... but the clouds ...

... but the clouds ... is a television play by Samuel Beckett. Beckett wrote it between October
November 1976 to replace a film of Play which the BBC had sent [him] for approval (and which he
had rejected)[1] due to the poor quality of the film. Donald McWhinnie directed Billie Whitelaw
and Ronald Pickup. It was first broadcast on 17 April 1977 as part of a programme of three Beckett
plays entitled Shades on BBC2. It was first published in Ends and Odds (Faber) 1977. An early title
for the piece was Poetry only love.

The title comes from a phrase from the last verse of Yeatss near-solipsist poem, The Tower:

Now shall I make my soul,

Compelling it to study

In a learned school

Till the wreck of body,

Slow decay of blood,

Testy delirium

Or dull decrepitude,

Or what worse evil come -

The death of friends, or death

Of every brilliant eye

That made a catch in the breath -

Seem but the clouds of the sky

When the horizon fades;

Or a bird's sleepy cry

Among the deepening shades.

Several months after the McWhinnie production in which he was himself heavily involved, Beckett
had the opportunity to act as his own director in the German version, Nur noch Gewlk, for
Sddeutscher Rundfunk. In this production he made one or two minor changes but the main one
was to include the whole last stanza above rather than the four lines in the original.

The Tower is a work which discusses history and the past not only in terms of recollection but also
as an entire complex of traces, remainders and legacies of which individual subjective memory is
only one element.[2]
The painful, highly personal question raised by Yeats is: if the poets physical powers fail, if his vision
and hearing are impaired, can the memory of the sensory world serve as a basis for poetry? Is
memory alone capable of stimulating the creative act? As he draws upon his memory, revisiting
scenes both in his life and works, he comes to respond affirmatively to the pessimistic question first
raised The poets physical impairments, paradoxically, prove a blessing. Indeed, in the stanza from
which Beckett derived his title, Yeats puts the real world in perspective, thereby reducing his own
sense of loss.[3] In a personal communication Beckett told Eoin OBrien that this was one of Yeatss
greatest lines.[4]

But why this particular line from the poem? Is it to do with the nature of clouds? Clouds seem
permanent but are ultimately impermanent; they cannot be touched, yet can be seen; they are
nothing more than condensed water, yet remain a symbol of romance, of the imagination beyond
practical measurement they are, in a phrase, at once here and elsewhere.[5]

Structure

Characters

The director, Sidney Homan, defines the four characters in this work:[6]

M is the poet in reflective mode

M1 is the poet in his active mode in the world

W is his muse or the principle of poetry as it mediates between the material and the imaginative
worlds

V is the poets voice that comes from M or accompanies the movements of M1 and that searches for
the heightened language prerequisite for poetry

Stages[edit]

Unlike Quad, which utilises a single fixed camera throughout, there are a total of sixty camera shots
in this piece, the shape of an hour or a minute,[7] which can be organised into four groups or
stages. There are only two televisual techniques used throughout the play: fade and dissolve.

Stage 1[edit]

(Directions 1-19): The first stage focuses on the past, those times when the woman did appear and M
could be creative as a consequence.

Stage 2[edit]

(Directions 20-26): The second stage examines where the poet is presently. There are three areas,
just offstage in the darkness.
West is the outside world in which he spends his days wandering.

East is his closet where he exchanges his greatcoat for his robe.

North, to the rear of the stage, is his sanctum in which, under the right conditions, he can be
creative.

Stage 3[edit]

(Directions 27-52): In the third stage the poet lists four possibilities:

The woman can appear and then vanish immediately.

The woman can appear and linger.

The woman can appear and speak to him, i.e. inspire him. He uses the example where she mouths
the words, but the clouds, and then vanishes.

The woman can fail to appear at all, the most common scenario.

Stage 4[edit]

(Direction 53-60): In the final stage, the poet actually finds success, almost as an ironic consequence
of his despair. The woman appears and, this time, V is able to [recite] all four lines from Yeatss poem,
rather than the truncated and hence frustrating single line of the television plays title.[8]

Synopsis[edit]

The play opens in darkness. It fades up to a shot from behind of M, a man sitting on [an] invisible
stool and bowed over [an] invisible table.[9] He is wearing his gown and nightcap. This is the only
way we ever see him in the present, bowed over his table. The camera returns to this image fifteen
times throughout the play.

We hear a voice and assume it belongs to the man we are looking at, at least it is his thoughts we
hear. He is remembering the circumstances under which he has seen the woman in the past. While
he remembers we see M1, his remembered/imagined self, go through the motions described, at
least what little actually takes place in the circle of light. He changes his mind about what causes her
to appear. At first he says, When I thought of her[10] but he realises that is inaccurate; the
woman simply appears to him, and always at night. He goes over his routine, carefully starting from
his return home after walking the roads since daybreak:[11] he enters, goes to the closet and swaps
his greatcoat and hat for a nightgown and cap, then he enters his sanctum and tries to summon her,
always without joy, whereupon at dawn he dresses again and heads out on the road.

The voice lists the three instances listed above where the woman has appeared to him in the past.
When he reaches the third one the camera cuts to the womans face, reduced as far as possible to
eyes and a mouth,[9] which mouths silently along with the voice, cloudsbut the cloudsof the
sky[12] The man then realises there is a fourth case, but not really a fourth per se because so
much of the time, by far the greatest amount of the time, nothing happens, the woman never even
appears.

Although from the opening scene it seems like he spends every night willing the woman to appear,
this isnt the case. Sometimes he grows weary and occupies himself with other things that are more
rewarding, such as cube roots[12] or sits absorbed with nothing which he describes as a mine
like the man in Film.

We see M1 prepare for the road again and leave. The voice says, Right, then the womans face
appears once more and the voice repeats the final four lines of Yeatss poem. This time, however, the
woman does not mouth the words. Her face dissolves, we are left with the man sitting at his invisible
table where we began and everything fades to black.

Interpretation[edit]

In a number of other works Beckett has felt the need to split an individual into separate aspects of
that character, e.g. Words and Music, where the writer, his words and his emotions are all
represented by separate characters. In ... but the clouds ..., however, Beckett is concerned not with
fragments of the self, but the whole person. The protagonist, M, sees himself whole, (as at the end of
Film) held in the light circle of the imagination The action of ... but the clouds ... consists of M
reliving past experience with such intensity that he can see himself performing his daily routine.[13]

The man is a poet, caught in the writers trap, the expectation of inspiration.[14] The woman seems
to be his muse. It may be Beckett is personifying her as a woman only in the abstract sense but it is
just as likely, considering Becketts most famous writer-character, Krapp, that she is also a lost love, a
once-literal muse. Krapps imagination is impotent though. M has not reached that stage. He is still
having occasional flashes of inspiration. And this must have been very much how the seventy-year-
old Beckett felt himself; writing was becoming increasing difficult for him. Either way, although not
quite a character, she is both an object of desire and a force beyond desire.[15]

Krapp sat at a real table and heard a real voice, albeit himself as a younger man. The man in ... but
the clouds ... sits at an invisible table unable to write. Everything he encounters is outside a circle of
dim, suffused light. This gives the play a dreamlike quality, the circle of light becomes a kind of no
place where this daily ritual takes place. The only voice is the one inside his head. Even the roads
take on an abstract quality; they are neither to nor from anywhere unlike the travel options in
Cascando, for example.

Not all of Krapps actions take place at his table, we hear him pouring drinks and attempting to sing in
the darkness surrounding his stage as a means of distracting himself from the task in hand; in Quad,
the players only reality is within the lighted square as is the case with the women of Come and Go
but in ... but the clouds ... all the real action takes place in the darkness, the central circle of light is a
place of transition only.

The fact that the woman may well have been real, rather than some stereotypical projection of Ms
ideal woman, is suggested by the line, With those unseeing eyes I so begged when alive to look at
me.[16] The camera focuses on the womans face while these lines are spoken. Interestingly, Eric
Brater argues that "what he longs for is not the beloved but the image of his beloved, the evocative
metaphor he has made of her. His is an exquisite despair. In his secret ceremony Becketts male figure
all but revels in it."[17] Because the old man realises he cannot physically recall his beloved, he
makes do with simulation; he torments himself with memories of what it was like when she came
before. M is not only trying to remember, he is trying "to remember the way in which he used to
remember."[2]

For Beckett and for Yeats, there is a difference between remembering and not remembering, but
both writers remind us that not remembering does not necessarily equal forgetting. That which is
not consciously 'remembered' by an individual can still return to impose itself is a variety of ways,
one of which both Yeats and Beckett qualify as a kind of haunting.[2] This makes one viewers
comment as to the nature of W all the more interesting when they call her the character who
appears but isnt really there she only gives the appearance of an appearance.[5]

The man is a poet but he is also and unexpectedly a mathematician, a rational man. Numbers
play a significant part in Becketts works (particularly the number three as it was a favourite of
Dantes). Ms addiction to numbers the four cases, the reference to cube roots, the two statistical
possibilities given for the fourth case [can be] explained as a defensive posture. M must know that
the womans appearance is at random and defies logic. His careful efforts to establish mathematically
the exact and proper conditions for her appearance are merely an attempt to give order to an
experience he knows, deep inside, is beyond rational measurement or prediction.[18]

He would prefer that the woman appears when he thinks of her, that there should exist a clear
correlation between conscious thought and realisation but his is not the case. He is forced to modify
the theory he is testing acknowledging that the womans face merely appeared and those
appearances were always at night. By the end of the play he has done all he can do, he is now at the
mercy of Providence. The woman will appear if, pleased with his efforts, she decides to appear.[19]
There is an element of ritual to the piece, another common element of Becketts theatre. Perhaps it
is the only way he can feel he can retain some element of control over or at least involvement in
the process.

Eric Brater suggests that ... but the clouds ... has more in common with Yeats than simply The Tower:

Like the characters imagined in the play The Words upon the Window Pane, the he we meet in ...
but the clouds ... sits trance-like at a sance, calling out to a face and a voice to appear: Look at me
and then, echoing Hamlets appeal to a quite different ghost, Speak to me. A scene from Yeats is all
but impossible to dismiss:[7]

Dr Trench: I thought she was speaking.

Mrs Mallet: I saw her lips move.[20]

As Katharine Worth has pointed out, in Yeatsian terminology shades [the final word of Yeatss
poem] necessarily conjures up thoughts of spirits or ghosts along with the onset of evening, and
Becketts play only reinforces this somewhat understated nuance.[2] The prevalence of ghosts in
Becketts later writings hardly needs commenting on.[21]

John Calder in his review of the three plays shown on BBC2 had this to say about ... but the clouds ...:

The man would appear to be immersed in guilt towards a missed opportunity, a dead love, a
regretted course of action, as in Eh Joe, but with a flatter style. Irony is subdued, stoicism more
matter of fact, self-pity almost entirely absent, illusion excluded. The man is concerned with
concentration, a Merlin conjuring up a ghost in his memory.[22]

Clearly the process in this play is open to interpretation. Is the process wholly internal, the man
remembering someone real from his past or is he trying to conjure up some external manifestation
of her, her ghost? And what is his motive for trying to evoke her? Is it simply to satisfy memory, to
wallow in the moment awhile as Krapp does, or is she in some way his muse, an enabling force that
makes the words come? Either way it is clear that he cannot control events directly, by the power of
his will, things take place at best, as a byproduct almost of his actions, but more likely they are
entirely out of his control and all he can do is wait on them.

Not I is a short dramatic monologue written in 1972 (March 20 to April 1) by Samuel

Beckett which was premiered at the "Samuel Beckett Festival" by the Repertory Theater
of Lincoln Center, New York (22 November 1972).

Synopsis[edit]
Not I takes place in a pitch-black space illuminated only by a single beam of light. This spotlight
fixes on an actress's mouth about eight feet above the stage, [1] everything else being blacked out
and, in early performances, illuminates the shadowy figure of the Auditor who makes four
increasingly ineffectual movements "of helpless compassion" during brief breaks in the
monologue where Mouth appears to be listening to some inner voice unheard by the audience.
The mouth utters jumbled sentences at a ferocious pace, which obliquely tell the story of a
woman of about seventy who was abandoned by her parents after a premature birth and has
lived a loveless, mechanical existence, and who appears to have suffered an unspecified
traumatic experience. The woman has been virtually mute since childhood apart from occasional
outbursts, one of which comprises the text we hear. From the text it could be inferred that the
woman had been raped but this is something Beckett was very clear about when asked. "How
could you think of such a thing! No, no, not at allit wasnt that at all."[2] It seems more likely that
she has suffered some kind of collapse, possibly even her death, [3] while "wandering in a field
looking aimlessly for cowslips."
The woman relates four incidents from her life: lying face down in the grass, standing in a
supermarket, sitting on a "mound in Croker's Acre" (a real place in Ireland
near Leopardstown racecourse) and "that time at court", each being preceded by a repeat on the
repressed first scene which has been likened to an epiphany; whatever happened to her in that
field in April was the trigger for her to start talking.
Her initial reaction to the paralyzing event is to assume she is being punished by God but finds
she is not suffering; she feels no pain, as in life she felt no pleasure. She cannot think why she
might be being punished but accepts that God does not need a "particular reason" for what He
does. She thinks she has something to confess and believes that if she goes over the events of
her life for long enough it will be revealed to her. In addition to the continued buzzing in her skull
there is now a light of varying intensity tormenting her; the two seem related.
The title comes from the character's repeated denial that the events she describes or alludes to
happened to her.

Mouth[edit]
Beckett had always intended that Billie Whitelaw, whom he had worked with on Play, give the
definitive premiere performance of Not I. "But in the end, more out of friendship than because of
any delays in London, he allowed Alan Schneider the opportunity to present it first" [4] in America
featuring Jessica Tandy. Tandy did fly to France to discuss the text with Beckett. However,
Whitelaws subsequent performances benefited from extensive coaching from Beckett.
"I knew that woman in Ireland," Beckett said, "I knew who she was not 'she' specifically, one
single woman, but there were so many of those old crones, stumbling down the lanes, in the
ditches, besides the hedgerows."[5] That said, Beckett did not demand that the part be spoken
with an accent, his one concession to Whitelaw when tutoring her. Schneider put ten questions to
Beckett, indicative of his bafflement. Beckett responded: "I no more know where she is or why
thus than she does. All I know is in the text. 'She' is purely a stage entity, part of a stage image
and purveyor of a stage text. The rest is Ibsen."[6]
Objective meaning does seem to have been of secondary consideration in the writing style. As
Beckett indicated to Tandy he hoped that the piece would "work on the nerves of the audience,
not its intellect."[7] Beckett told Tandy to consider the mouth "an organ of emission, without
intellect"[8] and "during rehearsals [with Whitelaw] he would say, 'Too much colour, too much
colour', which she correctly interpreted as 'For Gods sake, dont act'." [9]
The visual image of the mouth was, according to Beckett in a letter postmarked 30 April 1974,
suggested by The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (Caravaggio) in Valletta Cathedral.[10]

Auditor[edit]
The published stage directions also call for a character of indeterminate sex referred to as 'the
Auditor' (generally played by a male) who wears a black robe and can be dimly seen stage left.
When Beckett came to be involved in staging the play, he found that he was unable to place the
Auditor in a stage position that pleased him, and consequently allowed the character to be
omitted from those productions. However, he chose not to cut the character from the published
script, and whether or not the character is used in production seems to be at the discretion of
individual producers. As he wrote to two American directors in 1986: "He is very difficult to stage
(light--position) and may well be of more harm than good. For me the play needs him but I can do
without him. I have never seen him function effectively."[11] In the 1978 Paris production he did
reinstate the character but from then on abandoned the image concluding, as he had once said,
that it was perhaps "an error of the creative imagination." [12]
It has been suggested that the image of the Auditor was inspired by the image of a djellaba-clad
"intense listener" seen from a caf in Tunis; Beckett was in Morocco for a month from February
to March 1972.[13] James Knowlson conjectures that this "figure coalesced with [Becketts] sharp
memories of the Caravaggio painting" mentioned above. In this painting there "is an old woman
standing to Salome's left. She observes the decapitation with horror, covering her ears rather
than her eyes"[14] a gesture that Beckett added in the 1978 Paris production.
When Schneider questioned him as to whether the Auditor was Death or a guardian angel,
Beckett shrugged his shoulders, lifted his arms and let them fall to his sides, leaving the
ambiguity wholly intact.[15]

Significant productions[edit]
22 November 1972[edit]
Forum Theatre, Lincoln Center, New York, directed by Alan Schneider, with Jessica
Tandy (Mouth) and Henderson Forsythe (Auditor): Various dates have been offered for the first
performance of the play from September (quoted in the Faber text) to December 1972. The
review in the Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Mar., 1973), pp. 102104 states the
date as 1 November. The date above however is from Damned to Fame (p. 592) by James
Knowlson who was Beckets friend for over twenty years and is regarded as an international
authority on the man. It is also the date given in The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett.
Jessica Tandy found the experience of acting Not I terrifying. At first she had problems
remembering the text and had to rely on a TelePrompTer right in front of her. Because the play
was being performed in the round she had to be installed in a box, which could be wheeled on
and off the stage. Inside this contraption she stood holding onto two iron bars on either side of
the box. She was dressed in black and wore a hood, which made her feel like "an old English
hangman".[16] At first her head was held still by a strap but she found it unbearable and
unnecessary and asked for it to be removed. They also had an operator hidden in the box to
reset the focus on the mouth if it did drift slightly out of the light. Additionally, her teeth were
coated with a substance that exaggerated their brightness and then polished to attract the glare.

16 January 1973[edit]
Royal Court Theatre, London: Initially Billie Whitelaw wanted to stand on a dais but she found
this didnt work for her so she allowed herself to be strapped in a chair called an artists rest on
which a film actor wearing armour rests because he cannot sit down. Her entire body was draped
in black; her face covered with black gauze with a black transparent slip for her eyes and her
head was clamped between two pieces of sponge rubber so that her mouth would remain fixed in
the spotlight. Finally a bar was fixed which she could cling to and on to which she could direct her
tension. She was unable to use a visual aid and so memorised the text.
"Whitelaw has described the ordeal of playing Mouth, how she was totally cut off from others,
high above the stage, clamped, swathed in a black hood, subject to panic attacks; after the dress
rehearsal she was for a time totally disoriented. Yet this stage experience came to seem her
most meaningful one. She heard in Mouths outpourings her own 'inner scream': 'I found so much
of my self in Not I. Somewhere in there were my entrails under a microscope.'" [17]

17 April 1977[edit]
BBC2, The Lively Arts: Shades, Three Plays by Samuel Beckett: Arguably the definitive
performance of the piece albeit in a completely different medium from which it was originally
intended. Not I on its own was re-broadcast on 7 February 1990. The British Film
Institute database says this is a film of the 1973 Royal Court Theatre performance above but it
appears this was actually filmed on 13 February 1975 with Billie Whitelaw reprising the role. In
this production the Auditor is absent and the camera stays fixed on her mouth, everything else
being blacked out with makeup.
A valid criticism of this interpretation is that the focus shifts from the aural to the visual as the
image of Whitelaws mouth dominates the screen and has often been likened to
a vagina attempting to give birth to the self. This is a point Beckett himself picked up on when
first viewing the video though one to which he raised no objection.

11 April 1978[edit]
Thtre d'Orsay, Paris: Whereas in the French premiere (8 April 1975), Beckett allowed the role
of the Auditor to be dropped, in the subsequent performance he both reinstated the position and
gave it greater prominence lighting it from above but only at times when Mouth renounces the
first person singular. In addition to covering his head with his hands at the end, Beckett also
added "a gesture of blame" to the French version. Both this and the 1975 performance
featured Madeleine Renaud.

27 February 1993[edit]
Performed by Tricia Kelly, directed by Cathy Denford, at West Yorkshire Playhouse.

February 2000[edit]
Beckett on Film, Shepperton Studios: This filmed production, directed by Neil Jordan begins
differently from the BBC version in that the viewer sees Julianne Moore come into view, sit down
and then the light hit her mouth. Because of this the audience is aware that a young woman as
opposed to an old hag is portraying the protagonist.

9 April 2006[edit]
Beckett Evening, BBC Radio 3: To mark the centenary of Becketts birth, the BBC produced a
number of radio programmes including a recording of Not I by Juliet Stevenson who had played
the role on stage. Despite the lack of visuals her performance garnered favourable reviews. Of
note is the fact that she chose to speak with an accent.

2005 onwards[edit]
Performed by Lisa Dwan, firstly in London's Battersea Arts Centre in 2005. Dwan was
interviewed with Billie Whitelaw as part of the Beckett celebrations on BBC Radio 3.[18]Dwan
performed the piece again in July 2009 in the Southbank Centre in London[18] in a time of nine
minutes and fifty seconds; it usually plays for anything between twelve and fifteen minutes. The
performance has since toured around the world, garnering five star reviews. [19]

Related texts[edit]
"Kilcool"[edit]
In addition to the woman in the djellaba and the Caravaggio painting already mentioned there is
a third source that deserves comment, the so-called "Kilcool manuscript", a monologue which
Beckett worked on and abandoned in 1963. On the 28th of August 1963, shortly after
completing work on Film Beckett began working on a new notebook which included several
fragments of writing. There are four separate outlines in the 'Kilcool manuscript' which Stan
Gontarski describes as 'episodes'. The extensive analysis by Rosemary Pountey and Stan
Gontarski on the manuscript suggests that 'Kilcool' is an early forerunner to what later became
the visual and textual themes of Not I. In early drafts a female voice describes a move to Kilcool
(which is misspelt - Beckett later amends the mistake). Becketts father had once rented a house
in Kilcoole, a small marshy village in Co. Wicklow, Ireland. The first outline describes a
monologue spoken by a woman (only the face is visible) who has lost both parents and has
moved to Kilcool(e) to live with a 'widowed childless aunt'. [20] Stage outlines specify a "woman's
face alone in constant light. Nothing but fixed lit face and speech." throughout the four
outlines. [21]In later drafts Beckett eliminated almost all naturalistic detail in order to focus on more
abstract narrative themes such as memory, compulsive speech and death.

The Unnamable[edit]
Asked further about sources for Not I, Beckett referred questioners back to his own novel, The
Unnamable with its clamouring voice longing for silence, circular narrative and concern about
avoiding the first person pronoun: "I shall not say I again, ever again". [22] Vivian Mercier in his
book Beckett/Beckett goes as far as to suggest that, gender aside, Not I is effectively a
dramatisation of The Unnamable.
That Time[edit]
On 8 June 1973 Beckett began to imagine the play that came to be That Time which he called
later "a brother to Not I". This play also owes something to the Kilcool Manuscript. In it Beckett
returns to the image of a human head of an old man this time illuminated in the darkness and
assailed on all sides by three voices all his from earlier in his life. At one point the voice
designated as C says "did you ever say I to yourself in your life" [23]

Quad is a television play by Samuel Beckett, written and first produced and broadcast in 1981. It
first appeared in print in 1984 (Faber and Faber) where the work is described as "[a] piece for
four players, light and percussion"[1] and has also been called a "ballet for four people."[2]
It consists of four actors dressed in robes, hunched and silently walking around and diagonally
across a square stage in fixed patterns, alternately entering and exiting. Each actor wears a
distinct colored robe (white, red, blue, yellow), and is accompanied by a distinct percussion
instrument (leitmotif). The actors walk in sync (except when entering or exiting), always on one of
four rotationally symmetric paths (e.g., when one actor is at a corner, so are all others; when one
actor crosses the stage, all do so together, etc.), and never touch when walking around the
stage, they move in the same direction, while when crossing the stage diagonally, where they
would touch in the middle, they avoid the center area (walking around it, always clockwise or
always anti-clockwise, depending on the production).[3] In the original production, the play was
first performed once, and then, after a pause, an abbreviated version is performed a second
time, this time in black and white and without musical accompaniment. These are distinguished
as Quad I and Quad II, though Quad II does not appear in print.

Background[edit]
As far back as 1963 Beckett had thought of creating a geometrical mime. He tried to write a
piece for Jack MacGowran (generally referred to as J. M. Mime) but abandoned it "in the
absence of all inner need."[6]
"Becketts initial conception was to have [a pair] of characters walking along Quadrants in all
possible paths starting from O (a central origin) and returning to O. But in its final realization
almost twenty years later, the mime begins and ends with the void, an empty quad, and travellers
deflect their steps away from O."[7]
The discarded work was "intended as a mime for two players (son and father or mother) who are
described as naked under their coats. The stage is plotted out in a square, the four corners of
which (lettered A-D) are to be marked either by two boots and two hats or by four boots, recalling
the boots and hat found onstage in Godot;"[8] the mid-points were lettered E-G, and the centre, O.
The idea goes back even further however, "indeed Quad may be regarded as the fulfillment
onstage of the goal he had set himself in 1937 in the letter to Axel Kaun, [9] the achieving of an
entirely new means of expression through the elimination of language."[10]

Synopsis[edit]
Quad I[edit]
"Quad is based on a geometrical figure and on permutations of regular movements. First one,
then two, then three, then four figures, dancers or mime artistes, dressed in
coloured djellabas[11] (white, yellow, blue and red) appear one after another to scurry along the
sides and across the diagonals of a square, shuffling in strict rhythm to a rapid percussion beat.
Each figure then departs in the order in which he appeared, leaving another to recommence the
sequence Strikingly all of them avoid the centre which is clearly visible in the middle of the
square."[12]
Movements and Stages
 Stag
Series 1 Series 2 Series 3 Series 4
e
One white - - - yellow - - - blue - - - red - - -
Two white blue - - yellow white - - blue yellow - - red blue - -
Thre
white blue red - yellow white red - blue yellow white - red blue yellow -
e
Four white blue red yellow yellow white red blue blue yellow white red red blue yellow white
Five - blue red yellow - white red blue - yellow white red - blue yellow white
Six - - red yellow - - red blue - - white red - - yellow white

Courses
Course 1 AC CB BA AD DB BC CD DA
Course 2 BA AD DB BC CD DA AC CB
Course 3 CD DA AC CB BA AD DB BC
Course 4 DB BC CD DA AC CB BA AD

Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, Faber and Faber, 1984, p 293

The four series of six stages each produce a total of twenty-four stages suggesting, as
in Lessness, the measurement of time.
According to the script each character was to be unique in a number of ways. Apart from the
colour of the outfit, they were to be "[a]s alike in build as possible. Short and slight for preference
Adolescents a possibility. Sex indifferent."[13] That said, each players footsteps were to be
distinctive, each was to be accompanied by their own musical instrument and illuminated by a
light, the same colour as their outfit. For technical reasons, in the original broadcast, white light
was used. To help the performers cope with the rhythmic chaos "[t]hey wore headphones under
their hoods, so they could hear the percussion beats."[14]
There is an element of chance in this piece in that Beckett does not indicate how the footsteps
should differ nor which instruments should be used other than they should be percussive
("say drum, gong, triangle, wood block"[13]). He also doesnt specify a required sequence for the
colors.
The play is shown as recorded, with no cuts, just one fixed long take. Beckett had originally
calculated its length at 25 minutes but, in reality, the whole set was completed in nine-an-a-half
minutes.

Quad II[edit]
During the end of the taping, Beckett saw the color production of Quad rebroadcast on a black
and white monitor, and decided instantly to create a second part of the play, to be called Quad II.
While watching technicians test the image quality for reception by monochrome receivers,
Beckett was struck by the look of the tape slowed down and in black and white. He suddenly
exclaimed: `My God, it's a hundred thousand years later!' [15] Seeing the hectic bustle of the
performance he had already recorded transformed into the slow, dim shuffle, made Beckett
imagine a future time where his walkers continue their performance. [16]
"The fast percussion beats were removed and the only sounds that were heard were the
slower, shuffling steps of the weary figures and, almost inaudibly, the tick of a metronome."[14] The
performers now wore identical robes and moved at half the pace. The new section, called Quad
II, lasts four minutes as it only allows for one series of movements, compared to the four in Quad
I.
"The second version was a masterstroke, a second act to dramatize the entropy of the motion.
And, since the figures always turn left, not only at the centre but at all the corners also, the
pattern is that of the damned in the Inferno. Quad is indeed a sinister piece."[17]
The director Alan Schneider wrote to Beckett (13 November 1981) after viewing the television
programm several times: "much moved, especially by the slower section. Want to work on that as
a stage piece with some of my students here no audience would you mind?" [18] Beckett
replied (20 November 1981): "Cant see Quad on stage. But by all means have a go."[19] Later (6
February 1982) he made a qualifying remark: "Quad cant work on stage. But no doubt
interesting for students, gymnastically."[20] These are fascinating remarks considering the fact that
Beckett takes no real advantage of the many televisual techniques available, no close-
ups, freeze frames, pans, cuts, zooms, slow-motion shots or split screens simply a fixed
camera "far South of the circle, overlooking it"[21] that might represent any member of a theatre-
going audience.
[As with Film] Beckett's printed text was never revised to acknowledge this revision of the work's
fundamental structure. No printed version of the play bears the title of the production, and so no
version that includes Beckett's revisions with Quad II exists in print. Beckett's
own videotaped German production, remains the only 'text' that recognizes Quad as a two part
work."[22]

Interpretation[edit]
"Modern works of art often call for prolonged continuous close attention if one is to appreciate
them. The same is true of a gator basking in the sun on a mud bank in a swamp. Anything
viewed makes demands."[23]
The building blocks of Quad can be found in a number of Becketts other works:
"In Play, there is a correlation between light and voice, and a da capo structure that forms an
image of hell, but the voices of W1, W2 and M (an eternal triangle) do not follow a predictable
sequence. In this respect, action and dialogue differs from that of Come and Go, where it is
shaped by the mathematical sequence, a series of ritual movements: as one character leaves,
another moves up into the vacant centre."[24] Both Come and Go and Quad trace shapes through
highly patterned movements and interaction that mimic life through extreme abstraction. These
works are the inner rhythms laid bare."[25] "Geometrical structures of light and darkness shape the
stage settings of Ghost Trio, and ...but the clouds...; while in Breath and Not I the light is
arithmetical, changing in time. Quad integrates both forms: the quad is set out geometrically, but
the movements of the players defined arithmetically, with absolute precision. Behind the
dramaticule is a metaphor of coincidence, or meeting in time and space, and hence the danger
zone[13] where this might happen."[24] Even "the "perpetual separation and reunion
of Vladimir and Estragon"[26] which has been described as "a choreography of the void, a search
for stepping-stones to best approach or avoid the other",[27] can be seen to anticipate Quad, as
can the fact that Act II covers the same ground as Act I in the same way that Quad II literally
covers the same ground as Quad I.
Why are these four pacing so? Martin Esslin believes they "are clearly engaged in a quest for an
Other."[28] He reads "the centre that the hooded wanderers have so fearfully to avoid is obviously
the point at which real communication, a real encounter, would be potentially possible but
inevitably proves by the very nature of existence itself impossible. [29]
Sidney Homan describes Quads world as a "faceless, emotionless one of the far future, a world
where people are born, go through prescribed movements, fear non-being (E) even though their
lives are meaningless, and then they disappear or die." [30] This raises a philosophical question,
one the writer Albert Camus tried to answer in his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus: Face to face with
the meaninglessness of existence, what keeps us from suicide? What stops any of the four
players from simply hurling themselves into the "danger zone"? To a large extent, Camus
suggests that our instinct for life is much stronger than our reasons for suicide: "We get into the
habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking."[31] We instinctively avoid facing the full
consequences of the meaningless nature of life, through what Camus calls an "act of eluding." [32]
The following section from Camuss essay could almost sum up both Quad I and Quad II:
[Quad I] "It happens that the stage-sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours of work,
meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according
to the same rhythm-this path is easily followed most of the time.
[Quad II] But one day the why arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with
amazement. ...Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the
same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness What follows is the gradual
return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening."[33]
The danger zone may not, of course, signify death but it would take an act of faith or
an act of lucidity[34] to find out for sure. When Sidney Homan was rehearsing his
version of Quad, to learn more about the piece the players improvised, what one of the
actors called "a real ending, something more than the final characters just
disappearing"[35] where the last character about the leave the stage, halts, turns, removes
her hood and then, as if being beckoned by the centre, hesitantly makes her way there
where the lights fade down on her.
If recourse to Becketts own attitude is necessary, it is well documented that Beckett
favoured the mere physicality of his work over interpretative readings. With Not I he
stated explicitly that he was not "unduly concerned with intelligibility. [He wanted] "the
piece to work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect."[36] With Quad, there are no
longer any nasty words for that to be an issue. During filming Beckett "spoke to
the SDR cameraman, Jim Lewis about the difficulty that he now had in writing down any
words without having the intense feeling that they would inevitably be lies." [37]
Rather than trying to make sense of Quad, it is perhaps better to consider the
sensation caused by Quad. It presents us with the meaning behind the words. The
problem with meanings is that were used to having them wrapped up IN words. They
are like masks behind expressionless masks. Quad exposes the mechanism underneath
the actors actions; the clocks face and hands have been removed and all we are left
with are the exposed workings, which can be a thing of beauty in its own right, and, of
course, makes perfect sense in itself.
"As Susan D. Brienza indicates, in Quad the four characters rhythmically
draw mandala pictures that reveal concentric circles and include four quadrants. The
dancers counter-clockwise pacing evokes Jungs patients leftward movement, which is
equivalent to a progress towards the unconscious. They desperately attempt to achieve
centering and reinstate order and peace, to abolish the separation between the
unconscious and the conscious mind."[38]
"The avoidance of the centre is clearly a metaphor capable of wide interpretation, as with
Winnies mound in Happy Days. The small empty square could suggest the flight from
self, the I Becketts characters so carefully avoid The deliberate avoidance of contact
with each other, though present in the same square of light, is also a familiar theme in
Beckett, whose characters frequently choose isolation as with Krapp or the Listener
in That Time."[39]
Eckart Voigts-Virchow presents an interesting and amusing comparison between
Becketts play and the 1990s BBC childrens TV show Teletubbies:
"Whereas the Teletubbies have presumably only just started to acquire the apparatus of
human articulation ("Eh-oh!") and are trapped in their progress for hundreds of episodes
by the requirements of serialization, Becketts hooded figures totally relinquish
expressiveness beyond their coloured gowns, leitmotiv percussion, and racecourse. They
are defined by mere physical exertion. The Quad figures are probably an image of how
the Teletubbies will behave when they are close to death and their belly monitors have
long gone blank and become sightless windows."[40]
 "That there is a pun in quad and quod (slang for gaol) can hardly have escaped
Beckett. Since one of his Paris apartments overlooked the Sant Prison, he must
have been conscious of the rhythm of life as lived in a prison over a long period.
With this in mind the players following their prescribed course of movements around
a square could be seen as doing time in the most literal sense of the term and
exercising within the precise limits of the prison yard."[41]

Musical interpretation[edit]
Pascal Dusapin, a contemporary French composer, invokes Beckett throughout his
oeuvre. His concertante work for violin and ensemble, Quad, pays homage to a
critical essay on Beckett's Quad. The essay is written by one of the most renowned
commentators on Beckett, Gilles Deleuze, and begins with the "exhaustion of
possibilities", a theme reminiscent of many of the writer's propositions.
Nacht und Trume (Night and Dreams) is a lied for voice and piano by Franz Schubert, from a
text by Matthus von Collin, and published in 1825. In Otto Erich Deutsch's catalogue of
Schubert's works, it is D. 827.
The song, a meditation on night and dreams, is marked "Sehr langsam" (very slowly) and is in
the key of B major (with a modulation to the flattened submediant, G major, in the middle). There
is a single dynamic indication, "pianissimo" (very quietly), which does not change throughout the
song. The piano plays broken chords in semiquavers for the song's duration in a manner similar
to bar five (the bar in which the voice enters), for example:

A typical performance will last around three to four minutes.

A version in the Spaun family collection has the different tempo marking "Langsam, Sempre
legato" (Slow, Always legato).
The original publication erroneously attributed the text to Friedrich Schiller.
"Nacht und Trume" is one of several Schubert songs that Max Reger arranged for voice
and orchestra. The last seven bars of the original version feature in Samuel Beckett's
television play of the same name (see Nacht und Trume (play)).