Rough for Theatre I
Encyclopedia
Rough for Theatre I is a one-act theatrical sketch
by Samuel Beckett
. Also known simply as Theatre I it began life originally in French
in the late fifties as Fragment de théâtre and was later translated into English
by Beckett himself. The first production was at the Schiller Theatre, Hamburg
in 1979, directed by Walter Asmus. It was staged as Fragment for Theater I at the Magic Theater, San Francisco in September 1986 by Stan Gontarski with Robert Wagner
(A) and Tom Luce (B).
beggar
(A), sitting on a folding-stool, is scraping away on his fiddle
in the hope of getting a few coins from any passers-by. Three times in his opening speech he emphasises that he is “a poor old man.” His bowl is quite empty though; it has been some time since he has had contact with anyone. This day however a wheelchair
-using man (B) is drawn to his playing. He is similarly disabled having lost one leg (“It went bad and was removed”).
Now, for whatever reasons, they each find themselves alone in the world.
In the past the fiddler had a woman, “Dora”, who “took [him] by the hand” but scorned him for “the days [he] hadn't earned enough.” Since then he has been getting by on “things lying around … The other day I tripped over a sack of nuts
,” he says.
The man in the wheelchair says he too once had the support of a woman “to get me out of the chair in the evening and back into it again in the morning and to push me as far as the corner when I went out of my mind.” He also had a son, Billy, and begins calling the blind man by that name. He proposes the two of them join forces to unite sight and mobility in the interests of survival. The blind man is tempted by the other’s offer to locate some tinned food
. The prospect of chancing across some “baked beans
” especially excites him.
Their mutual need is “clear and the advantages of a symbiotic
relationship seem obvious, in theory at least … [However there is in this pair] the same juxtaposition of contradictory impulses and striking ambivalence
of behaviour that was present in the relationship of Estragon
and Vladimir
and of Hamm and Clov.”
The blind man wants to know: “What does it all look like now?” He is curious about the condition of the trees and several times brings up the subject of light. In the past he had been able to “feel twilight
gather” but something has changed and he’s no longer as sure as he once was. It appears that these two have been abandoned or forgotten when the populous fled the area. Sometimes he thinks he hears people and wonders if they are coming back.
Because the other man can see what things are really like he holds a bleaker vision of what the future has in store. Up until hearing the sound of music he has hardly ventured out and not travelled far at that. Although he has offered to be the fiddler’s eyes he becomes annoyed when continually asked to describe how things are and when he tells him that it’s “day” he feels the need to add an “if you like” casting a shadow of doubt on even this simple answer. Later on when he imagines things they might come across in their travels he only mentions the gutter and a muckheap. He doesn’t believe anyone will ever return so when things start to fall apart between the pair he laments: “I’ll never see anyone again.”
Beckett said of Endgame
that Hamm and Clov are Didi and Gogo at a later date, at the end of their lives. If that is the case, then the two characters in Rough for Theatre I could reflect what might have been if they had never found a way to get on in the first place.
The blind man pesters the other for details. He wants to know: “Is it still day? Will it not soon be night? Is there grass anywhere?” He insists on listening for sounds which the other can’t hear. Eventually the wheelchair-using man has had enough and he starts to threaten the fiddler who at the very end wrenches the man’s pole from out of his hands at which point the action freezes in a final tableau
.
Is he going to throw it away? Is he going to beat him with it? Or even kill him with it? Beckett’s plays often have a certain open-endedness and this sketch is no different. Perhaps because it has taken so little time to build up to this climax it lacks the resonance of Endgame’s concluding scene where we never know if Clov ever leaves Hamm or the close of Happy Days
where the audience is left wondering if Willie is reaching for the gun or for Winnie.
The similarity with Endgame may be one reason why Beckett did not attempt to develop the play further and why he published it at a much later date among the ‘odds’. “Several passages make one suspect … that Beckett may have sensed that the dangers of repetition or self-parody
were too great to allow him to complete or release the play [any] earlier.” Many scholars suggest that the room in which Endgame is staged is a post-war fallout shelter
and that the nothingness observed outside is a result of a nuclear winter
; a similar view can be just as easily taken of Rough for Theatre I.
Comparisons have also been drawn between Rough for Theatre I and a number of other plays: “John Millington Synge
’s The Well of the Saints
(1905) (with the [elderly] blind Martin Doul feeling the light of the day) … W. B. Yeats’s The Death of Cuchulain
(1939) (Yeats’s blind man feeling Cuchulain’s body as A does B’s … starting with the feet)” and also “Yeats’s The Cat and the Moon (1924), where a blind man and a cripple
form a symbiotic relationship.”
, and is dated December 1956. This being the case it was conceived whilst Beckett was putting the final touches to Fin de partie
(which took him from 1954 till 1957 to complete) but before he began its translation into English. The original title, The Beggar and the Cripple has been scored out and replaced with The Gloaming.http://www.thefreedictionary.com/gloaming
The characters are named B (Blind) and C (Cripple) in this version.
The work contains two biographical references of note. When Beckett returned to Ussy (where he wrote the first draft) he “was anxious to see how the young trees he had planted over the past three years were standing up to the cold weather.” This gets grafted into the play. “One of the two players enquires of the other: ‘How are the trees doing?’ The second replies: ‘It is difficult to say. We are in winter you know. They are all black and bare, the evergreen
s included. One would have to cut into them with a knife…” This gets truncated to: “How are the trees doing? / Hard to say. It’s winter you know.”
The second reference was excised from the final version but is of interest in that it is a rare reference to his father; Beckett’s writing is generally matricentric.http://www.wordreference.com/definition/matricentric The writing breaks down following this sentimental passage where C recalls a fishing trip with his father: “Bring me back to the hot summer evening out in the Bay
with my father in the little rowboat
, fishing
for mackerel
with a spinner. To the time when it was all still time. ‘Do you remember what they look like?’ ‘Yes, father, all blue and silver.’” When Beckett discussed this with James Knowlson in 1989 he used the exact turn of phrase, “‘fishing for mackerel with a spinner’ … that he had used over thirty years before in his rejected play fragment.” Even accounting for Beckett’s astounding memory this was an exceptionally clear and vivid recollection. In more typical Beckett fashion the image resurfaced in Texts for Nothing: “Yes, I’m here forever, with the spinners and the dead flies, dancing to the tremor of their meshed wings…”
“Two later versions of The Gloaming in French and English were written in the 1970s. The English version was only published at a much later date in Ends and Odds under the title Theatre I.”
project in June 2000 starring David Kelly
(A) and Milo O'Shea
(B).
The director, Kieron Walsh, said in interview: “I was quite daunted at the prospect of filming one of the plays, but when I read Rough for Theatre I, I immediately saw the cinematic possibilities. It reminded me a little of Laurel and Hardy
, so I shot it on location – ‘Street corner: day’ – in black and white.”
Sketch comedy
A sketch comedy consists of a series of short comedy scenes or vignettes, called "sketches," commonly between one and ten minutes long. Such sketches are performed by a group of comic actors or comedians, either on stage or through an audio and/or visual medium such as broadcasting...
by Samuel Beckett
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...
. Also known simply as Theatre I it began life originally in French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
in the late fifties as Fragment de théâtre and was later translated into English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
by Beckett himself. The first production was at the Schiller Theatre, Hamburg
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
in 1979, directed by Walter Asmus. It was staged as Fragment for Theater I at the Magic Theater, San Francisco in September 1986 by Stan Gontarski with Robert Wagner
Robert Wagner
Robert John Wagner is an American actor of stage, screen, and television.A veteran of many films in the 1950s and 1960s, Wagner gained prominence in three American television series that spanned three decades: It Takes a Thief , Switch , and Hart to Hart...
(A) and Tom Luce (B).
Synopsis
The action is confined to a derelict street corner where everything is in ruins. The day is wintry, grey and sunless. A blindBlindness
Blindness is the condition of lacking visual perception due to physiological or neurological factors.Various scales have been developed to describe the extent of vision loss and define blindness...
beggar
Begging
Begging is to entreat earnestly, implore, or supplicate. It often occurs for the purpose of securing a material benefit, generally for a gift, donation or charitable donation...
(A), sitting on a folding-stool, is scraping away on his fiddle
Fiddle
The term fiddle may refer to any bowed string musical instrument, most often the violin. It is also a colloquial term for the instrument used by players in all genres, including classical music...
in the hope of getting a few coins from any passers-by. Three times in his opening speech he emphasises that he is “a poor old man.” His bowl is quite empty though; it has been some time since he has had contact with anyone. This day however a wheelchair
Wheelchair
A wheelchair is a chair with wheels, designed to be a replacement for walking. The device comes in variations where it is propelled by motors or by the seated occupant turning the rear wheels by hand. Often there are handles behind the seat for someone else to do the pushing...
-using man (B) is drawn to his playing. He is similarly disabled having lost one leg (“It went bad and was removed”).
Now, for whatever reasons, they each find themselves alone in the world.
In the past the fiddler had a woman, “Dora”, who “took [him] by the hand” but scorned him for “the days [he] hadn't earned enough.” Since then he has been getting by on “things lying around … The other day I tripped over a sack of nuts
Nut (fruit)
A nut is a hard-shelled fruit of some plants having an indehiscent seed. While a wide variety of dried seeds and fruits are called nuts in English, only a certain number of them are considered by biologists to be true nuts...
,” he says.
The man in the wheelchair says he too once had the support of a woman “to get me out of the chair in the evening and back into it again in the morning and to push me as far as the corner when I went out of my mind.” He also had a son, Billy, and begins calling the blind man by that name. He proposes the two of them join forces to unite sight and mobility in the interests of survival. The blind man is tempted by the other’s offer to locate some tinned food
Canning
Canning is a method of preserving food in which the food contents are processed and sealed in an airtight container. Canning provides a typical shelf life ranging from one to five years, although under specific circumstances a freeze-dried canned product, such as canned, dried lentils, can last as...
. The prospect of chancing across some “baked beans
Baked beans
Baked beans is a dish containing beans, sometimes baked but, despite the name, usually stewed, in a sauce. Most commercial canned baked beans are made from haricot beans, also known as navy beans – a variety of Phaseolus vulgaris – in a sauce. In Ireland and the United Kingdom, a tomato...
” especially excites him.
Their mutual need is “clear and the advantages of a symbiotic
Symbiosis
Symbiosis is close and often long-term interaction between different biological species. In 1877 Bennett used the word symbiosis to describe the mutualistic relationship in lichens...
relationship seem obvious, in theory at least … [However there is in this pair] the same juxtaposition of contradictory impulses and striking ambivalence
Ambivalence
Ambivalence is a state of having simultaneous, conflicting feelings toward a person or thing. Stated another way, ambivalence is the experience of having thoughts and/or emotions of both positive and negative valence toward someone or something. A common example of ambivalence is the feeling of...
of behaviour that was present in the relationship of Estragon
Estragon
Estragon is one of the two main characters from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. His name is the French word for tarragon.- The impulsive misanthrope :...
and Vladimir
Vladimir (Waiting for Godot)
Vladimir is one of the two main characters from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.- Personality :...
and of Hamm and Clov.”
The blind man wants to know: “What does it all look like now?” He is curious about the condition of the trees and several times brings up the subject of light. In the past he had been able to “feel twilight
Twilight
Twilight is the time between dawn and sunrise or between sunset and dusk, during which sunlight scattering in the upper atmosphere illuminates the lower atmosphere, and the surface of the earth is neither completely lit nor completely dark. The sun itself is not directly visible because it is below...
gather” but something has changed and he’s no longer as sure as he once was. It appears that these two have been abandoned or forgotten when the populous fled the area. Sometimes he thinks he hears people and wonders if they are coming back.
Because the other man can see what things are really like he holds a bleaker vision of what the future has in store. Up until hearing the sound of music he has hardly ventured out and not travelled far at that. Although he has offered to be the fiddler’s eyes he becomes annoyed when continually asked to describe how things are and when he tells him that it’s “day” he feels the need to add an “if you like” casting a shadow of doubt on even this simple answer. Later on when he imagines things they might come across in their travels he only mentions the gutter and a muckheap. He doesn’t believe anyone will ever return so when things start to fall apart between the pair he laments: “I’ll never see anyone again.”
Beckett said of Endgame
Endgame (play)
Endgame, by Samuel Beckett, is a one-act play with four characters, written in a style associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. It was originally written in French ; as was his custom, Beckett himself translated it into English. The play was first performed in a French-language production at the...
that Hamm and Clov are Didi and Gogo at a later date, at the end of their lives. If that is the case, then the two characters in Rough for Theatre I could reflect what might have been if they had never found a way to get on in the first place.
The blind man pesters the other for details. He wants to know: “Is it still day? Will it not soon be night? Is there grass anywhere?” He insists on listening for sounds which the other can’t hear. Eventually the wheelchair-using man has had enough and he starts to threaten the fiddler who at the very end wrenches the man’s pole from out of his hands at which point the action freezes in a final tableau
Tableau vivant
Tableau vivant is French for "living picture." The term describes a striking group of suitably costumed actors or artist's models, carefully posed and often theatrically lit. Throughout the duration of the display, the people shown do not speak or move...
.
Is he going to throw it away? Is he going to beat him with it? Or even kill him with it? Beckett’s plays often have a certain open-endedness and this sketch is no different. Perhaps because it has taken so little time to build up to this climax it lacks the resonance of Endgame’s concluding scene where we never know if Clov ever leaves Hamm or the close of Happy Days
Happy Days (play)
Happy Days is a play in two acts, written in English, by Samuel Beckett. He began the play on 8 October 1960 and it was completed on 14 May 1961. Beckett finished the translation into French by November 1962 but amended the title...
where the audience is left wondering if Willie is reaching for the gun or for Winnie.
The similarity with Endgame may be one reason why Beckett did not attempt to develop the play further and why he published it at a much later date among the ‘odds’. “Several passages make one suspect … that Beckett may have sensed that the dangers of repetition or self-parody
Self-parody
A self-parody is a parody of oneself or one's own work. As an artist accomplishes it by imitating his or her own characteristics, a self-parody is potentially difficult to distinguish from especially characteristic productions .Sometimes critics use the...
were too great to allow him to complete or release the play [any] earlier.” Many scholars suggest that the room in which Endgame is staged is a post-war fallout shelter
Fallout shelter
A fallout shelter is an enclosed space specially designed to protect occupants from radioactive debris or fallout resulting from a nuclear explosion. Many such shelters were constructed as civil defense measures during the Cold War....
and that the nothingness observed outside is a result of a nuclear winter
Nuclear winter
Nuclear winter is a predicted climatic effect of nuclear war. It has been theorized that severely cold weather and reduced sunlight for a period of months or even years could be caused by detonating large numbers of nuclear weapons, especially over flammable targets such as cities, where large...
; a similar view can be just as easily taken of Rough for Theatre I.
Comparisons have also been drawn between Rough for Theatre I and a number of other plays: “John Millington Synge
John Millington Synge
Edmund John Millington Synge was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore. He was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival and was one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre...
’s The Well of the Saints
The Well of the Saints
The Well of the Saints is a three-act play written by Irish playwright J. M. Synge, first performed at the Abbey Theatre by the Irish National Theatre Society in February, 1905...
(1905) (with the [elderly] blind Martin Doul feeling the light of the day) … W. B. Yeats’s The Death of Cuchulain
Cúchulainn
Cú Chulainn or Cúchulainn , and sometimes known in English as Cuhullin , is an Irish mythological hero who appears in the stories of the Ulster Cycle, as well as in Scottish and Manx folklore...
(1939) (Yeats’s blind man feeling Cuchulain’s body as A does B’s … starting with the feet)” and also “Yeats’s The Cat and the Moon (1924), where a blind man and a cripple
Cripple
A cripple is a person or animal with a physical disability, particularly one who is unable to walk because of an injury or illness. The word was recorded as early as 950 AD, and derives from the Proto-Germanic krupilaz...
form a symbiotic relationship.”
The Gloaming
A longer and somewhat different draft of this play was begun in EnglishEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, and is dated December 1956. This being the case it was conceived whilst Beckett was putting the final touches to Fin de partie
Endgame (play)
Endgame, by Samuel Beckett, is a one-act play with four characters, written in a style associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. It was originally written in French ; as was his custom, Beckett himself translated it into English. The play was first performed in a French-language production at the...
(which took him from 1954 till 1957 to complete) but before he began its translation into English. The original title, The Beggar and the Cripple has been scored out and replaced with The Gloaming.http://www.thefreedictionary.com/gloaming
The characters are named B (Blind) and C (Cripple) in this version.
The work contains two biographical references of note. When Beckett returned to Ussy (where he wrote the first draft) he “was anxious to see how the young trees he had planted over the past three years were standing up to the cold weather.” This gets grafted into the play. “One of the two players enquires of the other: ‘How are the trees doing?’ The second replies: ‘It is difficult to say. We are in winter you know. They are all black and bare, the evergreen
Evergreen
In botany, an evergreen plant is a plant that has leaves in all seasons. This contrasts with deciduous plants, which completely lose their foliage during the winter or dry season.There are many different kinds of evergreen plants, both trees and shrubs...
s included. One would have to cut into them with a knife…” This gets truncated to: “How are the trees doing? / Hard to say. It’s winter you know.”
The second reference was excised from the final version but is of interest in that it is a rare reference to his father; Beckett’s writing is generally matricentric.http://www.wordreference.com/definition/matricentric The writing breaks down following this sentimental passage where C recalls a fishing trip with his father: “Bring me back to the hot summer evening out in the Bay
Dublin Bay
Dublin Bay is a C-shaped inlet of the Irish Sea on the east coast of Ireland. The bay is about 10 kilometres wide along its north-south base, and 7 km in length to its apex at the centre of the city of Dublin; stretching from Howth Head in the north to Dalkey Point in the south...
with my father in the little rowboat
Watercraft rowing
Watercraft rowing is the act of propelling a boat using the motion of oars in the water. The difference between paddling and rowing is that with rowing the oars have a mechanical connection with the boat whereas with paddling the paddles are hand-held with no mechanical connection.This article...
, fishing
Fishing
Fishing is the activity of trying to catch wild fish. Fish are normally caught in the wild. Techniques for catching fish include hand gathering, spearing, netting, angling and trapping....
for mackerel
Mackerel
Mackerel is a common name applied to a number of different species of fish, mostly, but not exclusively, from the family Scombridae. They may be found in all tropical and temperate seas. Most live offshore in the oceanic environment but a few, like the Spanish mackerel , enter bays and can be...
with a spinner. To the time when it was all still time. ‘Do you remember what they look like?’ ‘Yes, father, all blue and silver.’” When Beckett discussed this with James Knowlson in 1989 he used the exact turn of phrase, “‘fishing for mackerel with a spinner’ … that he had used over thirty years before in his rejected play fragment.” Even accounting for Beckett’s astounding memory this was an exceptionally clear and vivid recollection. In more typical Beckett fashion the image resurfaced in Texts for Nothing: “Yes, I’m here forever, with the spinners and the dead flies, dancing to the tremor of their meshed wings…”
“Two later versions of The Gloaming in French and English were written in the 1970s. The English version was only published at a much later date in Ends and Odds under the title Theatre I.”
Beckett on Film
The play was filmed on location in Dublin as a part of the Beckett on FilmBeckett 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 in June 2000 starring David Kelly
David Kelly (actor)
David Kelly is an Irish actor, who has been in regular film and television work since the 1950s.-Acting career:Playing everything from Beckett to Shakespeare, he has appeared in Theatre, TV and film constantly since 1959...
(A) and Milo O'Shea
Milo O'Shea
-Early life:He was born and raised in Dublin and educated by the Christian Brothers at Synge Street, along with his friend Donal Donnelly.He was discovered in the 1950s by Harry Dillon, who ran the "37 Theatre Club" on the top floor of his shop The Swiss Gem Company, 51 Lower O'Connell Street...
(B).
The director, Kieron Walsh, said in interview: “I was quite daunted at the prospect of filming one of the plays, but when I read Rough for Theatre I, I immediately saw the cinematic possibilities. It reminded me a little of Laurel and Hardy
Laurel and Hardy
Laurel and Hardy were one of the most popular and critically acclaimed comedy double acts of the early Classical Hollywood era of American cinema...
, so I shot it on location – ‘Street corner: day’ – in black and white.”
External links
- Schiller Theatre home page (German)
- Magic Theater home page