Beckett, Samuel
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: partial (a clip of about two minutes; the English auto-captions are garbled in places, mixing Beckett's lines with commentary, so only the clearly intelligible points are reported)
Core ideas
The clip presents rare footage of Beckett at work. In 1987 he collaborated on an American television version of "What Where," reviewing the evolving production periodically on videotape; unusually for someone known to avoid cameras, he allowed these sessions to be filmed with a camcorder. A commentator explains that having him look at the play and make final adjustments was valuable because such adjustments were needed anyway for a video production, and that this direct input, around 1987, was "really the last theater work" Beckett ever did, which makes it historically important.
The footage then turns to details of staging. One observation concerns the way characters appear: instead of fading in, a figure is suddenly there, a deliberate effect that Beckett confirms in the exchange. The commentary adds that he wrote "What Where" in 1983 but began rewriting it for German television almost as soon as it premiered on stage, being dissatisfied with the stage version for several reasons without having a complete plan to fix it. He went to Stuttgart and worked with his favorite cameraman (the name is transcribed as "Jim Lewis"), and together they turned the stage play into a video production.
One decisive choice was to drop the stage device for the "voice from the past," the voice of Bam, which on stage was a hanging megaphone and which Beckett judged inappropriate and confusing. They settled instead on a very distorted image of a face that Beckett kept calling a "death mask." The commentator concludes that even as he approached his eightieth birthday Beckett remained an "incurable tinkerer" with his own work. Fragments of the play's text are heard between the commentary.
Excerpts
“In 1987 Beckett collaborated on an American television version of his last play, What Where. He reviewed the evolving production periodically on videotape and, in a departure from his usual camera shyness, allowed these sessions to be taped with a camcorder.”
“They settled on this very distorted image of a face that Beckett kept calling a death mask. One of the interesting things about Beckett, even in approaching his eightieth birthday, he was an incurable tinkerer with his own work.”
“You fade them out, and suddenly, at one point, suddenly they're there. [...] It doesn't fade up, he's suddenly there. — Exactly.”