Breath (samuel beckett)
Breath , English original title Breath , French souffle , is a one-act play by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett . Breath is the most reduced of all his minimalist pieces , but still fulfills the Aristotelian minimum conditions of beginning, middle and end.
The absurd scene, only about 35 seconds long, was introduced in New York in 1969 as the prologue to Kenneth Tynan's scandalous revue Oh! Calcutta! Premiered.
content
Since the play gets by without any protagonists , plot or text, its written fixation is exhausted in the mere stage direction :
“Dark. Then 1) weak lighting of the stage, on which various, unrecognizable rubbish is lying around. For about five seconds. 2) Weak, short scream and immediately afterwards inhale simultaneously and gradually brightening the lighting up to the maximum that can be reached simultaneously after about 10 seconds. Silence for about five seconds. Exhale and at the same time gradually darkening the lighting up to the minimum that can be reached simultaneously after about ten seconds (lighting as in 1) and immediately afterwards scream as before. Silence for about five seconds. Then dark. "
The description is supplemented by the following more detailed specifications on the part of the author:
“ Rubbish : nothing stands, everything is scattered around.
Scream : moment of a tape recorded vagitus [lat. Whimper; Toddler cry ]. It is important that both screams are identical and that lighting and breathing sounds increase and decrease in exactly the same way.
Breath : amplified tape recording.
Maximum of the lighting: not too bright. If 0 = dark and 10 = light, the lighting should increase from 3 to 6 and decrease accordingly. "
interpretation
This parabolic scene, which looks like a bad joke, can be interpreted as the knowledge reduced to an aesthetic skeleton that human life between birth (first cry) and death (last cry) is nothing more than a brief becoming (breathing in and getting lighter) and passing away (breathing out and darkness) in the senseless chaos (rubbish) of the world.
literature
expenditure
- Breath . In: Samuel Beckett: The Collected Shorter Plays . Faber and Faber, London 1984, pp. 209-210.
Secondary literature
- Dror Harari: Breath and the Tradition of 1960s New Realism: Between Theater and Art . In: Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui 22, 2010, pp. 423-433.
- Claire Lozier: Breath as Vanitas: Beckett's Debt to a Baroque Genre . In: Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui 22, 2010, pp. 241-251.