The following is an excerpt from the opening of Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame (1958).
Bare interior.
Grey light.
Left and right back, high up, two small windows, curtains drawn.
Front right, a door. Hanging near door, its face to wall, a picture.
Front left, touching each other, covered with an old sheet, two ashbins.
Centre, in an armchair on castors, covered with and old sheet, HAMM.
Motionless by the door, his eyes fixed on HAMM, CLOV. Very red face.
Brief tableu.
CLOV goes and stands under window left. Stiff, staggering walk. He looks up at window left. He turns and looks at window right. He goes and stands under window right. He looks up at window right. He turns and looks at window left. He goes out, comes back immediately with a small step-ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window left, gets up on it, draws back curtain. He gets down, takes six steps [for example] towards window right, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window right, gets up on it, draws back curtain. He gets down, takes three steps towards window left, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window left, gets up on it, looks out of window. Brief laugh. …
It goes on like this for another half page before CLOV and HAMM begin to speak, but when they do, their speeches look like this:
CLOV: [Fixed gaze, tonelessly.] Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. [Pause.] Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. [Pause.]
…
HAMM: Me – [he yawns] – to play. [He holds the handkerchief spread out before him.] Old stancher! [He takes off his glasses, wipes his eyes, his face, the glasses, puts them on again, folds the handkerchief and puts it neatly in the breast-pocket of his dressing-gown. He clears his throat, joins the tip of his fingers.] Can there be misery – [he yawns] – loftier than mine? …
The first two pages, then, contain much more stage directions than they do speech. Why are there so many stage directions, and what is their purpose? What do they do to our reading of the play?
Beckett is very particular about exactly what he wants to take place on the stage, that much is clear. But let us look more closely at the at-rise description to see if it does more than simply describe what is meant to happen on stage.
There are no strict rules for how to write stage directions. Some conventions exist, such as the tendency for them to be placed in square brackets and in italics, but in theory, they don’t need to be. More importantly, a great deal of variety is possible when it comes to the literary style of stage directions. Why would stage directions have a literary style, you might ask. After all, their function is merely utilitarian, is it not? As this excerpt from Beckett’s play suggests, stage directions can have a style of their own, in the idiom of their author. We might notice some peculiarities of Beckett’s approach. For one, the at-rise description is extremely repetitive – not just in what happens, but in the way it is written. For a while, every sentence begins with the word ‘he’. (‘He turns’, ‘He goes’, ‘He looks’, ‘He turns’, etc.). Surely, a seasoned writer like Beckett would be able to vary the language if he wanted to. We can only assume that he did not want to and that the repetition we see here is meant to create a monotonous mood – a sort of dreadfully unchanging slog through dull routine. This would affect us as readers as well as the directors and actors that would read the play with the intention of putting it on.
Beckett, then, does not feel compelled to tell us explicitly that play revolves thematically around boredom and routine (among other things), but allows it to shine through in the stage directions even before a single word has been spoken.
Furthermore, the language has other peculiarities. If you look at the at-rise description and the brief tableau of CLOV performing a long-winded curtain-pulling exercise, you may note that the sentences sound very clipped and unnatural, in part because they avoid the using the definite article: ‘Front right, a door. Hanging near door, its face to wall, a picture.’ This would have sounded more natural as ‘At the front right there is a door. Hanging near the door, its face to the wall, is a picture’. Natural, however, is not the effect Beckett is going for. The language here sounds alien, and somewhat off, like things are not the way they should be. This causes an almost subconscious feeling of unease, which goes together well with the aforementioned monotonicity.
When we move on to the speeches, we see that they too are heavily interspersed with instructions. There are exact instructions, for example, for the use and putting away of a handkerchief. The actors are given very little freedom to improvise. What is the purpose of this seemingly dictatorial stage direction regime?
To Beckett, as to many other modern playwrights, the theatre is an arena of spectacle. What is seen is at least equal in importance to what is being heard and therefore the visual and kinesthetic aspects of drama need to tightly planned and choreographed, like a dance. Controlling the visual aspects is as important for a playwright as it is for a painter or a filmmaker, and why shouldn’t it be? Maybe because such detailed stage direction might function as a creative straightjacket. Theatre, film and so on are collective creative endeavours. Part of what distinguishes drama as an art form is its collaborative nature, in which directors, stage and set designers, actors, composers, musicians and others work together to make a script come alive (and readers too take part in the creative process, lest we forget). It might seem discourteous of a playwright to leave so little up to the designers, actors and directors. At the same time, however, Beckett’s descriptions of the stage are not quite as detailed as all that. And there is something disarming about insertions like ‘He gets down, takes six steps [for example] towards window right‘. The ‘for example’ makes all the difference. Beckett may know what he wants, but he’s not completely inflexible.
Next: few stage directions