Where Are We, Exactly?

I've seen two of his plays now and read one of them, and I'm not sure what I think of Samuel Beckett. To a large extent, I at least prefer watching him to reading him - I hear things in performance that I don't catch in reading, and with Beckett, every word is important. Particularly because the plays of his that I've had experience with are so deliberately vague on detail. He presents you with characters (or character, in the case of Krapp) and turns them loose with almost no context in which to place them. We have to take them on their terms, not ours.

For instance - where do his plays happen?

...Well...about that...

There's no place we can pin down for them. All that we know about Vladimir and Estragon's location is that there's a tree. Krapp is presumably in a room in his house, but we have no idea about anything else surrounding him. The characters in "Endgame" can't leave their refuge, but why that is, or where else they might go if they could, is obscure.

Take this computer-graphic set design for "Waiting for Godot," for instance. (I happen to think it's crazy cool.)



Where is this? Nowhere - deliberately nowhere. You have the sundial on the ground, and the tree in the middle, and absolutely nothing around it. And for that play, it works. The "nowhere" location gives the play permission to be wild and fanciful. It lets it make no sense by any rules we recognize, but still wallop us a good one when we realize that there are PEOPLE trapped in this nowhere, trying to figure it out along with us.

I like this one too:



Not only is this nowhere, it's a cyclical nowhere. It's hard to imagine a place like this, of one or two absolutes and vagary on everything else.

Or for "Krapp's Last Tape" - how about this one?



Here, Krapp's not even really in a room. He's framed by the skeleton of a room - those beams all around him - set against complete black. At least Vladimir and Estragon have their tree. Krapp has nothing here, no line to anything recognizable as of our world. The lamp over his desk makes the stage look like a police interrogation cell. As befits the play, Krapp is completely alone.

And here's a pretty scary set for "Endgame":



They're not even enclosed here - the shelter's walls are low and falling down. The rest of the world is coming - but that rest of the world is still a complete mystery. The center doorway is dark, but the windows are bright white. Just what IS out there, if anything? What does it mean? What could it do?