I am alone.
In the present as were I still.
It is winter.
Without journey.
Time passes.
That is all.
Make sense who may.
I switch off.[1]
Samuel Beckett’s final play, What Where, was considered one of his more political works when it premiered in 1983 at the Harold Clurman Theatre, in a production directed by Alan Schneider and which I was privileged to see at the time. On a triple-bill with Ohio Impromptu and especially Catastrophe, the play seemed to echo the political concerns that surrounded Catastrophe, which had been written for Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, then in a prison. While it remains possible to interpret the play as a parable of power and torture, it operates, like Catastrophe, on several other levels as well: as a play about the unforgiving agony of memory and conscience, and once again as a play about an artist painfully sifting through his experience for ultimate meaning. As Enoch Brater wrote, “While it is indeed possible to trace the political dimensions implied by this work’s steady focus on so much offstage torture, its energy in performance makes peripheral any specific allusion to the excesses of Marxism, as it does any flirtation with the hilarious farce of the Marx Brothers, yet another gang of four. Especially when performed with Catastrophe, What Where‘s political overtones seem to loom large center stage. Yet in this play any parable of terrorism, Marxist or otherwise, is delivered in strictly symbolic terms.”[2] As Beckett’s last work for the stage, produced six years before his death, it constitutes a distillation of the themes and concerns that marked his entire career, from the monograph Proust onward. Though the originial play was only 12 minutes in length, for his production of the play for German television in 1984, Was Wo, Beckett cut the text even further. It remains a chilling, simple delineation of the agony of consciousness in the winter of one’s last days.
In the video below, Damien O’Donnell directs Sean McKinley (as Bam) and Gary Lewis (as Bom, Bim and Bem) in a production which also underscores the political interpretation of the play, although the setting suggests a skull of language, knowledge and books, with Bam as the consciousness seeking significance in the midst of the material that seems to reach to an invisible apex.
Footnotes