Teatro Plástico's 2011 production of Samuel Beckett's What Where.

Samuel Beckett’s final work for television was the 1986 Was Wo, an adaptation of his final stage play What Where for Süddeutscher Rundfunk, produced a few years years before the dramatist’s death. In Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theatre (Oxford University Press, 1987), Enoch Brater discusses Beckett’s re-visioning of the play for broadcast:

The adaptation of What Where for television results in some startling effects and gives the play new and sharper resonances. On the stage Beckett had never really been satisfied with the role the cold and impersonal megaphone had been called upon to play. On screen Beckett more clearly establishes that this is a story about Bam remembering. “All this happened long ago,” the playwright pointed out. On television Was Wo turns inward, personalizing and depoliticizing the stage play even further. Torture becomes more explicitly self-inflected, a function of memory, remorse, and the relentless need to tell a story. … We concentrate not on a repeated body movement but on a held facial expression. Heads imply a mind and the hell that lies within. This is a far more somber winter journey. …

What Where for television makes us conscious of the ever-increasing expanses of darkness in Beckett’s imaginative world. Progressive reduction makes things simpler, but it also makes them more bleak. As the play moves from stage to television screen, the void encroaches on a visual horizon once filled with a playing space offering, by comparison, a much wider range of human potential. Such discipline, however, serves to clarify an important tension in the original stage play: the narrative progression that makes of Bam’s lines both a story and an autobiographical event. Bam is “Sam,” the B is “Beckett”; and Bam’s voice, like so many others we have heard on Beckett’s stage, is speaking, as always, through metaphor. Seasonal imagery, which Beckett said was meant to reflect Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle, points forward, as it inevitably does, to the ages of man, now “seen” to be as fleeting and elusive as an image on this screen — only twelve minutes’ duration. In the end all fadings were abandoned except the most important one, the final one: you couldn’t tell when it finally wasn’t there. “All gimmicks gone,” [Beckett's assistant] Walter Asmus said when Was Wo was finally ready for broadcast. “All?” Beckett wondered. “You can’t tell.” (162-163)

For an alternative video version of the stage play, see Damien O’Donnell’s production for the Beckett on Film project here. Below, Beckett’s own Was Wo, as it was broadcast on 13 April 1986, Beckett’s 80th birthday: