The Dramatic Journey of Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett

By Jaya Kapoor

The moderns found these two writers to be one of them, and the post moderns said their essence was post-modern. They were found to have deep existential core and humanism was the defining spirit of their works. When a writer writes with deep empathy for the human situation, the work is freed from the traps of ideologies and techniques. It reaches out to people beyond time and space. Truth is complex and individual in manifestation but simple and universal in essence. This simplicity is the most difficult to achieve and most prized achievement of an artist. This simplicity of the communication is what the journey of O’Neill and Beckett has been all about. Their journey is marked by unsparing effort to give a universal metaphor to an immensely subjective experience. The voices of two of the greatest dramatists come together to tell not just what drama has been all about in the 20th Century, but also what it is in our own day. It looks not just into the plots or characters to understand their works but also how they communicated so much more through the way they visualized the technical aspects and theatrical impact of their plays.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Jun 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781543706888

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Copyright © 2020 by Jaya Kapoor.

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CONTENTS

Acknowlegements

Preface

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 Development of Modern Theatre

Chapter 3 O’Neill and Beckett

Chapter 4 O’Neill The Long Journey Home

Chapter 5 Experiments in Techniques

Chapter 6 Imprints of Thoughts

Chapter 7 The Plays That Shape The Quest

Chapter 8 Delving into the Depth

Chapter 9 Rootscapes of Identity

Chapter 10 Beckett Creating a Different World

Chapter 11 Words in Search of Meaning

Chapter 12 Less Than Ordinary: Godot and Endgame

Chapter 13 Monologues That Are Not: Krapp, Happy Days, Play

Chapter 14 Towards Inner Vistas : Towards Minimalism

Chapter 15 Escalating Tension

Conclusion

Bibliography

For Shivang …

One day

you will tell your own stories

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the permission of various publishers whose books I have used to support my arguments in the book at various points. I would also like to thank the University of Allahabad for permitting me to use my previous research to give bones to my narrative. I am thankful to the publisher for not losing their faith in me and to their entire team for their support.

Thanks is too a small word for Rishi. Without his balance and sanity I would have given up long back. Acknowledgement is also due for lending his own prowess at typing at crucial points in writing the book. The love, support and encouragement of Ma and Papa are always my most important source of inspiration. They are eagerly waiting to see the book at the end of this journey with much anticipation and pride. My parents-in-law have my heartfelt gratitude keeping life organized around me without a word. The support of Mayank shows there is no better friend than a brother. He never ever feels hundreds of miles away - from being around always, he is just a phone call away. Last but most important Shivang gets a bear hug, for coping with mumma getting lost in books and computer ever so often in the past months, for one cannot thank the soul.

PREFACE

W hat is it that engages you with a writer? Is it their works? Or is it their story that you read in their works? Is it your own story they seem to tell? Probably all of these come together to bind us in a relationship of empathy with people who live across places and write across time both mostly beyond our reach. My engagement with O’Neill and Beckett is now over a quarter of a century old. And like friends over a lifetime I meet them and call on them for no reason mostly. The book shaped in the long break I had to take in the Covid-19 Lockdown and went to them yet again. The book contains all the time, space and memory that the Lockdown of 2020 brought. I could not have found better people to fill every silence that the withdrawal in the challenging times has created around me. They had spent their lives doing just that for themselves.

1 June 2020

"No man can surpass his own time, for the spirit

of his time is also his own spirit." Hegel

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

What is Drama ?

T he very act of bringing the self, the inner world – which could be personal or could also be the world of imagination – into a dialogue with the social the external world in an actual physical form, is drama. The inner world and the world outside come together as each searches for itself in the other. The artist and the audience/reader are in a journey bound by common threads of a search for the self.

Society is a network of human relationships which is concentric and ever-widening with the self as center. Any attempt to define a Self, to create self-consciousness, requires honesty. Such honesty in relation to oneself involves a simultaneous honesty in exploration of the relationships around oneself. An artist is always trying to bring this honesty into the work sometimes through personal narratives, at others through narratives of people born out of his self.

It begins with what is visible and perhaps even what is tangible, moving on to ever widening co-centric circles till it merges into the exploration of the inner vistas of the self. It is a journey that each artist, and hence his work of art, has to undertake in order to be honest to the art and thereby to himself.

At times this journey enters into the unlit unexplored areas of the soul where the individual often connects with the vaster universal forces. It is difficult then, to say where the individual ends and the social begins and the vice versa. The unexplored within the individual and the unexplored undefined world outside are sometimes woven together.

When this connect is simplified and an omniscient force such as God is assumed to exist, it becomes easy to establish an order and a sense of security, and then, definitions emerge. But there are times when such a comfort is denied to the writer. His art then becomes the only refuge where he seeks and hopes to find answers to his questions. Such art is not just autobiographical it resonates with people beyond times and lands in similar turmoil.

The Search

In drama there is a thin, almost invisible, line between the two processes. The thought of the writer is manifested in the thought of the characters that he builds up. It is like he is standing outside himself to watch his thought as the characters interact. His subjective explorations are objectively manifested. And this is his interaction with the social environment. The journey here need not be an autobiographical one where each time it is a chronological journey into the personal life of the writer. Porter Abbot distinguishes between the autobiographical and the autographical as autobiography is a subset of autography comprehending narrative self-writing…and more specifically the story of one’s life. (Abbot 1996: 2) He refers to Georges Gusdorf who says that to read an autobiography is to be oriented not toward the past but toward a continual revelation of authorial consciousness at the moment of writing. (3) Abbot says that conventional autobiography is as given to comforts and authorial distance enabled by fiction as are traditional novels. Beckett’s writing is contrary to such autobiographical form in that it is governed by that unformed intensity of being in the present which at every point in the text seeks to approach itself. (18) To be able to do thus, to be in the present always he has to undo autobiography. This undoing is not the undoing of fictional creation but the end of being Beckett, Beckett before he is Beckett(18). This helps us in two ways when we approach his plays first it helps us understand why he was hesitant in publication of Elutheria where he felt the text had strong autobiographical elements and second the action time of the plays is within the frame of the stage time. Even in Godot we are never sure how much, if at all any, time has passed between Act I and II. As we move into later plays, this time of action becomes equal to stage time. It is here and now and not with reference to any earlier time or past narrative. With O’Neill something similar is happening though to a lesser degree as a conscious effort. When he subsumes his identity as a writer and gives up the conscious effort to resolve his crisis through his works to become Eugene before he is Eugene, the result are works that shine with empathy, love and unconditional acceptance.

Memories come to play a very crucial role in the act of writing. Amongst all his writings, Beckett’s trilogy is in a very close almost symbiotic relationship with his plays. The lines that occur in The Unnamable why should I try to put in order, time after time, the stories of so few things, my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time? are quoted by Olney to highlight the fact that "the impulse to narrate …. has become irrational and illogical, compulsive, obsessional, repetitive, unwilled and often unwanted but not to be denied. It reminds of Krapp’s sense of futility of performing the self even after the slow detoriaration of the validity of the act. O’Neill is consistently taking a similar journey through his innerscapes in his works. There are differences though from the journey of Beckett. They are on completely dissimilar grounds in the experiences of childhood except that O’Neill spent much of his life trying to come to terms with guilt about his mother’s addiction and Beckett spent his childhood trying to understand the stern discipline his mother imposed and the consequent distance he felt from her. As a result memory does play a very crucial role, but while O’Neill creates and recreates his family in almost every play he writes and even after the release from the shackles of the past in writing Long Day’s Journey Into Night he is moving further down the time beyond his life to search for roots and identity in his Irish ancestry in the incomplete cycle of plays. On the other hand Beckett is drawing from his life in Ireland very obviously in his early works but by the time he comes to writing his plays, his engagement with memory has become more about the act of remembering and less about the memories.

The course a writer undertakes, the subject and the treatment of the subject are all a part of the same process of evolution of the self. O’Neill and Beckett are writers who do not have the solace and refuge of faith in their inner journey. There are moments in their life when they yearn for elusive solace and when it eludes them, their art becomes the act of faith. Their journey and their quest are all contained in their art. Both the dramatists move into increasingly deeper realms of the minds of their characters and take their art to newer realms of exploration.

CHAPTER 2

Development of

Modern Theatre

T he twentieth century was one of the most revolutionary, creative, vigorous and prolific periods in the growth of drama. Putting dramatists of such different temperaments as O’Neill and Beckett beside each other helps in understanding the range and flexibility that the genre had achieved in the period. Their characters cannot be put into the category of the hero and the villain in the sense of traditional drama. They could only belong to the age which accepts not only the Apollonian with its organized and positively channeled energies but also the Dionysian with its raw unexplored even perhaps evil but profound and beautiful form of the dialectic.

The advantage of the medium of drama is that it adds to the richness of the experience of this dialectic as theatre. It becomes not only as expression by the dramatist but is also enriched by the sensibilities of those attached to its production. This becomes even more crucial in the twentieth century with its highly experimental traditions. The drama of O’Neill and Beckett broadly captures the major strains of the theatrical experiments of the dramatists before them, assimilates these into their works and takes them further.

With the emergence of modernism theatre changed radically not only in terms of the themes being explored but also the techniques being used to translate them into effective theatre. Modernism emerged in the mid Nineteenth Century with several simultaneous developments in technology and changes in socio economic conditions. Capitalism and colonialism combined to give wealth to the European society but was also accompanied by a simultaneous and unprecedented exposure to other cultures, their perceptions and their philosophies. There was also an urgent exploration of the ways to resolve the socio-economic problems of the age. Led by the spirit of Modernism, ideas like socialism, capitalism, communism, constitutional government were used in political experiments that had deep and long term socio-cultural consequences.

The early phase of modernism can then be taken as the time religious faith as defined by organized religion had begun to be questioned, anthropological developments had made alternative view of life more acceptable, and colonialism had exposed European society to different view of life and truth as valid as they held their own to be. A deepening of capitalism with burgeoning markets induced a mass culture unprecedented in human history and led to many fundamental shifts in social relationships. A new idea of sexuality and an increasing awareness of the gender were emerging with far reaching impact in the social structures. This had created a class of people who tried to find new expressions for their fast changing world. As a consequence there emerged several avant-garde movements across France, Italy, Germany Poland and Russia. These were places where there existed a tradition of intellectual platforms for debates among intelligentsia a recognized elite of artists, academics, critics, philosophers and others on topics ranging from the nature of art to the nature of being (Zarrilli et al 2013: 355). The cabarets in France along with cafes all over Europe were places for such meetings and gatherings where bohemians, writers, artists, entrepreneurs gathered and many literary and theatrical experiments were introduced to select audience of intelligentsia. The caberets were especially fertile grounds for emergence of avant-garde artists. Like the Confucian elite of the Ming era Chinese society, economic prosperity of colonial Europe led to aspirations for university education desire to join the intelligentsia among a lot of young minds. And belonging to this elite group was the hallmark of any artist some of whom spent a major part of their day in these joints.

Some other very important developments happened that redefined the art and modalities of creative expression and were especially relevant for the growth of theatre. The technological innovations like photography, audiography and electricity were among the most crucial factors that transformed the perception of reality and its modes of expression for the creative writers and artists.

Electricity helped in two ways, it led to the possibility of better light as a stage technique and also dimming of the lights in the auditorium making theatre a more intense, introspective and personal experience. This was also the first time ideology as social vehicle was entering theatre and dramatists were bringing their ideological views for projection through their works. Techniques of stage illumination worked in two ways. First it brought the act into complete prominence through an undiluted focus on the stage and second it helped in exploring the possibilities of creating layers in the act on the stage through a dimming and brightening of various sections of the stage. On the one hand it became easier to be real and natural on the other it also created possibilities for creating fragments, for defamiliarizing the familiar and redefining the perceptions of the ordinary.

Another early change that was closely related to this divergent trends of growth came with photography. Real was what could be verified-as Zola put it -you cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it (Sontag 1979: 87). Zola provided a framework for the approach of Naturalism following the broad idea of realism. Naturalism was a defining approach –an avant-garde movement that gained substantial influence in the theatre between 1880 and 1914 and then disbanded. (Zarrili et al 2013: 35) in the larger movement towards realism that can be seen consistently since then. And this led to the fascination seen in theatre for close to reality settings which reflected not only the socio economic environment of the characters but also traced the impact of this environment on the way a character shaped. The theories of heredity and impact of environment on the way a character shaped influenced the theatre of Naturalism. Theatre of Naturalism traces this impact and the friction it produces in relationships and within an individual. The development of the plot as well as the representation on the stage was made keeping these ideas in mind. The costumes and settings were closely following the time and place of the story. And the socioeconomic position of the character defined the response of the character to situations. Naturalistic theatre also reflected were the problems that arose out of the friction and confrontation between the individual and his environment. O’Neill draws from the theatre of Naturalism in some of his early plays.

The theatre of Saxe-Meiningen was a remarkable example of how realism entered theatre in terms of technique. He was worked out the minutest details of the sets and dresses and made sure that the appearance was as close to the reality as possible and invested heavily in costumes and stage settings. Even the minor roles were given a definite ‘character’ and making the crowd dynamic rather than static and superficial (Shepherd-Barr 2016: 19). Meiningen was working mainly on romantic and historical plays and this emphasis on accuracy worked well in these genres. His subject matter responded to such an interpretation since he worked in a narrow range and did not experiment or innovate in terms of subject or characters.

As opposed to the picture perfect theatre of Meiningen Players, there were writers who were writing plays with reflecting life. The plays of Ibsen were the watershed in use of realism in drama. His themes and the characters are all drawn from the real life situations. He started writing in the mid- nineteenth century and begun as a poet dramatist writing mainly drawn from the tales and myths of Norway. Later in the 1870’s he shifted to realism and with plays like Doll’s House (1879), An Enemy of the People (1892), Ghosts (1881) he emerged as a thinker who confronted his audience with difficult questions. His plays had a far reaching impact on not just trends in theatre but also in placing drama as a medium for ideas and reality.

The reality that Ibsen presented was different from the reality of the Mieningen Players in that it looked beyond the photographic approximation to things beneath the surface from which realities of life emerged. His questions and explorations were questions about the systems in society and explorations of the forces that compel a man to act in a certain way. In A Doll’s House or An Enemy Of The People or any other play he wrote, the justification for the decision of the character to act in a way is investigated and the character shaped from there.

Later he used a more symbolist style of writing in plays like When We Dead Awaken(1899), but he never stopped asking difficult questions. His influence on drama was deep and permanent for he redefined art and asserted that art should be a source of insights, a creator of discussion, a conveyor of ideas (Brockett 2014: 363). This capacity of drama to communicate with the audience instead of serving passive entertainment was fine-tuned through experimental drama through the coming decades. The experimental symbolist and avant-garde theatre made the plays more suggestive, abstract and metaphysical – less grounded in real and tangible everyday life (Shepherd-Barr 2016: 19). Dramatists like Lorca, Maeterlinck, Mayerhold, Artaud, Jarry were redefining the meaning of theatre with their experiments. These dramatists were not just serving up entertainment, they were rather exploring their art to create a platform for a fresh approach to theatre. Projection of inner vistas and outer environs became both acceptable and even desirable. The range of experimentation from Wagner’s Total theatre to Jarry’s surreal production of Ubu Roi point to how the modern theatre is constantly moving between realism and abstract theatre. Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner call this as creative destructions (Ackerman & Puchner 2006: 2). They do see the new productivity as a fallout of the technological changes like industrialization and economic changes like capitalism as we discussed earlier but also point out that the creative forces that were unleashed were, a critique, even destruction of a certain kind of theatre (2)that ushered many reforms in theatre of the times.

With the experimental drama making its presence felt very strongly from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, theater became more than a representation of the text put together by the dramatist. The reason was that the mainstream theatre did not find the experimental theatre to be commercially a viable medium. In fact the staging of these plays even led to extreme cases like riots that only further deterred the mainstream theatre from dabbling with it. As a result the dramatists took it upon themselves to put their works up on the stage. The mainstream theatre satisfied the regular middle class audience that approached the theatre for lighthearted entertainment. But the intellectual scientific unrest of the time could not be kept away from the theatre. The two big influences on the age especially in Europe were Nietzsche and Wagner. Both talked of a new kind of theatre that did more than just provide entertainment to the audience. Martin Esslin talks of Wagner’s idea of drama as a ‘total work of art’. He talks of drama as combining poetry music architecture design, to create sublime emotional experiences and profound insights in audiences attending what came near to being religious rites (Esslin 1997). It made demands of the audience in terms of the questions it raised and explorations it tried to make of the self and the external expression of that exploration. At that point in time, theatre was undergoing a major upheaval and Wagner’s idea of totality was reflected in the views of many other dramatists and directors like Brecht who were exploring the stage as a space for complete artistic expression.

This was the time when theatre did not have to fight tooth and nail with Cinema and television for the audience attention. It could still reach out to the common man. It was a good laboratory to conduct experiments in theories and philosophies with a select audience and then introduce the general theatre going public to the theories evolved on the basis of these responses. Ibsen, Chekov, Zola, Wagner were some of the people who adopted theatre as a laboratory for their ideas. Thus was born the earliest kind of purely experimental theatre directed at a select intellectual class, the Naturalistic theatre.

The Naturalistic theatre evolved slowly through the symbolic theatre to the expressionistic theatre. First Wedekind, and later on Strindberg, Chekhov, Hoffmansthal were some of the pioneering writers of the style. Strindberg talks about the style as distinct from naturalism prevailing then. He says art is not simply sketching a piece of nature in a natural manner, he further adds that naturalism in the true sense of the word is not in the moment when great conflicts occur, naturalism is also not in rejoice in seeing what cannot be seen everyday, this is all what he calls mistaking the wood for the trees (Williams 1966:109). True naturalism is to find the crisis, the moment of struggle and to reveal normal experience in its light (Williams 1966:109). At another place he points out that true naturalism is to find the crisis, the moment of struggle and to reveal normal experience in its light (Williams 1969: 109). This takes the journey into the inner realms and gives the dramatist an inner vista to play out the drama as opposed to a physical realm. The near to real setting only highlights and intensifies the struggle and makes it vivid and stark in the background of the work-a-day world. With the rapid developments in science and technology these dramatists need not use only the acting skill of the actors or the text to convey their ideas. They could use advanced sound and light technology, along with sophisticated and elaborate stage designs to convey these ideas. The director thus emerged as an important part of the production. That was the reason why the dramatists preferred to either direct their own plays or give the rights to the directors who they felt could create in the theatre what they had conceived in the text. A whole lot of small theatre groups came up around these experimental dramatists and directors. Theatre Libre in Paris, Otto Brahms’s Freie Buhne in Germany, Independent Theatre in London, Moscow Art Theatre in Russia and Abbey theatre in Ireland were some major theatre groups associated with the experimental theatre in Europe. William Archer, Andre Antoine, Brahm, Stanislavski, Lugne-poe, E.G. Craig, Adolphe Appia, and Reinhardt were some of the major directors associated with these theatre groups.

Andre Antoine’s Theatre Libre was a pioneering effort towards naturalism. He stressed on training his actors who were mostly amateurs along with observing a fidelity to the time and environment settings. Along with Freie Buhne, Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) and Independent theatre, they developed the system of selling tickets for the season and this gave them the freedom to experiment. G.B. Shaw was important because he was the first one to move away from the serious tone of the Naturalist theatre. His dialogues sparkled with humour and articulated the views of the characters which could at times be