156 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES WORKS CITED

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1 156 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES WORKS CITED Asmus, Walter D. (1977), Practical Aspects of Theatre, Radio, and Television: Rehearsal Notes for the German Première of Beckett s That Time and Footfalls at the Schiller Theater Werkstatt, Berlin, Journal of Beckett Studies, 2, pp Beckett, Samuel (1986), The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber & Faber. Beckett, Samuel, and Alan Schneider (1998), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clarke, Rosie (2014), Untitled interview with Lisa Dwan, The White Review, February online issue, < interview-with-lisa-dwan/ > Dwan, Lisa (2014), She taught me that truth has a sound : Lisa Dwan on Billie Whitelaw, Guardian Blog, 22 December. Frost, Everett C. (2012), Beckett and Geulincx s Metaphysics, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd hui, 24, pp Gontarski, S. E., ed. (1999), The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: The Shorter Plays, London: Faber & Faber. Gontarski, S. E. (2014), Towards a Minoritarian Criticism: The Questions We Ask, in S. E. Gontarski (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jung, C. G. (1935), The Collected Works, Vol. 18: The Tavistock Lectures, The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lane, Anthony (2014), Chatterbox: The Boards, The New Yorker, 29 September. Whitelaw, Billie (1995), Billie Whitelaw... Who He?, New York: St. Martin s Press. Review of Footfalls/Neither by Samuel Beckett and Morton Feldman, directed by Katie Mitchell, conducted by David Robert Coleman, Staatsoper im Schillertheater, Berlin (19 28 June 2015). An expressionistically stark strip of light spills from an open door into a bare room, narrow as a corridor; a middle-aged grey woman is standing barefoot under the faint light of a lamp, arms to her

2 Theatre Reviews 157 sides; an expressionless voice utters the word Mutter, and one enters Beckett country. For a series of performances in June 2015 Beckett country meant the Schillertheater in Berlin, where the Staatsoper is temporarily housed until renovations of its nineteenth-century building are completed. For the first time since its premiere in 2014, also at the Staatsoper im Schillertheater, director Katie Mitchell has twinned Beckett s 1975 play Footfalls with Morton Feldman s 1977 opera Neither, adapted from Beckett s eleven-line prose poem 1 of the same name though in the lower case, neither from For various reasons, the double bill is a prudent choice, especially at the Schillertheater, as it was here that Feldman had tried, at first unsuccessfully, to persuade Beckett to write a libretto for an opera after having seen Beckett rehearse Footfalls in their small Werkstatt theater in 1967 (Knowlson, 1996, 631). Beckett declined, but sent Feldman a postcard with the words of neither on them, and Feldman built his haunting one-act opera from them. The two pieces, Footfalls and Neither, complement one another because of the recurring image and motif of a person going to and fro (Beckett, 2010, 167), and because of an inherent theme, what Beckett allegedly called the only [...] theme in his life (Knowlson, 1996, 631): doors that close when approached, and that open when distanced (Cohn, 2001, 340). The set of Footfalls, which is devoid of set design, as well as the lyrical asceticism of all of Beckett s work seem to have been influences on Feldman s piece. 2 The performances of the two works back-to-back are not only logical for an aesthetic kinship, but also for pragmatic reasons. No rebuilding is needed between the works and the 75 minutes of intense goings to and fro can be performed without a break, as if they were one piece, one long act of a recurring theme. There is a further pragmatic reason which makes the double bill a fortuitous union: Feldman s piece is just short of an hour and hardly makes for an opulent opera evening in the Puccini or Wagner vein. So, to clock in at around the length of an average feature film, Feldman s opera is usually coupled with another short piece, such as Arnold Schönberg s monodrama Erwartung (1909).

3 158 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES Figure 2. Samuel Beckett, Footfalls / Morton Feldman, Neither; Julia Wieninger; Staatsoper im Schillertheater, Berlin, 2015; Photo Credit: Stephen Cummiskey. In the Schillertheater Vikki Mortimer s stage design gives Footfalls a tense feeling both of tight closeness and spare abandon. The full width of the stage is used to suggest May s room, which is book-ended by doors on each side, one open (stage left), one closed (stage right), so that neither s motif of the opening and closing doors is already suggested as a static image. The doorless, oversized back wall, extending as if infinitely off into the flyspace and out of the audience s view, is placed close to the orchestra pit, giving the room a confining kammerspiel quality and May a mere strip of pacing space, which is, however, all she needs for her repeated nine steps. The stage design embeds Beckett s monochrome minimalism of Footfalls in more naturalistic or expressionistic structures the room is reminiscent of Ibsen or Strindberg, while the high ceilings suggest Claus Peymann s sets for Thomas Bernhard s plays as well as the cinema of German expressionism, which Beckett admired. Mitchell s Footfalls is performed in Erika and Elmar Tophoven s translation as Tritte, and May s repeated Mutter at the very beginning is answered by a voice which, while the sound comes from upstage following Beckett s script (Beckett, 2006, 399), seems

4 Theatre Reviews 159 to speak from the open door on the audience s right rather than from the darkness, as in Beckett s version with Billie Whitelaw. It was in the original Berlin production that Beckett introduced a vertical strip of light visible in the background, to give the impression that the light was falling through the crack of a door (Ackerley and Gontarski, 2004, 202). The lighting by Jon Clark takes Beckett s vertical strip of light and levels it as the stark sash of light emitted from the open door stage left, while two faint vertical lines of light from two industrial lamps cut through this horizontal strip on the stage. Whereas Beckett s vertical strip of light in his Berlin production faintly suggested a door upstage, as if the mother s haunting presence were perhaps towering over May, Mitchell s staging, with the two doors on the sides, visually accentuates the strong binary undertones of Beckett s play and the one theme running through both Footfalls and neither. While Beckett s missing stage descriptions in the script of Footfalls may suggest his intention to have no stage design in any realist sense, Mortimer and Mitchell s choice works extraordinarily well for the actress Julia Wieninger. Her presence both when standing still under one of the two industrial lamps and when pacing to and fro is physically dominant and disembodied at the same time, with her arms always insecurely glued to her sides, rather than folded across the chest, as is usually the case in productions of Footfalls. Wieninger s worn grey wrap hiding feet (Beckett, 2006, 399) almost blurs her with the bluish grey walls of the stage. Her gait is much more of a trudge than Whitelaw s was, her entire body bent forward, so that the next stage would mean doing Nauman s Beckett Walk, which lends a staccato heaviness to each rhythmic step of her pacing. Wieninger is barefoot, so that her footfalls are audible not as shoed clacking steps but as faint sluggish slaps. Beckett was sceptical of Alan Schneider s idea to us[e] the same voice for May and her mother (Ackerley and Gontarski, 2004, 201), though Wieninger s performance of both voices works very well. In Wieninger s rendition, the similarities between the two voices the voice of the mother was pre-recorded are barely perceptible; knowing that the same actress performs both voices means, however, that an audience is likely to see May s mother as departed from the beginning rather than dying throughout

5 160 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES the play. Both her voices of May, Amy, and Mrs W. as well as her physicality grow slower, fainter, and more torpid as the play progresses. The chimes heard before each part are played by a triangle rather than a bell, so they are already quite soft from the beginning. When the final chime has been sounded, the stage is not empty andsothereisstilla trace of MAY (Beckett, 2006, 403). Wieninger stands still for a long time, the curtain does not fall, and suddenly the orchestra begins Feldman s poignant opera Neither. As if an automaton set in motion, May turns and resumes the same pacing from Footfalls, and while the first notes of Feldman s eerie, glass-like music spread, the back wall to May s room is lifted up and rises into the flyspace. Another narrow room similar to the first, with similar doors on each side, is revealed, and another woman, almost identical-looking, is engaged in her own rhythmic pacing. This second woman is played by the soprano Laura Aikin, and as she is pacing, parallel to Wieninger, toward the door on the audience s left, just before the fourth minute of the opera, she begins to sing. Aikin is an extraordinarily gifted singer with a range over three octaves, and she uses her gifts to push at the limits of the soprano range performing Feldman s complex composition. Her singing continues to lengthen Beckett s libretto to such a degree that the words become incomprehensible and leave language behind them on their way toward non-representational sound. And yet, the words are there, spread out among Aiken s magnificent vibrating voice; and they are present as image. As the opera progresses five back walls all ascend and disappear, and behind each wall there is another plane upon which grey women are engaged in the same pacing trudge, though at different stages of their ways toward the door opening just for them and closing just for them upon approach. The lighting of Neither is dimmer, fainter, and more modulated towards the bluish grey, giving one the sense of witnessing an underwater nocturne when all the doors are closed and no light is streaming through them. The performers are dressed in subtly varying tones of grey which seem to grow paler for each individual woman, until the last one far upstage seems almost ghostly white. As these hauntingly pale figures populate the stage, one feels as though having entered the forsaken space of The Lost Ones. The

6 Theatre Reviews 161 performers seem all confined to their own narrow plane [n]arrow enough for flight to be in vain (Beckett, 2010, 101) their own strip to pace along, without ever interacting with the others. So, their isolation in the presence of the other women at one point there are nine performers on stage suggests the worst kind of loneliness implied in Le Dépeupleur, loneliness among one s fellow creatures. The women do not let up their pacing toward the slowly opening and closing doors, and intermittently they run across the stage, giving their attempts to reach the doors a sharp, passionate, and ever heightening sense of despair. Like the lost ones, the performers at various stages of the opera all go dead still, face the audience and meditatively perform various minimalist movements, once slowly raising their arms, once subtly swaying from left to right like pendular puppets. The alternation between utter stasis, minimalist movement, and rapid running gives the opera a dynamic that breaks open the stark binary of Footfalls rhythmic pacing, as if the subtle movements when the women are standing and facing the audience were a small interstice splicing open the impossible contrast visualized by the opening and closing doors, by the motionlessness that approaches death and the movement that still signals life. The decision to visualize the one theme is very effective, not only because Beckett s words suggesting this theme in neither are unrecognizable, and not only because of the link with Footfalls, but also because Feldman s compositions for violin in the opera are often performed at such a slow tempo and at such a low volume that the bows moving across the strings sound like creaking doors, either opening or closing. The two most incisive images in this exquisitely visual production are two linked moments. The first is a reference to Pina Bausch s devastatingly melancholic Café Müller (1978) and perhaps to this work s own dramatization of isolation in company when the grey women on stage are rushing towards the closing doors and running up against them, arms stretched out, touching the flat spaces with their open bodies, as Bausch and her fellow performers did the walls of Café Müller. The second image is perhaps the most memorable, and it is variously repeated toward the end of the opera and in harmony with Feldman s vertiginously spiraling scales. Some of the women do, in fact, manage to run

7 162 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES out into the yellow light of the opened doors. But, perhaps not unlike the dog chained to his vomit, they are seemingly drawn back immediately and return into the blue-tinged space of the stage. Before Neither comes to its climactic end, there is a moment when all music goes quiet and the movement of the bow playing the strings of one violin is decelerated to such a degree that one hardly hears any notes but just makes out the scratching of the horsehair on the strings, as if this were the instrument s, the opera s, death rattle, its last sigh. In the end, Aiken s voice becomes ever more shrill, shrieking to the limits of her range, and ever more desperate, and yet ever more hauntingly lyrical. And then the curtain begins to be lowered, a painstakingly slow and at first barely perceptible descent, until the final domination of black, when the curtain, hovering for a moment mid-way, suddenly falls. The brilliant pairing of the two pieces at this spectacular performance in Berlin emphasizes that Footfalls is a variation on the theme that Beckett would explicate in neither. The to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow, which Beckett writes of in neither (Beckett, 2010, 167) may be seen as the negative, the inversion, of May s walking in a strip of light (as Beckett has staged it in the Whitelaw version), walking from inner to outer light. Mitchell s interpretation brings out this theme, by staging Footfalls in very different fashion, the way she has reaccentuated the central motif of Happy Days, with Winnie(also played by Wieninger) up to her waist and neck in water rather than in sand. Here, she stages Footfalls both with and against Neither, and so she is able to develop Beckett s physical rhythms (Overbeck, 2011, 728) further, and to fit them to a musical composition that is itself a maddening to and fro in a different medium. Feldman s opera, through restricted musical means in imitation of Beckett s theatrical and verbal means (Albright, 2003, 147), tried to overcome music the way Beckett had aimed to overcome words. The performances in Berlin showed that the overcoming of words and music may not be accomplished by way of neither, but only by way of words and music in company. Jan Wilm DOI: /jobs

8 Theatre Reviews 163 NOTES 1. Ruby Cohn is right that [g]eneric definitions break down for Beckett s late works (2001, 340), and Beckett never referred to the piece as a poem. Seeing as how it forms Feldman s libretto, if I call the piece prose poem in the following, it is used for convenience and faute de mieux. 2. Feldman s wordless compositions for voices seem very much linked to Beckett s critique of language and, of course, Feldman would contribute music to Beckett s Words and Music (1962) for a US radio production in For good engagements with Feldman s and Beckett s aesthetics in comparison, see Albright s Beckett & Aesthetics (2003) and Catherine Laws Music and Words and Music : Feldman s Response to Beckett s Play (2000). WORKS CITED Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski (2004), The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, New York: Grove Press. Albright, Daniel (2003), Beckett & Aesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel [1986] (2006), The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2010), Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, , ed. Mark Nixon, London: Faber and Faber. Cohn, Ruby (2001), ABeckettCanon, Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Knowlson, James (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury. Laws, Catherine (2001), Music in Words and Music : Feldman s Response to Beckett s Play, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd hui, 11, pp Overbeck, Lois More (2011), Audience of Self/Audience of Reader, Modernism/modernity, 18.4, pp