Game (drama)
Play is a drama directed by Samuel Beckett . It was written between 1962 and 1963 . The world premiere was in German on June 14, 1963 at the Ulmer Theater in Ulm . The English-language premiere was performed in 1964 at the Old Vic in London under the title "Play".
In 1966 Comédie was released , a French film version of the game , which Beckett developed together with the young director Marin Karmitz , who had learned from Jean-Luc Godard and Roberto Rossellini . The three roles are played by Michael Lonsdale , Eléonore Hirt and Delphine Seyrig . Another English film adaptation of Play with Alan Rickman , Kristin Scott Thomas and Juliet Stevenson was made and directed by Anthony Minghella for the Beckett on Film Project .
The drama
The stage is empty and almost dark. Only in front of the stage ramp are three identical, touching, one meter high, gray urns with three heads protruding from their neck-narrow openings, two women (F1 and F2) and a man (M). They are steadfastly forward throughout the act. Their age is indefinable, they do not wear masks, but they appear to be, almost appear to be part of the urns and can hardly be distinguished from them. They tell monotonously about the shared memories of their love triangle: M was married to F1, had an affair with F2, F1 "smelled" her mistress, hired a private detective and threatened M with suicide. He returned to F1 with remorse, but became unfaithful again and fled with F2.
The three heads only speak or remain silent when they are asked to do so by a spotlight, which is directed sometimes at this face, sometimes at that face and then swings away again. Only at the beginning and at the end does the spot illuminate all three heads at the same time, so that all three characters speak simultaneously next to each other and the text becomes an incomprehensible "noise like that of a lawnmower". The faces are indifferent throughout the play, the voices reel off the text tonelessly and hastily, with the exception of the places where the stage directions expressly require a special expression. At the end of the game there is a short instruction to "repeat the game".
According to Beckett, the spotlight should "stimulate" speech like a listener. Instead of turning three lights on and off as needed, a single, rotating light should therefore be used, in this way the headlight acts like an invisible questioner.
interpretation
Just as Beckett's film is not least a film about film, so game is not least a game about game. Just as Beckett's radio plays are games from hearing and his novels mainly novels over the novel writing, so also is Play (dt. Play ) a play over the theater. And as always, Beckett reduces the respective genre to its most elementary components until it, having become a skeleton of itself, can express nothing more than its own lack of expression and its own end.
Contrary to the first impression, all components of traditional theater can be found in Spiel : characters and dramatic conflict, dialogue and monologue, beginning and end, even a stage with props is still available. However, all life has been taken from them and the convention has been turned on its head: otherwise incidental matters become the main thing, the technology, the stage spotlights become protagonists, people are degraded to breathless corpses. As in a realm of the dead , everything revolves endlessly around itself, without ultimately reaching the longed-for standstill.
Where there is so little left, everything (despite Beckett's repeated denials) wants to become a symbol, above all the main protagonist who determines the course of the plot, the arbitrarily acting and switching commercial. Attempts have been made to interpret him as a capricious god. Others interpret him as the opposite, as provocative Satan. Still others see him as a caricature of the director or the personification of the attention of the theater audience - which Beckett his game would have enriched from playing to another facet: Not only is the theater itself would be the subject of the play ( play become), but also the dramaturge or visitors themselves would be part of the action.
music
In 1965 Philip Glass wrote incidental music for two saxophones for " Spiel " , his first minimalist work. Glass' music has since been profoundly influenced by Beckett's work.
Individual evidence
- ↑ This is already indicated by the programmatic title of his radio play Words and Music .
- ↑ One cf. in turn, programmatic titles such as endgame , end now , act without words I and II , dream out of dreams , the last tape , stories and texts about nothing , coming and going , fragments 1 and 2 , breath and cascando .
- ↑ The scene has been compared with the purgatory from Dante's Inferno in the Divina Commedia , not least because Beckett studied his work very intensively and wrote a treatise on it as early as 1929 ( Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce ).