Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART ONE Acting
- PART TWO Directing
- 5 Underground staging in perspective
- 6 Eh Joe, Dis Joe, He Joe: toward a television icon
- 7 The gamble of staging prose fiction
- 8 Conclusion: the question of context
- PART THREE Conversations
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Eh Joe, Dis Joe, He Joe: toward a television icon
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- PART ONE Acting
- PART TWO Directing
- 5 Underground staging in perspective
- 6 Eh Joe, Dis Joe, He Joe: toward a television icon
- 7 The gamble of staging prose fiction
- 8 Conclusion: the question of context
- PART THREE Conversations
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
At the end of his book Beckett/Beckett (1977), Vivian Mercier writes:
I am prepared to argue that the brevity of the latter works is due not to any philosophical aspiration towards silence but to … perfectionism: the only perfectly finished piece of workmanship is the miniature.
As discussed throughout the previous chapters, in his search for the perfect image, Beckett has inserted more and more precise stage directions into his texts, and sought more and more complete control over the action in productions he directs. In live theater, however, even with the most amicable rehearsal atmospheres, it is impossible to have total control because practical circumstances always necessitate some compromises. Only in the television studio, particularly at Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) in Stuttgart, has he been able to wield a directorial baton sufficiently powerful to conduct performances exactly the way he wants and to record them for posterity in that form.
Beckett's five television plays are jewels of astonishing precision, masterpieces all but unknown even to most Beckett appreciators because of their practical inaccessibility. One occasionally comes across a stage adaptation of Eh Joe or Quad, but such productions do not provide the same experience as the works in their intended medium, which are rarely rebroadcast after their premieres and lie moldering in various video archives. These works have played a significant role in the development of the author's late stage plays, but it is important to stress that they were written specifically for television and are not stage plays.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Beckett in Performance , pp. 95 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989