A few words about Nacht und Traume

Nacht und Traume, first broadcast in 1983 on German television, is yet another of those plays
Beckett devised specifically for that medium, like Ghost Trio, …but the clouds…, while we
have seen that so many others have had both a staged and a televised version – as we have just
seen with What Where, or previously with Quad, and yet earlier with Not I. The medium of
television has thus become dear to Beckett in his later years, possibly corresponding to the
need to reduce the dimensions of the stage, or to concentrate the attention of the audience in a
different way, and use the focus of the camera to direct our point of view. Remember the
focus on the Mouth in Not I , so much more efficient in the television version than in the
staged one, quite simply because of the proximity with the Mouth – too great actually to be
seen only as a standard mouth any longer – so much more disturbing too.
Then, obviously too, special effects are easier to set up before a camera – and this is what is
needed here, as from the start, the dramatis personae suggests an odd situation, since there is
only one character (A) but also his DREAMT self (B). Of course this is feasible on stage – as
it is in a way in Ohio Impromptu – the fact that one character is only a dreamt character is not
such a strange thing on a theatrical stage… We shall see later what the point of the television
medium may be.

First the title, taken from a lied by Schubert, the last bars of which are heard during the play,
together with words from the lied : “come again, holy night/ sweet dreams come again”, so
that the setting is somewhat clear, it is to do with night and dream indeed. And what we are
given in the stage directions are two characters then, again, as in so many other plays, one the
mirror image of the other, … with the left profile of one to match the right profile of the first.
The place is the same sort of dark bare room as we have seen before, with “evening light”,
“black wall”, which comes to be only a slight variation from the white walls of Ping – black
or white, the effect is in fact about the same…it is the colour of life that is still missing. The
window is as usual too high – you can never see right away through Beckett’s windows , in
Endgame, Clov, the only character who can move about, needs to climb up on a ladder in
order to see what the outside is like – or rather IS NOT or is no longer like!

Short as it is, the play yet follows the classical structure with a division into three acts: act one
is the dreamer and the sole sound of music, the lied being first “hummed”, then spoken more
clearly; act two is the dreamt scene, now that the dreamer has rested his head most completely
on his hands. In this act, there seems to be a third character, as hands come to rest on the
dreamt character’s head. As in a religious scene, those hands will in turn bring a cup, a cloth
or join with the dreamt character’s hands. The cup, the cloth that wipes the brow of the
dreamer, and the joined hands are an obvious allusion to a Christian scene. As in religious
scenes, the Beckettian figure is an icon, not so much a person as a human presence. However,
as with Ping or Catastrophe, the figure of Christ works as a metatextual reference only, like an
archetype of human suffering and soothing, but not to give a metaphysical dimension to the
play.

Suffering? Soothing? One suggests the other, as there is no soothing without implicit
suffering first. It is both the peacefulness and the loneliness of an aged figure, as if peace
came from the doubling of the character in the dream.
The third act of the play shows the dream as over, since A raises his head. Over, or still to
come? Once again, “the end is in the beginning” because the action seems to be simply
repeated from the first act, with the words of the lied being softly sung and a fade down on A
while the light comes up on B. yet this time, as the dream is resumed and the focus on B
again, as A disappears totally from the screen, B no longer appears as a dreamt self, but rather
as the only reality. So that when the camera moves back to the “whole” space of the room at
the end, with both A and B visible again, the feeling is not that we are back to a reality, but
rather that we have just reached different levels of dream. Then B fades out , and A fades out
too, leaving us with the feeling of an apparition. Again, as with the end of so many other
plays, be they for television or stage, we may have the feeling that the darkness is not final,
that the dream may start again, the character reappear. As if there was an after-image on the
television screen, the persistence of vision that the screen may produce.
What the television medium emphasises is the absence of reality of the reality as much as of
the dream… the dream image we see is set against a “real world” that is just yet another
image.

In this Beckett is very close to Yeats’s poetry. Beckett’s drama turns out as one of “visions”.
Just like the poet, Beckett insists on the importance of “rhythm, balance, pattern, images that
remind us of vast passion, the vagueness of the past times, all the chimeras that haunt the edge
of trance”, as Yeats writes in his essays – yet this brought Yeats to a mystical vision, while
the issue remains for Beckett that of the “issueless predicament of existence”