EN107, WEEK EIGHT
BECKETT: HAPPY DAYS, NOT I
Reflections on writing
• What difficult, what straightforward?
• How do you feel about time management? Peer review?
• Similarity and difference from HS experience?
• What guidance would you like for future papers?
Beckett, Happy Days
• Playwright unimaginable without wartime experience
• Waiting for Godot (1953): new theatrical idiom
Language
• GO HERE FIRST
• “Close reading”/”practical criticism”
• Polyvalence (multiple meanings)
• Clarification (single meanings)
• Nonsense (meaninglessness)
• Oral presence
• Are speeches hard to say out loud?
• Do the speeches make you talk in particular ways?
• Is there a rhythm to the words, or some other oral ordering?
Embodiment
• Actors
• What do stage dramatis personae say about the actors’ bodies?
• What race/class presence is called for?
• Who is excluded?
• What do stage directions call on the actors to do
• What training is required of actors?
• What are actors meant to feel or experience?
• Does this script require preparation, and if so what kinds of preparation?
• Can this script be performed? Is it instead closet drama?
Structure
• How is the play divided?
• Discrete, long acts? Shorter scenes? Contextless lines of dialogue?
• Audience focus
• Presentation of information
• How long is the play?
• Text: how long does it take to read, and how difficult is it to read?
• Performance: how long would this play take to perform?
• Repetition
• What elements are repeated? What does repetition do?
Plot
• Does the play possess a consistent plot?
• Is this plot fulfilled?
• Sequence
• Sequential
• Non-sequential
• Sequence unclear
Onstage performance
• Ensemble
•
•
•
•
Why are these characters together?
What characters are on stage at any given moment?
Who understands other characters’ dialogue, and who fails to?
Are there multiple overlapping worlds onstage?
• Characters in multiple times, places, settings
• What juxtapositions are created?
Offstage, in performance
• Mise-en-scene
• Where could this play be performed, and where not?
• What properties appear onstage?
• Audience
• What sort of audience does the play address?
• What do they know?
• What do they believe?
“Realism”
• Probably the most difficult term to use
• Is the play realistic?
• Term always relational
• Is it more realistic than specified other plays?
• Is it realistic in particular aspects: dialogue, setting, content
• Is the play not realistic?
• What is the play’s relationship to a specific non-theatrical reality?
• What elements of this reality are heightened, diminished, promoted, or
hidden?
Stage directions
• What are s.d. like in Happy Days? (take a few minutes and have a
look, if necessary)
• What is space like in Happy Days?
• How to approach this question:
• Note how the s.d. describe the space of the play
• What is onstage, and what is offstage? How are they related?
• Can characters move easily around the stage, or are they somehow restricted?
• Note how characters make use of this space
Storytelling
• What are the gaps or inconsistencies in Jo’s stories? In Helen’s?
[This is the older slide—here, Winnie]
• What can we make of these?
• How are these related to the play’s metatheatrical elements? I might
say specifically: to the elements brought into the play from outside of
it?
Beckett, Happy Days (1961) and Not I (1972)
• Playwright unimaginable without wartime experience
• Waiting for Godot (1953): new theatrical idiom
• A “tragicomedy”
• Fragments of European civilization: hats, umbrellas, books—remnant of
vaudeville, clowning
• Particular importance of theatricality: daily life as performance, over a void
• Influential over all subsequent C20 playwrights
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4LDwfKxr-M