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'AUTOMATIC IN THE MUSCLE':AN INTERVIEW WITH

ROBERT WILSON

Article in Journal of Beckett Studies · April 2014

DOI: 10.3366/jobs.2014.0089

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 Interviews 101

JH: Do you think that was because of the play, or was it the
material circumstances of working with [an ill performer]?
IR: No, I think it was the play. The process itself was
rejuvenating. I think it was the feeling in the play.

Interview conducted and edited by Jonathan Heron, 6 April 2013

With special thanks to Tony Howard

DOI: 10.3366/jobs.2014.0088

‘ A U T O M AT I C I N T H E M U S C L E ’ : A N I N T E RV I E W W I T H
ROBERT WILSON

On How it Began

I was turning seventy, and a year or so before that, someone

suggested that I do Krapp’s Last Tape. And from time to time I
perform a work that I also direct and design – not so often, but from
time to time. The last big work I did was Hamlet, a Monologue in
the nineties, playing all of the characters, even Ophelia. And then I
guess the production before that that I did most frequently and for
the longest time was a work that I wrote, called I Was Sitting on my
Patio this Guy Appeared and I Thought I Was Hallucinating, and it was
a text of nonsense. So I went from a text of nonsense, to Hamlet, a
text with sense, and then somehow I thought that Beckett would
be a good next place to stop off, to visit that world. When I first
made theatre I made a play that was seven hours long in silence,
and Eugene Ionesco came, and he wrote a big article, and he said,
‘Wilson went further than Beckett, because it was seven hours of
silence’. I met him and we talked and got to know each other a
little bit. He said, ‘Beckett would be perfect for you, you should
really direct Beckett.’ At that time I had no idea I would have a
career in the theatre. It just happened by accident. Then I made a
play called A Letter for Queen Victoria, and Beckett came to see it,
and we met a couple times after that, and a lot of the things that he
talked about and liked were very similar to the things that I liked.

Wilson, Robert. "'Automatic in the Muscle': An Interview with Robert

Wilson." By Nicholas Johnson. Journal of Beckett Studies, 23.1
(2014): 101-106.
102 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

Figure 2. Robert Wilson rehearsing Krapp’s Last Tape, Moscow, 2013.

(© Julian Mommert)

At that time I was probably more angry than I am now,

but I really did not like naturalistic theatre, and I didn’t like
psychological theatre. All these ideas seemed to be an unnecessary
burden on a play – and a great actor, if he was great, he was
great – but it just seemed that there was too much thinking
involved. I was much more interested in the vaudeville actors like
Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin. It was formal. The makeup was
artificial. It was all dance, and it was tiny; it was essential to what
one was doing, and it didn’t get burdened with too much thought.
And it had humour! When Chaplin’s little tramp is starving and
he’s eating the shoes, you’re laughing, and it’s at a tragic situation,
and that always reminded me very much of Beckett. But the
more I saw in later years’ productions, it always seemed to me to
be all wrong. It became very unnecessarily burdened with being
something heavy. You know: Kraaaaapp’s Laaaaast Taaaaaape.
And Beckett said that his favourite actors were these vaudeville
actors too. It seemed like a good fit. But for years I resisted
doing Beckett. For some reason it seemed too close, and too right,
and I think also because, after Eugene Ionesco wrote this and
 Interviews 103

announced it in a very big way, that many, many people would

always say ‘when are you going to do Beckett, and when are you
going to do Beckett?’ Somehow I just resisted. After all these years,
I thought I would try to do it; I think I did it because I had seen a
number of productions, and I didn’t see it that way.
I was very fortunate when I began work on the piece. The
Festival in Spoleto asked me to do it, and we went in the winter,
when the theatre was closed – it’s a small theatre, the Caio Melisso.
So the first thing I did (that I usually do) is I start with: what does
the stage look like? So I actually built the set, and then I started
working with light in the set. Once I know what the space looks
like, it’s much easier for me to decide what to do. So I started
with an image. And in that way, it’s another affinity with Beckett,
because he was a visual playwright. He’s not somebody who just
wrote words, but he also saw it in terms of images. He constructed
his plays visually and with text. In a work like Happy Days, it’s what
you’re hearing and what you’re seeing that makes the tension. You
buy a ticket and it says Happy Days, and you go in, you see a woman
buried in sand – it’s a tragedy. It’s Chaplin eating his shoes when
he’s starving.

On the Rehearsal Process

There was a young actor that I had worked with as a child, when he
was ten years old or not much older, and I put him on stage, just to
see what it would look like to have someone in this environment,
this set. And I didn’t think so much about the text or anything,
I just had him walk around and see what it looked like in that
room, and have him sit there. And then I began to play with light,
so then I’d have a kind of feeling for the work. I always say that
without light there’s no space. I usually start with light first. Light
will create the space. So with the actor, I’d just sit there for an
hour just looking at him, sitting there. That seemed to already be
so powerful, this kind of sitting doing nothing was already so full.
And then I’d put together some sort of choreography or movement.
I don’t know if choreography is the right word, but sort of time-
space constructions of movement, and I played with sound – and
104 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

this was all before I got to text. I’d see what it was like, what
happened if I put a sound layer over this, what kind of tension
did that create in the space, and if it was very loud and then it was
suddenly quiet, you know, what happened, and then I felt I was
ready to take the pill.
So I said, okay, let’s put text on it. I had the actor sit there and do
movement, and I had someone read text, and I played it on the tape
recorder, and I would stop it, and I would just look at him. It’s very
difficult for me to see myself. He doesn’t look anything like me,
he’s much younger, fifty years younger. And then I got up and had
him look at me and tell me what he thought. And he was already
used to sort of doing things himself, so I’d say – do you think this
looks better, or should I do this, or how is this shadow, and what
do I see if my hand is about ten centimeters, and so on. Somehow
I had mapped that out with text and with sound, and then I just
repeated it, and in my work you can’t repeat something too many
times. The more mechanical it is, the freer it is. So I just kept trying
to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it, and you know, learn to sit
there. It’s fifty-something minutes before I speak the first word. So
how do you hold the audience by doing that? The difficulty for
me in playing Beckett is to play the silence and the humour. Those
are the two, for me, essential ingredients of whatever work of his
you’re doing. What is essential is the silence and the humour. So
often they are absent in the production, or the actor doesn’t trust
the silence – and then to keep it light. Beckett to me is light.

On ‘A Late Evening in the Future’

To me Beckett is not timeless, it’s full of time. That was a part of

my thinking. So that’s very important, that somehow acoustically,
it has to be a work full of time. The great works are. To put Hamlet in
the supermarket, or try to update Shakespeare, always seemed to
me to be ridiculous. You can do it. . . but a great work is full of time,
so you don’t have to. Time is no concept for me, and space is no
concept, and once you give it a concept, it’s limited to the play and
the production. People might move slow, but if they think they’re
moving slow and they move slow, it’s boring. But if they don’t
 Interviews 105

think about it, and they’re moving slower than they normally do,
they become aware that it’s connected, everything that’s going on;
every energy in the world is happening simultaneously. And that’s
something you experience, it’s not something that’s intellectual.
And to experience something is a way of thinking. In this context,
to experience something is a way of thinking. To me, with time and
space, you make time-space constructions: this is loud, this is quiet,
this is slow, this is quick, this is interior, this exterior, and you make
a construction, and then you learn it. Then if you can repeat it so
you don’t have to think about it so much, you can experience it,
and that’s what performance is. It’s not something for me that’s
in the head, this experience. It’s in the body the way an animal
listens – you know, the way the dog walks to the bird, his whole
body is listening, he’s not listening with his ears.

On Freedom within Structure

I’ve directed a number of operas. Take the Ring of Wagner: on

one hand, you have to respect the master and what he’s done. I
mean, I can’t rewrite Wagner. I can’t change the tempi. Maybe one
conductor is a little slower than the another, but you know, it’s a
given, so you have to respect it. And then the difficulty is that you
have to be careful not to become a slave to it. So you have to find
your own way within the structure. But if I’ve taken that as a given,
there’s a kind of freedom. I don’t find it too much different than in
Einstein on the Beach. That’s something that I constructed and wrote
with Philip Glass. I worked closely with Phil on the time-space
constructions, in terms of the overall structure, the themes and the
variations, how they occurred and reoccurred, and we talked about
links. But the first thing we talked about was time: how long scenes
should be, the structure of these scenes. The first day when we met,
we talked about time and the structure of time. So that was a given,
and then I had to learn it. And it’s the same as when you do the
Magic Flute of Mozart – you have a structure, and then you learn it,
and then within that you can find the freedom.
My mother said she liked to type on a typewriter because it gave
her time to think. She was a very good typist, I mean that she typed
 106 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

very quickly, but she was like a machine. The first time you ride
a bicycle, you have to think about what you’re doing, but after a
while you don’t have to think about it so much. You can just do it.
A friend of mine is a ballet dancer. I asked her how many ballets
she knows, and she said, eighty or ninety ballets. And I asked her
about something she does in Balanchine’s Symphony in C, and she
said, oh, I have no idea what it is I do, but when I’m doing it I know.
It’s in the muscle somehow. When she’s done it so many times, it’s
there, it’s automatic in the muscle.

Interview conducted and edited by Nicholas Johnson, 15 October

2013
With special thanks to Julian Mommert

DOI: 10.3366/jobs.2014.0089

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