerned...
,”
Interpretations
The title requires some clarification. “In the words of AristotleAristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
: ‘catastrophe
Catastrophe (drama)
In drama, particularly the tragedies of classical antiquity, the catastrophe is the final resolution in a poem or narrative plot, which unravels the intrigue and brings the piece to a close. In comedies, this may be a marriage between main characters; in tragedies, it may be the death of one or...
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/catastrophe is an action bringing ruin and pain on stage, where corpses are seen and wounds and other similar sufferings are performed,’”. Malone
Malone Dies
Malone Dies is a novel by Samuel Beckett. It was first published in 1951, in French, as Malone Meurt, and later translated into English by the author....
refers to “Catastrophe … in the old sense … [t]o be buried alive in lava
Lava
Lava refers both to molten rock expelled by a volcano during an eruption and the resulting rock after solidification and cooling. This molten rock is formed in the interior of some planets, including Earth, and some of their satellites. When first erupted from a volcanic vent, lava is a liquid at...
and not turn a hair, it is then a man shows what stuff he is made of.” The more obvious definition applies of course to the act of defiance itself; the effect is nothing less than catastrophic.
The play is often singled out amongst the Beckett canon
Canon (fiction)
In the context of a work of fiction, the term canon denotes the material accepted as "official" in a fictional universe's fan base. It is often contrasted with, or used as the basis for, works of fan fiction, which are not considered canonical...
as being overtly political even though similar claims could be made for What Where
What Where
What Where is Samuel Beckett's last play produced following a request for a new work for the 1983 Autumn Festival in Graz, Austria. It was written between February and March 1983 initially in French as Quoi où and translated by Beckett himself....
and Rough for Radio II
Rough for Radio II
Rough for Radio II is a radio play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in French in 1961 as Pochade radiophonique and published in Minuit 16, November 1975. Beckett translated the work into English shortly before its broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 13 April 1976. Martin Esslin directed Harold Pinter ,...
. The play is still a Beckett play and as such it is unwise to limit ones reading of it. "When ... asked about the political significance of Catastrophe, he raised his arms in a gesture of impatience and made just one remark: 'It is not more political than Pochade Radiophonique’”, Rough for Radio II, as the latter is known in English."
Political
The play can be viewed as an allegoryAllegory
Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...
on the power of totalitarianism and the struggle to oppose it, the protagonist representing people ruled by dictators (the director and his aide). By "tweak[ing] him until his clothing and posture project the required image of pitiful dejectedness"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0243166/, they exert their control over the silenced figure. “The Director’s reifying of the Protagonist can be seen as an attempt to reduce a living human being to the status of an icon of impotent suffering. But, at the end of the play, he reasserts his humanity and his individuality in a single, vestigial, yet compelling movement.” In answer to a reviewer who claimed that the ending was ambiguous Beckett replied angrily: “There’s no ambiguity there at all. He’s saying, you bastards, you haven’t finished me yet.”
It is interesting to note that, after the fall of the communist
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
government in Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
, crowds famously chanted, "Godot
Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's...
has arrived!" as a rallying cry, in reference to Beckett's most famous play. Havel himself would later make allusions to the importance of Beckett's work in terms of his struggle, and his work. In a speech addressed to the Institut de France
Institut de France
The Institut de France is a French learned society, grouping five académies, the most famous of which is the Académie française.The institute, located in Paris, manages approximately 1,000 foundations, as well as museums and chateaux open for visit. It also awards prizes and subsidies, which...
on 27 October 1992, for example, the President cites Beckett and Godot repeatedly with direct reference to the Czechoslovakian experience: “I should make it clear that citizens of the communist world could not be divided into dissidents and those who merely waited for Godot. To a certain extent, all of us waited for Godot at times, and at other times were dissidents. It's just that some of us might have been more the former, and others more the latter. Nevertheless, this experience can be simplified to the recognition that there are different kinds of waiting.” Following his release from prison, Havel wrote a play in response, which he dedicated in his turn to Beckett. It was called The Mistake.
Theatrical
A filmed version of Catastrophe was directed by David MametDavid Mamet
David Alan Mamet is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter and film director.Best known as a playwright, Mamet won a Pulitzer Prize and received a Tony nomination for Glengarry Glen Ross . He also received a Tony nomination for Speed-the-Plow . As a screenwriter, he received Oscar...
for the Beckett on Film
Beckett on Film
Beckett on Film was a project aimed at making film versions of all nineteen of Samuel Beckett's stage plays, with the exception of the early and unperformed Eleutheria. This endeavour was successfully completed, with the first films being shown in 2001.The project was conceived by Michael Colgan,...
project. It starred playwright and Beckett enthusiast Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
as the Director, and featured the last on-camera appearance of famed British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
actor
Actor
An actor is a person who acts in a dramatic production and who works in film, television, theatre, or radio in that capacity...
, John Gielgud
John Gielgud
Sir Arthur John Gielgud, OM, CH was an English actor, director, and producer. A descendant of the renowned Terry acting family, he achieved early international acclaim for his youthful, emotionally expressive Hamlet which broke box office records on Broadway in 1937...
as the Protagonist (he would die only a few weeks later).
This version has been somewhat controversial, as Mamet chose to film it as a realist piece: the scene takes place in an actual theatre, and the principals are dressed as a director and his assistant might look. “When the director (D) made his peremptory demands for light from his female assistant (A) he received it not for his cigar, as in the original, but in the form of torchlight for his script. This weakened the sense of gratuitous offensiveness hanging about the character. D., played by Pinter, received rather too much camera attention and a patient John Gielgud rather too little, above all at the final moment” when he raises his head in defiance. Some critics have argued that this interpretation takes away from the tyrannical theme of the play.
This is not the only version that has taken liberties with the staging. “When Catastrophe was performed in the Beckett Festival on 15 September 1999, the director Robert O’Mahoney, interpreted the climax very differently [from the way Beckett had]. After Johnny Murphy raised his head and glared with great dignity at the audience, his lips parted and stretched into an imitation of Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionist art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety.- Childhood :Edvard Munch...
’s The Scream
The Scream
Scream is the title of Expressionist paintings and prints in a series by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, showing an agonized figure against a blood red sky...
. This nullified the impact of the ending, as Protagonist was reduced to nothing more than an abject silently screaming victim.”
Catastrophe is not only about a political situation and the place of the artist in it. The victim or “protagonist” is also representative of all actors, having to portray what writers write for them in the way directors tell them to do it (Beckett is not unaware of his own relationship with actors, particularly those who in the past have resisted his stage directions). The director in the play catches two prototypes, that of the political commissar and of the all-powerful personality director like Peter Brook
Peter Brook
Peter Stephen Paul Brook CH, CBE is an English theatre and film director and innovator, who has been based in France since the early 1970s.-Life:...
, Vitez, [Mamet or O’Mahoney], who bend a performance to their own interpretation, where often the victim is the author himself; there are many “in” theatrical jokes. The director’s assistant coolly carries out her instructions, and it matters little if we are in a concentration camp
Internment
Internment is the imprisonment or confinement of people, commonly in large groups, without trial. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the meaning as: "The action of 'interning'; confinement within the limits of a country or place." Most modern usage is about individuals, and there is a distinction...
or a film studio: all humane considerations are ruled out to achieve the ultimate work of art. The two-pronged metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
is incredibly effective for all its surface simplicity. In time, as with all of Beckett’s work, more strands and allusion
Allusion
An allusion is a figure of speech that makes a reference to, or representation of, people, places, events, literary work, myths, or works of art, either directly or by implication. M. H...
s will be discovered.
Theological
The first command in the Bible is "And GodGod
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
said, Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness”
“The cigar-smoking Director's first command is also for " Light"; further such demands and repetitions of the phase "For God's sake" help to build a conception of the Director as God, while sustaining his theatrical gestus
Gestus
Gestus is an acting technique developed by the German theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht. It carries the sense of a combination of physical gesture and "gist" or attitude...
of a bourgeois
Bourgeoisie
In sociology and political science, bourgeoisie describes a range of groups across history. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture." A member of the...
and chauvinistic
Chauvinism
Chauvinism, in its original and primary meaning, is an exaggerated, bellicose patriotism and a belief in national superiority and glory. It is an eponym of a possibly fictional French soldier Nicolas Chauvin who was credited with many superhuman feats in the Napoleonic wars.By extension it has come...
impresario
Impresario
An impresario is a person who organizes and often finances concerts, plays or operas; analogous to a film producer in filmmaking, television production and an angel investor in business...
. His identity with the Creator is further effected by his command over language and light, determining the structure of the play so as to conform to the order of Creation, and by the inclusion of a lighting technician named Luke … The presence of Luke
Luke the Evangelist
Luke the Evangelist was an Early Christian writer whom Church Fathers such as Jerome and Eusebius said was the author of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles...
, like an inspired evangelist
Evangelism
Evangelism refers to the practice of relaying information about a particular set of beliefs to others who do not hold those beliefs. The term is often used in reference to Christianity....
, receiving the will of Director-Creator
Creator deity
A creator deity is a deity responsible for the creation of the world . In monotheism, the single God is often also the creator deity, while polytheistic traditions may or may not have creator deities...
, translated into intelligible terms by Assistant-angel
Angel
Angels are mythical beings often depicted as messengers of God in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles along with the Quran. The English word angel is derived from the Greek ἄγγελος, a translation of in the Hebrew Bible ; a similar term, ملائكة , is used in the Qur'an...
, completes the absurd metaphysical motif. His lighting operations correspond to the technical application of a divine morality.
At one point Protagonist’s hands are adjusted to convey the attitude of prayer
Prayer
Prayer is a form of religious practice that seeks to activate a volitional rapport to a deity through deliberate practice. Prayer may be either individual or communal and take place in public or in private. It may involve the use of words or song. When language is used, prayer may take the form of...
. From the Director’s perspective he has simply chosen the most aesthetically pleasing pose of course.
Conversely the play has also been interpreted “as an attempt by the devil
Devil
The Devil is believed in many religions and cultures to be a powerful, supernatural entity that is the personification of evil and the enemy of God and humankind. The nature of the role varies greatly...
to strip man of his own soul.”
Personal
“The play has also been related to Beckett’s own horror at self-exposure, and linked to the essentially exhibitionist nature of theatre. It has been seen as demonstrating the impossibility for an artist to shape his work in such a way that it reveals what he intends it to reveal; art in the end escapes him.” Interestingly, his wife Suzanne’s words after the telephone call confirming that Beckett had received the Nobel PrizeNobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
for Literature were: “Quelle catastrophe.” She fully realised the effect such attention would have on this most private of men.