In Beckett’s theatre the actor is unable to incarnate or identify himself with the character, so what is the relation between them? The incommensurability between the actor and the character signals the impossibility for the former to objectify the latter. In a sense the character enacts like a “foreign will”24 that is free from the actor’s control. Yet on the other hand the actor is not allowed to depart from the character because the performance on the stage is by nature a representation even to the least degree, and so the actor cannot just present himself as an actor qua actor. Hence the relation between the actor and the character is radically alien and mutually reliant. Apart from being isolated from the other actors by the darkness, most of the time the actor is placed alone on the stage and is accompanied with the threatening darkness as well as with a sense of uncertainty aroused by the unverified character. The threat of the darkness evokes the fear of being flung into the sheer reality and thus propels the actor to continue playing even though he is forbidden to do it. Inasmuch as the validity of language is degraded, the way to play by not playing focuses its attention on the expression of physicalness in Beckett’s performance.25
The notion of physicalness concerns two aspects about the actor’s conditions: one points to his concrete feeling of being there on the stage and the other refers to the actor’s corporeal perception. Concerning the first aspect, we see that the actor is knotted to the stage and is chained to himself because it is difficult for him to define or keep a distance from the other objects. The actor in this case is the captive of himself so that he is unable to be absolved from the state of being solitary and exists with the impossibility of withdrawing himself back from the approach of the dead end of performance. In performance what the actor initially
24 According to Levinas, “the foreign will” refers to the invisible, unpredictable and incalculable Other (TI 230).
25 Roby Cohn mentions that as Beckett directs Endgame, he concerns more about “the physical rather than the metaphysical” (238). JoAnne Akalaitis pinpoints that when he directs Endgame, he is “very interested in the physicalness of it” (Akalaitis 139). Gerry McCarthy also stresses on the discussion about the actor’s body in Beckett’s plays (McCarthy 257-59).
encounters is the situation wherein he is kept alone on the stage, obligated to perform and circumscribed by the surrounding darkness. About the second aspect, the body makes possible the resolution for the actor to release himself from the state of being alone because there is “somebody who’s spiraling inward”26 (qtd. in Kalb 147) the actor’s body who makes him concentrate on the bodily perception or on the “shape of the body.”
Thus the actor’s body changes to be an “agent”27 whereby the actor and the character confront each other. The fact that the character is unverifiable emphasizes the incapability of fabricating an illusionism about the character’s subjectivity. Hence the character enacts like a foreign will to which the actor is subjugated and obligated due to his being on the stage in performance. In this way, what the actor plays is neither the character nor the actor qua actor, but is an expression of the relation with the character as an irreducible otherness to the actor.
Therefore the movement of playing is “a playing qua playing,” and would not be satisfied because it is a process as a desire in relation to the unknowable character, i.e., an impalpable other. In this way, the actor is unable to be a self-assured subject due to the annulment of his intentionality and is simultaneously able to get rid of being fixated alone on the stage because he ventures on the radical transcendence from himself to the otherness revealed by the character. In consequence, the actor does not exist self-reliantly but on the contrary with the character through his body. The actor oscillates in the dilemma that there is no access to understanding the character and there is no permission to recoil back to be himself. Yet the dilemma paradoxically gives the actor a finite freedom that releases him from being stuck in the stalemate of “not playing” by playing in relation to the non-representability of the character.
If for the actor the existence lies in the dilemma, then he is undoubtedly at risk of being
26 These are Billie Whitelaw’s wordings, which describe the intense force engendering inside from her body as a demanding requirement for her to play as it calls for.
27 Pierre Chabert describes that “the iireducibility of the body” in Beckettian stage “reminds us that it remains an agent of disclosure” (27), which tells a inadequate relationship between body and mind, and which the body is not regarded as an object being appropriated by a subject.
exposed to the emptiness on the stage28 because he is not allowed to recoil back behind the illusionism of the character or the protection of his self-sufficiency. The action of playing qua playing is a self-exposing rather than a self-preserving process. That is, the inadequacy between the character and the actor, though it stirs the perplexing question such as “who is on the stage?” makes possible the actor to delve into himself for his unknown part. So in the process of playing the actor’s subjectivity is produced neither from the actor qua actor nor from the character. His subjectivity owes its existence in relation to the unverified character, whose inner world the actor desires to apprehend without satisfaction. In addition, the actor’s subjectivity comes into being in the relation to the fear that takes place in the actor’s being alone with himself. In this way, the actor is no longer in the time of his solitary presence on the stage but is in the time in relation to the other person, in this case, the character. In other words the actor becomes a temporal being because he is (un)willing to forgo his narcissistically self-claimed sovereignty and to expose himself to the relation with the unknowable that entices the actor into denuding the unknown part of himself unconsciously.
In the performance unto death the actor goes on playing by desiring for the inimitable character for fear of being fixated alone on the stage and thus simultaneously by desiring an unknown self that keeps shunning the definition by the self who is limited in the reality. Such a desire is not an anticipation to integrate the desired, but is the one that forever unfolds the impossibility of the union between the desiring and the desired. Thus the actor has his freedom freer than that given in the reality (which accords to the well-institutionalized rules)
28 Kalb provides a valuable observation of the actor’s action of acting qua acting in the following paragraph:
Performers in the early works have found that they can progress only so far by imagining and imitating specific personalities; even after developing strong characterizations, they find themselves facing an emptiness onstage that is unbearable for them as actors. That emptiness is the essence of what Robbe-Grillet called their “irremediable presence,” also a primary experience for spectators, a condition of acting qua acting that makes it impossible for audiences to believe completely in either the action’s lifelikeness or its illusionism……The general dilemma of the Beckett actor is subsumed in this problem of suspension: he need not convince anyone of particular truths (that his character or situation or real, for instance, or that we should accept this or that ideology), he need only keep on going, keep on acting, but with conviction and clown-like chrisma if he is not to lose his audience and with his raison d’etre. (146, emphasis mine)
and in the conventional theatre (which advocates the representation of the character rather than the discovery of the actor’s unknown self).