Editorial

Samuel Beckett would have been 100 years old in 2006. Recently he seems to have been everywhere: on the stage, in new and revived productions, often with famous names in the big roles or directing; on the page, in yet more critical exegesis and in new editions of his works, with celebrated authors providing the introductory comments; on film, television and radio; on the streets, with his face displayed on banners and his words projected onto the facades of buildings; and even in libraries and exhibition spaces, with the often indecipherable handwriting and the bizarre doodlings of his manuscripts on display as – what? Art objects in themselves? Materials to prompt psychoanalysis? Evidence of a desire to trace the enigmatic inner self behind the Great Work – but the very work that itself denies us the reassuring pretence of an authoritative self (or any knowable self at all, or even such a discrete entity as a ‘work’)? Suddenly, then, the obscure and difficult Beckett – an icon of Apple's ‘think different’ campaign – is tamed by ubiquity.

Previously, however, Beckett had seemed to be nowhere very much. There was the brief flurry of interest and activity in relation to the 2001 Blue Angel Films/RTE/Channel 4 Beckett on Film project and associated performances – certainly a significant moment, but the Channel Four screenings were nevertheless first rescheduled to ‘education’ slots and then dropped altogether. Either side of this, though, it seemed to me that Beckett's work – especially that of the last twenty-five years of his life – was little produced, little read and little discussed. I am of course generalizing, but in the UK, at least, performances seemed broadly limited to revivals or imported productions of the ‘big three’ (Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days), with the odd outing of Krapp's Last Tape thrown in if John Hurt was available. And that was pretty much that, outside of the considerable, obsessive machine of ‘Beckett Studies’. Beckett seemed at one and the same time too difficult and experimental, still, for the mainstream, but somehow too passé for explicit consideration by those at the ‘cutting edge’ of contemporary practices.

In this respect, one might be forgiven for feeling the author to be in danger of becoming a purely historical feature of the literary and dramatic landscape; a heritage figure, requiring memorialization only. However, in turning from Beckett towards the new work of other artists, I increasingly felt that a whole other story lay beneath the apparent indifference. I was seeing Beckett everywhere: in new performance work, for sure, and certainly in some of the most publicized artwork of our time – the slow-motion ‘animated stills’ of Bill Viola or the interior monologues and repetitive wordplay of Bruce Nauman's Raw Materials, for example, or the art-from-nothing of Martin Creed, and the confessional voice and the exploration of the relationship between self and space in the work of Vito Acconci – but also in a whole range of otherwise very diverse video art, choreography, experimental film, and even in sonic art and musical composition.

In this sense, Beckett has been, and in some contexts continues to be, an omnipresent but silent figure: the elephant in the contemporary arts space. While an influence over some writers and theatre-makers might be expected, what is more striking is the pervasive sense of Beckett's ghost haunting so much other recent work, sometimes formally, sometimes thematically, and often through a self-conscious approach to media. Most noticeably, these traces relate to significant features of Beckett's practices: his particular use of patterns of repetitious movement in space, or the (often related) patterns of fragmented speech and silence – of repetitious and exhaustive form, often as a defence mounted against encroaching formlessness; his approach to image-making (and particularly the creation of animated tableaux) for stage and screen; his exploration of visual and/or aural perception, testing the limits of representation and the drive towards self-identity; the use of forms of interrogation, often in relation to modes of intimate confession by individuals subjected to formal authority and scrutiny by technology; his fragmentation, subjection and constraining of the body, but also its later re-imagining and potential re-emergence through technical reproduction and manipulation. But these are only the more obvious relations. Clearly, Beckett's work continues to provoke creative and theoretical responses in all artistic fields, and while the influence is sometimes explicit, it is just as (if not more) often deeply rooted and widespread but subtle and indirect.

Beckett's own artistic interests were certainly not confined to literature and theatre. At one point he wrote asking to study cinematography with Eisenstein, and his film (Film), the rarely screened television plays and the radio plays reveal his interest in exploring the powers of different technologies with respect to the limits of self-knowledge. Similarly, Beckett's deep interest in fine art and its influence on his work are now quite well-documented, particularly by James Knowlson and Lois Oppenheim. He developed a number of close friendships with visual artists, dabbled in art criticism, and for five years translated the criticism of others for transition. The ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’ show him using the staged discussion of three visual artists as a platform for his views on the function of modern art in general.

Beckett's equal knowledge and understanding of music is apparent in both his textual references to specific musical works and the actual use of music in several of his plays. The relationship here is in some ways less critical, in both senses of the term: he did not attempt music criticism, and at times his references to and uses of specific musical works function more sentimentally than musically (though this is interesting in itself – the ‘company’ of listening becomes important, as Noel Witts discusses in this volume). However, in certain plays – Ghost Trio and Words and Music are good examples – music plays a significant role in the exploration of subjectivity and the production of meaning. Additionally, the approach to the voice, along with the use of fragmented narratives and musicalized language structures in his later plays, at times seems comparable with aspects of experimental music theatre from the mid-1950s onwards, developing a complex relationship between sound, image and action.

For all this breadth of artistic interest, Beckett was no great collaborator. He of course worked with actors and directors on the realization of his stage works, and he allowed a number of artists to illustrate his texts – Giacometti, Max Ernst, Avigdor Arikha, Edmund Gorey and Louis Le Brocquy, amongst others – but these processes always followed the completion of the writing: in no sense were the texts conceived or developed as part of a process of collaboration. Even the book project with Jasper Johns, Foirades/Fizzles, used texts already published in French, and Beckett did not see the etchings until the book was nearly finished. Overall, then, it would seem that Beckett had no more interest in the difficult and often messy processes of artistic collaboration than in letting others adapt his works within or between media close to his own (stage, film or radio adaptations of prose or poetry, for example). However, illustrative responses or adaptations by musicians were received more positively; as Judith Wechsler has suggested, perhaps this was ‘the kind of interpretation – without criticism or verbal commentary – that Beckett could countenance’. Given all this, and the particular ways in which Beckett's engagement with the processes, forms and materials of making work throw one back to fundamental questions about self-perception and representation, language and identity, body and space, it is hardly surprising that artists have continued to be influenced by his work, both directly and indirectly. However, there is surprisingly little critical work in this field; the occasional article in a journal or edited volume, and one book with a section devoted to composers' settings of Beckett. Of course, some artists have commented directly on the influence, but at times this has encouraged critics to focus solely upon intentional manifestations of the relationship rather than considering other possible connections. On Beckett is therefore an attempt to indicate something of the range and breadth of these practices and to develop the process of finding potential modes of critical and artistic response. Its diversity is therefore indicative, and hopefully provocative of further such work. Coincidentally, the initiation of this volume only slightly predated preparations for what was probably the first conference entirely devoted to a similar field: ‘Beckett and Company’, co-hosted in October 2006 by Tate Modern, the London Consortium, Birkbeck and Goldsmiths Colleges of the University of London, and the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise. And in March–June of this year, the Pompidou Centre's major Beckett exhibition focuses on ‘establishing a dialogue between the main themes of Beckett's work and contemporary artists’. Or perhaps there is no coincidence; the centenary no doubt provided part of the impetus, but such activities seem equally representative of an emerging desire to explore these connections more explicitly and critically. Efrosini Protopapa's paper for this volume traces her sense of Beckett as a ‘phantom’ presence in contemporary European choreography. As such, the wonderful critical and imaginative awareness of Protopapa's ‘series of realizations’ is suggestive of the impulse behind the whole volume, while also indicating some of the difficulties involved in pinning down the precise ways in which Beckett's work informs such practices. Asked why he had written so little about Beckett, Jacques Derrida stated that he felt too close to the work: ‘Precisely because of this proximity, it is too hard for me, too easy and too hard. I have perhaps avoided him a bit because of this identification’ (1992: 60). His response is frustrating, but provocative of further enquiry in just the same manner as the relative lack of detailed work on the relationship between Beckett and contemporary arts practices. In part, On Beckett traces aspects of the significance of Beckett's figuring of other arts in his writing, and the attractions of even his ‘non-dramatic’ texts to performance-makers. However, it can be equally productive to consider Beckett in tandem with and through art with which he has no obvious link. The volume therefore maps some of the Beckett-like undercurrents in contemporary practices as well as some of the myriad ways in which aspects of his work – the use of language, images, forms, patterns, sounds, movement, themes, processes and ideas: any or all of these – continue to provoke artists into new actions. I am extremely grateful to the contributors for their insightful and creative work.