To the editors:
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That notwithstanding, on a literal level, nothing could be simpler to stage than a Beckett play, especially Krapp’s Last Tape [August 11]. All you need, for all practical purposes, is a table, a tape recorder, some tapes, a dictionary, and two bananas. In fact, some Beckett plays seem tailor-made not only to be staged, but to be staged by a company without much money and by actors who for one reason or another can’t learn lines. If Krapp’s Last Tape is impossible to stage, then what would we do with a scene such as from Goethe’s Faust in which wine emanates from tabletops and then suddenly turns to shooting flames?
Had the text been included in Jim Ortlieb’s “staging,” we would have seen the protagonist looking up in the dictionary what we would have known was a word in the script. And we would have observed an old man’s private annoyance at hearing his own pompous voice from younger days.
Both the stepping-through that Ortlieb has staged and Boeker’s review of it assume that the words of the play say nothing, are nothing, and are dispensable. So what we were given was performance art as a cultural list. Drama–the relationships among words and the physical–words to sounds of voices and to inflection, words to causes and effects, words to the question of their possible meanings–was withheld from us, along with, ultimately, the pathetic experience that lurks in that play.
