‘the reader will remember’

My title – ‘the reader will remember’ – is taken, as the reader will remember, from a moment, or rather, two moments in Beckett’s 1976 play, Footfalls. The phrase appears twice, both in the third and final part of the play. The first is when M, pausing in her pacing, introduces the listening audience to the previously unknown figure of Mrs Winter. ‘Old Mrs Winter, whom the reader will remember, one late autumn Sunday evening, on sitting down to supper with her daughter after worship, after a few half-hearted mouthfuls laid down her knife and fork and bowed her head’ (242). The second comes just a few moments later, as M’s narrative of the Sunday evening conversation between Mrs Winter and her daughter continues: ‘But finally, raising her head and fixing Amy – the daughter’s given name, as the reader will remember'(243).

These two moments are a little disorienting to an audience even without the reference to a reader and the various things the reader is supposed to have remembered, but for which there appears to be no basis for their having ever known until now. Disorienting because for the audience there is a strong temptation to identify Mrs Winter and Amy with M. and the woman with whose unseen voice M. has been in dialogue until now, a temptation both strengthened and troubled by the resemblance between the names Amy and May, the name by which the voice, V., which may or may not be the voice of Mrs Winter (she whom the reader will remember, if indeed it is she) refers, in dialogue, to her interlocutor, the pacing figure who appears in the text as M. But whether M is May or Amy and V. Mrs Winter or not, who is this reader, and why might the text, or the author of the text, assume, imagine, or even groundlessly assert that they will remember these names, when there has in fact been no prior reference, so far as anyone in the audience can know, to either Mrs Winter, or Amy?

Moments such as this are in fact far from unusual in Beckett’s work, and have received due critical attention. Julia Jarcho, in a chapter devoted primarily to Waiting for Godot in her excellent recent book, Writing and the Modern Stage, observes that ‘(t)he emphatic composition of such moments disrupts the convention by which the text is supposed to convey a spoken conversation; when the character’s speech begins to read like a piece of writing, the textual medium through which we encounter this speech becomes perceptible as such’ (101), and that when such moments appear in the performance of a play, they seem to confound our sense of how plays are supposed to work: ‘That a character should appear to be inventing the words she speaks, is, as we know, a fundamental ideal of drama’ (91). The reader will note, of course, Jarcho’s use here of the little phrase ‘as we know’ here, and its performance of a rather similar act of complicity between writer and reader to that offered, unmoored from any such actual complicity, in Beckett’s play.

There is, indeed, something slightly academic about the tone and implication of Beckett’s ‘the reader will remember’: the ostentatious display of an assumed shared familiarity on the part of writer and reader alike, with textual material other than that which is immediately to hand, or in view. In Jarcho’s case, the writer simply assumes a familiarity on the part of her readers with one of the basic assumptions of much drama, which hardly seems an unreasonable assumption for her to be making of most of her most likely readers. Also, because she is attentive to a related academic convention, she includes in brackets, a reference, which I omitted in reading this citation from her book, to the theorist of drama with whose definition of drama as such, she apparently associates this assumption most strongly. She and I refer, of course, to, Peter Szondi, who, as the reader will remember, wrote a slender but highly influential volume entitled Theory of the Modern Drama. Like Jarcho’s text, then, but less obviously, I’d like to suggest, if I may be permitted, Beckett’s possesses a citational quality, as well as the characteristics of what Bill Worthen, in his own reading of these moments of address to the reader in Footfalls – which appears in the concluding chapter of his 2005 book, Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama – describes as a ‘writerly discourse’ with an ‘archly archaic diction and syntax’ (174).

Such citational gestures and the assumptions of familiarity with which they frequently cohabit can be experienced as either inclusive or exclusive, depending upon their recipients’ actual familiarity with the material to which a text or its author alludes. In Beckett’s case, it seems to me, one of the crucial effects of the device of addressing ‘the reader’ in this way, is not simply to draw attention to the textual, literary, writerly nature of the words being spoken on stage, which, of course, it does, but also to open up a gap between the audience who hears these words spoken on stage, and some other, unspecified reader, to whom this text appears to have been addressed.

There are various possible effects of this gap, I think, for someone who hears these words spoken. The first is the simple confusion to which I have already alluded, and with it the impulse to check, by means of recollection, whether or not you should have remembered that the mother’s name was Mrs Winter and the daughter’s Amy. This confusion and the impulse to check would be shared of course, by the reader in question, who could refer back in the text to reassure themselves that they had not in fact misremembered. Creating this impulse for the non-reading spectator in the theatre, then, feints at the kind of literarization of the theatre which Brecht recommended, when he suggested that an epic style of performance might generate the effect of footnotes in a written text.

But more interesting, I think, is the gap between spectator and reader, and the sense these moments seem likely to produce in spectators, that the words they are hearing are not really intended for them, addressed, as they are, to someone who is interpellated as a reader rather than a spectator or auditor. This might be accompanied by a feeling that the actor who speaks them here on stage would have done better to have left them out: to include them in this way is tantamount to learning and reproducing the stage directions, a failure to distinguish between two different textual functions. Such an error would mean that the play performed in this way would no longer conform to the ‘ideal of drama’ articulated by Szondi with which Julia Jarcho, quite reasonably, as the reader will remember, assumed we would be familiar. Whoever we are. In any case, the reader might go so far as to suggest, this reading of the stage directions is what may be going on under our very eyes in Footfalls much of the time: ‘one two three four five six seven eight nine wheel’.

It is also worth noting that there are other moments in which the text, or the figure or the character, appears to be addressing the spectator, calling their attention to things to which a mere reader might not be expected to attend, other than in their mind’s eye: ‘But let us watch her move, in silence … Watch how feat she wheels’ (241). The situations of spectatorship and readership thus accentuated are oddly entangled, in what Jarcho calls ‘a utopian dialectic between the actuality of performance and the virtuality of an unstaged script’. This dialectical entanglement is utopian, for Jarcho, who, as the reader will remember, follows Adorno in her understanding of utopia, in that the simultaneous heightening or intensification of both the actuality of performance and the virtuality of script might make possible the ‘determinate negation of what is’. The world shown is intensely, demandingly here and now, as though there could be nothing else there but this, but at the same time, the possibility that it might, somewhere, some time, be different from itself, is made fleetingly available.

It is a third potential effect, however, that interests me most. In articulating a distinction between spectator and reader, the text of Footfalls may unsettle the spectator to some degree, leading her to question the accuracy of her own perceptual apparatus, but it does at least allow the her the comfort of knowing who she is. It is the identity of the reader which is in doubt. The simplest way of putting an end to this doubt might be to take the phrase ‘the reader’ to refer simply to the function of reading, rather than to any reader in particular. This is how such phrases tend to be used in texts intended only for readers: Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Reader, I married him’ interpellates each individual reader in the moment of reading, but does so only by not actually specifying any individual as such. However, Beckett’s text has had specific readers prior to its being spoken on stage, one of whom – the only one, in fact, of whom we can be absolutely certain – is the performer who speaks these lines, who will have read the text of the play in order to learn it so as to be able to reproduce it in performance. Might we not suppose, then, that the act of speaking the words ‘the reader will remember’ in performance refers to the earlier work of reading and memorisation through which the script of the play has been transformed into its performance?

This work of reading and memorisation is precisely what most ‘drama’ – in the sense intended by Peter Szondi – generally tends to hide, in order to generate and maintain the illusion, for an audience, that the words spoken on stage by a character are their own spontaneous invention. That no one actually falls for this illusion is of course immaterial. But so powerful is the shared commitment to sustaining it that it is perfectly possible to talk about the work that it hides without in any way diminishing one’s enjoyment of the performance, without, that is, destroying the illusion. We all know that this work must have been done; we can even talk admiringly of the feats of memory that it supposedly entails. But none of this prevents us from paying no attention to the presence of the written text we hear spoken on stage. Unless, that is, that spoken text starts drawing attention to its writerly qualities, especially if it adds to its use of ‘archly archaic diction’ the very particular and potentially anti-dramatic device of referring explicitly to the acts of both reading and memory.

So here is what interests me. First, the work of remembering the text – learning your lines – is fundamental to the production of drama as it is conventionally understood. Second, it is rarely, if ever, discussed as anything other than a technical process to which actors need to attend. For critical and theoretical discourse it appears to be pretty much a given, not worth any prolonged attention. Third, in as much as it has received any critical attention at all this has taken place primarily in discussions of post-dramatic theatre: theatre that actively makes a feature or a problematic of some of drama’s most fundamental conventions and assumptions. Foremost among the relevant conventions is what Hans-Thies Lehmann has described as the ‘suturing’ of the spoken text to the body of the actor: the operation by which the figure of the dramatic character is produced and sustained. In Lehmann’s account much of what he calls postdramatic theatre finds ways of undoing this suture. Among the now very familiar means of doing this are the use of audio feeds (either perceptible by the audience or not) which actors follow and imitate, of which the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma’s No Dice might serve as an exemplary instance, and the use of audio recordings to render speech while the stage figures whose speech we suppose ourselves to be hearing do not actually speak. The reader will recall, of course, that this latter device was used by Samuel Beckett, perhaps most prominently in Rockaby. Another possibility, extensively explored in extraordinary productions of Ibsen by Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller, is for the words supposedly spoken onstage by actors representing the characters in the play to be spoken instead, live, from a platform shared with the sound and lighting desk, by other actors who are, at least in the case of their production of John Gabriel Borkman, dressed as skeletons. Something about the relationship between the dead and the living is presumably at stake in this separating out of live action from live speech. I shall come back to a question of what is dead and what is living in a moment.

In the mean time I shall leave for another occasion a discussion of the effects of some examples of the use of these techniques and dwell for the time being on a less widely-used means of effecting this uncoupling of speech from bodies, one which Beckett will certainly have been aware of, and which he will almost certainly have used himself, even if there is no immediately discernible trace of the practice in question in the texts of any of his plays. I am talking about the simple expedient of having actors perform the text by speaking it directly from the script in front of them. While there are numerous variants of this, including, of course, Beckett’s own Ohio Impromptu (a title which makes a little joke about it), these usually involve dramatic situations which explain away the use of a script, as one might argue is the case in Ohio Impromptu, or the reading, during the course of a performance of texts whose prior existence as texts the performance explicitly acknowledges, as has often been the case in productions by the Wooster Group. Leaving to one side the question of provisional proto- or para-performances such as play-readings, there is one very large field of dramatic production – often far from experimental or post-dramatic in character – where this practice is not just widespread, but nearly universal. This is where Beckett will have encountered it – in radio drama. What I want to suggest is that those moments, such as the one I have been discussing here in Footfalls, in which Beckett’s drama seems to initiate undoings of the dramatic situation that prefigure innovations often attributed to later, postdramatic theatre, may themselves be attributable to a reflection upon theatre, as a medium, occasioned by his engagement with radio, in which performances are made by actors speaking with scripts in hand.

While this practice is acceptable in radio, there are numerous indications that it is something of a taboo, still, in theatre. In radio, it can easily be set aside or forgotten by listeners, or it might never even occur to them that this is what is going on, as they immerse themselves in the scenes which this act of reading makes available to them. In theatre, however, the appearance of a script in the hand of an actor is more or less always the sign of something having gone wrong. Someone, for whatever reason, has failed to fulfil a basic theatrical function: learning their lines. Probably the most frequent occasion for the appearance of the script in hand is when an actor is indisposed, and lacking appropriate understudy cover, the production recruits a stage manager or director to ‘read in’ the role. In such cases the audience is inclined to forgive, as they can assure themselves that this is no breach of any implicit labour contract, since they can assume that someone else has done the work (of learning the lines) even if that person is not present tonight to demonstrate that they have done so. But other breaches of this implicit labour contract are viewed less mercifully. Some critical disquiet was voiced over David Hare’s 1996 production of Wallace Shawn’s play, The Designated Mourner, at the National Theatre in London, in which the celebrated film director, Mike Nichols, used a concealed autocue (clearly not well-concealed enough for eagle-eyed critics) to assist him in the delivery of lengthy monologues. The theatre critic, Sheridan Morley, wrote a letter to The Spectator magazine, responding to a Diary entry from David Hare published in the previous week’s edition, chiding Hare, who had commented on the apparent artlessness of the performances given in his production, for not disclosing the use of the autocue, inviting readers to ‘imagine the next time an O’Toole or a Nicol Williamson or a Richard Harris agrees to a National King Lear and asks for the prompting device, only to be told that there was one law for Nichols and another for the ‘real’ actors in the profession’. Real actors, it seems, learn their lines and that is how we can tell they are real. Elsewhere, in both newspaper reviews and online forums, we find complaints about actors who are visibly using earpieces or being prompted from offstage. All these complaints point to an anxiety that someone has not done their job properly. The job in question being to transform written text into speech by means of memory (and to appear, all the same, to be speaking without the use of any mnemonic technology of the kind that Derrida’s King Thamus, as the reader will remember, found so poisonous).

Another anecdote illustrates a premium being placed on feats of memorisation and illutsrates the same strong prejudice in favour of memorisation. In Elevator Repair Service’s production of Gatz, which, for those readers who do not remember, was an eight hour staging of Scott Fizgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, the action begins when an office worker, played by Scott Shepherd, is unable to switch on his computer at the start of the working day, finds a copy of the novel in his desk drawer and starts to read it. Shepherd reads the novel, in its entirety, book in hand throughout, as other company members gradually morph from office colleagues to characters in the novel to enact it alongside and in dialogue with Shepherd’s reading. Here Shepherd’s reading is justified by being lodged within the logic of the staging: we are watching a man read a novel within the dramatic fiction, rather than a man reading out a dramatic fiction. But the key point – and an indication of the extent to which memorisation is valued – is that it became widely known, and was admiringly commented upon, that through the act of reading the book night after night, Shepherd had in fact memorised it in its entirety. He did not need to read it in performance. The reading is revealed as a choice made by an actor who has, after all, committed sufficient socially necessary labour time to the task in hand. If my own memory serves me right there is in fact a moment about an hour from the end of the show at which, by putting aside the book, Shepherd effectively reveals that the book has been a prop all along – part of the mise en scène, just like all the office furnishings – rather than a mnemonic prosthesis.

I have suggested so far, perhaps rather predictably, given my track record of thinking about theatre as work, that the taboo on the appearance of the script on stage, without it being incorporated into the mise en scène or justified by pure and exceptional expediency, expresses a widespread anxiety that not enough work has gone in to the production of the production. Another explanation also suggests itself, and might be more readily accepted, I think, by spectators invited to think about why they might feel that something is wrong when an unjustified script appears on stage. The script is somehow dead, or reveals the already done, not quite live quality of the theatrical experience, against which so much work is done, by performers and audiences alike, to pretend it really is live, as if for the first time, in the moment, present, and so on. In this version of the taboo, the script is a dry dead thing, like Vinge and Müller’s skeletons, and altogether lacking in the unpredictable wetware presence of the actor who has remembered their lines and speaks them as though they were their own, spontaneously appearing in their minds in the very moment of their utterance and audition. To read a script on a stage is to consent to your own deadness as an actor, to reveal that you have no life, no will of your own. To have memorised your script is to have acceded into liveness. Let’s consider for a moment those occasions in Beckett’s plays where characters are made to behave as though they are aware of their theatrical situation, to act as though they were offering spontaneous commentary on the conditions of the performance they are making. As Julia Jarcho has observed – and she makes much fruitful analysis of this observation – these moments do the very opposite of what they might be supposed to be attempting. Far from making the characters appear as though they are making things up spontaneously, as though, in other words, they were alive, what they do is reveal the sheer scriptedness of it all, rendering the characters at best dead-and-alive. Which is hardly a controversial description of every simulacrum of the human that finds its way on stage in Beckett’s theatre, or indeed, once you think about it, of any such simulacrum on any kind of stage anywhere. But that’s a larger argument for another day (and one that Rebecca Schneider has already pursued far more brilliantly than I).

My own contribution to this liveness question comes not so much from a theoretical or critical position as it does from my experiences as a spectator and as an occasional maker of theatre. And it’s this. Sometimes there is nothing more dead-seeming than having someone repeat lines that they have remembered. There is something about the way, from time to time, an actor can be detected in the act of memory, labouring, in a rather dazed and sedated manner, to retrieve for reproduction the words that they have read. They absent themselves and lose the capacity to sustain the illusion of presence. So my own first attempts to make theatre in which actors didn’t have to learn their lines were motivated by my desire to avoid this effect. But on reflection, this approach, at least with this objective, seemed a false direction. What I am interested in now is not eradicating the work of memorisation altogether, but finding ways of making it part of the theatrical experience. Put simply, if the act of memorisation for the purposes of theatrical speech is an act of reading, which, the reader will remember, I have insisted, uncontroversially I think, that it is, then if you put the act of reading itself on stage what you open up is the possibility that the means of theatrical (re)production will become visible. That the audience will hear and see the engine of dramatic theatre itself – the translation of text into speech, not by way of memory, or at least (with Scott Shepherd in mind) not at first, but by way of transmission through a working body.

One final observation. In the last five or six years, I have been making theatre in which performers work exclusively from visible and as-yet unmemorised scripts. And the funny thing is no one has ever said anything about it. Is this because what we are doing is in fact so shameful that no-one can bring themselves to raise the question? I don’t think so. Or did they simply not notice, or did they not consider it important at all? In other words, is this apparent taboo actually a kind of public secret? Do we all pretend that the labour of reading and remembering and only then speaking is of fundamental importance to our appreciation of drama, while knowing, deep down, that it is not?