Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century) 3031041321, 9783031041327

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NEW INTERPRETATIONS OF BECKETT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance Hannah Simpson

New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century

Series Editor Jennifer M. Jeffers, Department of English, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, OH, USA

As the leading literary figure to emerge from post-World War II Europe, Samuel Beckett’s texts and his literary and intellectual legacy have yet to be fully appreciated by critics and scholars. The goal of New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century is to stimulate new approaches and develop fresh perspectives on Beckett, his texts, and his legacy. The series will provide a forum for original and interdisciplinary interpretations concerning any aspect of Beckett’s work or his influence upon subsequent writers, artists, and thinkers.

Hannah Simpson

Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance

Hannah Simpson University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK

ISSN 2945-6797 ISSN 2945-6800 (electronic) New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century ISBN 978-3-031-04132-7 ISBN 978-3-031-04133-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04133-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Tommy Jessop (Vladimir) and Otto Baxter (Estragon) in performance, Hackney Showroom, London, 2018. Cover credit: Hackney Showroom This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to John and Elizabeth Finlay, and to Anna and Hiram Simpson—with all my love.

Preface

This book grapples with Beckett’s depictions of disability in his stage plays, and with how these depictions have been encountered and embodied by a variety of disabled actors and theatre-makers. I’ve included this preface to lay out some of the thinking that informs the shape and scope of the work that follows. I have a theory that every book has a “hidden co-author”: an author or text who does not necessarily appear frequently (or at all) in the formal citations, but has nevertheless influenced every detail of the project. For this book, that hidden co-author is disability writer Eli Clare, and most particularly his Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (2017), which details his experience of a world that reads his disability as a defect in need of “cure”—or eradication. Clare shuns the ideology of cure or repair for his cerebral palsy, pointing out how easily the discourse of cure slides into eugenicist practice. He refuses to classify his “tremoring, slurring, human, slightly off balance” body as the defective or abnormal or pitiable entity that others describe (187), and he rails against the violence of “cure” that encourages disability-selective abortion, that pushes his friend with a benign birthmark into scraping, burning, and lasering her face, that prescribed his twelve-year-old self painful orthopaedic equipment to forcibly prevent his tremors, and that classified him—writer, scholar, activist—as mentally retarded, threatened with a life spent in the Oregon institutional home that routinely sterilised their ‘patients’. Yet he also acknowledges that he is alive today because of medical technology, and

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that curative intervention has provided comfort to and extended the lives of his friends with cancer and chronic pain and AIDS and diabetes; he mourns his mother’s poverty that prevented her from accessing an inhaler, adrenaline or emergency-room treatment during much of her life. In his attempt to “allow cure to be the contradictory mess it is” (183)—to acknowledge the value of medical care and yet to give voice to his furious, unequivocal resistance to the ableism that values his life below that of his (temporarily) non-disabled peers—Clare models a candid “grappling” with his subject that guides this book’s own grappling with disability on Beckett’s stage. Come join us – a multitude of mad, sick, disabled, and deaf people. We won’t ask you to check your shame and loss at the door. We’re not Pollyannas or poster children, inspirations or tragedies. Rather we are cranky and stubborn, defining neither beauty nor ugliness, punishment nor reward. We won’t ask you to desire your life, but among us, you might choose to tuck that DNR [a do-not-resuscitate order] away. (186)

The other ‘text’ that has directly but silently shaped this book is the anonymous peer review report I received some years ago in response to a journal article manuscript. The report was insightful and generous, and I was and remain grateful for its advice. However, the reviewer and I found ourselves at an impasse regarding our interpretation of disability in Beckett’s work. In that article, I explored how recorded audience discomfort with the physical movement in Beckett’s play Quad might be illuminated by reading through the lens of disability writers’ testimony to and theorising of the common ableist recoil from the unfamiliarly functioning body. The reviewer accused me of “reifying the disability phobia of able-bodied culture rather than challenging it” and ignoring how “Beckett’s incorporations of disability are anything but stigmatizing”. There is something to this criticism: Beckett does, after all, make the impaired body the norm across his stage plays. However, I think we misread wilfully, disingenuously, if we ignore how often Beckett’s depictions of the disabled body are skewed with discomfort, abjection, and despair. Hamm’s paralysed and wheelchair-less wretchedness and Clov’s chronic pain, Lucky’s being labelled a “half-wit” and a “cretin”, Mouth’s overwhelming compulsive speech: these are not positive, ‘activist’, or even affectively neutral representations of impaired bodily functioning. Nor, I

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think, do we need to re-interpret them as squeaky-clean, socially responsible paragons in order to engage with the aesthetic and affective impact of these bodies in Beckett’s scripts, and with how disabled performers have negotiated these bodies in performance. I have no interest in writing a book that condemns Beckett’s representation of disability as somehow unethical—but I am equally uninterested in offering a determinedly redemptive gloss of these moments. I do not believe that Beckett was writing these playtexts with any straightforward disability politics or ethics in mind—but I am fascinated by what happens to these scripted bodies in performance, under the politically alert direction of the performers in conversation here. So, to my anonymous reviewer: thank you, sincerely, for our encounter. Here’s the book I’ve written in response. This has been both a very easy and very difficult book to write. (What book is not difficult to write?) Where it has been easy, this is due to the guidance of the disabled actors and theatre-makers whose interviews are printed here, and whose insights on Beckett and Beckett’s depictions of disability have profoundly influenced my own thinking and writing. It has been illuminating and energising to talk with these practitioners, and to watch their work. It was easy to pitch this book and to advocate for its publication, because of my conviction that their voices and experiences offer a really new contribution to Beckett scholarship, and to theatre and performance scholarship more broadly. Thank you, again, to these theatre-makers and their allies: Nabil Shaban, Garry Robson, Chris Jones, Dan Moran, Jess Thom, Tommy Jessop, Sam Bernard, Otto and Lucy Baxter, Curtis Lindsay, and Daniel Vais. A final note on my own position as writer here. I am uncomfortable with the idea of scholars being required to ‘out’ themselves to prove their right to work on particular material—be that in matters of gender, class or national identity, sexual orientation, or personal experience of various forms of trauma and abuse. But there are inevitable limitations to writing about an experience from too far outside that reality. So, for the (partial) record: my own body is an uneasy, unreliable one in terms of its physical and mental functioning. (For a long time, I referred to it as “treacherous”, resentful of how often it let me and my work down, but I am shifting now to slightly kinder terms, following the examples of Nabil Shaban and Jess Thom.) Years of chronic illness and a series of lingering problems have left me sceptical of easy vauntings of good health and neatly obedient bodies. (“So long as he’s healthy”, expectant mothers say, and I wonder how they’d cope with me as a daughter. I don’t think I’m a bad one.) I

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am always ready for my own unruly body to next let me down. However, I do not currently identify as disabled. If, as crip theorist Robert McRuer observes, “the ideal able-bodied identity can never, once and for all, be achieved” (2006, 9), I am wary of going down the path of proclaiming that we are thus “all disabled”, all “differently abled”, and so on. Indeed, by focusing on disabled performers as a specific community, this book necessarily draws a line between the disabled and the non-disabled body— even if that line is a blurry, constantly shifting one. There is a value in acknowledging and accepting a difference in bodily function, and a consequent difference in our experiences of the world, without automatically imposing a hierarchy of worth. Or, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson puts it, “in an era governed by the abstract principle of universal equality, disability signals that the body cannot be universalised” (1997, 24). The bodies on Beckett’s stages are very often not ‘any body’, but disabled bodies. I draw here on the insights of disabled practitioners, and on the vast and rich field of disability theory and scholarship, in order to write about them as such. Edinburgh, UK

Hannah Simpson

Works Cited Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Will Davies for making this whole book possible, and to Alastair Shipman for making everything else possible. Thank you also to Jack Herlihy for lending his combined medical and dramatic expertise to the manuscript’s final stages. My thanks to the theatre-makers interviewed in this book, and to their allies working behind the scenes: Otto Baxter, Lucy Baxter, Sam Bernard, Malcolm Bernard, Jim Bernfield, Sam Curtis Lindsay, Tommy Jessop, Jane and Edmund Jessop, Chris Jones, Dan Moran, Robert Rae, Garry Robson, Nabil Shaban, Jess Thom, and Daniel Vais. This work was funded by the Rosemary Pountney Fellowship at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. My gratitude to St Anne’s College, and to Rosemary and her family for their generous support of early-career theatre scholarship.

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Praise for Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance

“Simpson’s text stands up alongside some of the great interviewbased books in the field, such as Linda Ben-Zvi’s Women in Beckett and Lois Oppenheim’s Directing Beckett. Like them, Simpson pays close attention to practitioner experience, through carefully selected case studies, to inform the scholarly record of Beckettian performance. This book reasesses ‘Beckett’s disability aesthetic’ and revises our understanding of virtuosity, with the added benefit of capturing Edward Beckett discussing some of the pertinent issues of performance practice.” —Professor Jonathan Heron, University of Warwick “This is an essential book for anyone interested in disability and the theater. In recent years, Beckett’s drama has become a vital resource for performers of diverse cognitive and corporeal abilities and, in the process, his legacy has been transformed. Simpson’s subtle readings of Beckett’s texts – in terms of disability aesthetics – paired with her searching interviews of actors and other theater-makers, reveal exciting new dimensions of the playwright’s work and its increasing significance for disability performance.” —Professor Patrick Bixby, author of Nietzsche and Irish Modernism and Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel

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Contents

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Introduction: Beckett’s Disabled Bodies Beckett’s Disability Aesthetic Ethics and Aesthetics A Note on Terminology Works Cited

1 6 10 11 13

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Endgame: Theatre Workshop Scotland, 2007 Theatre Workshop Scotland’s Endgame: Aesthetic Disturbance and Affective Disquiet Disability in Endgame: Star Turns and Cripping Up “Subliminal Fear and Moral Panic”: Responding to the Disabled Body in Endgame Conclusion Interviews: Nabil Shaban, actor, October 2017 Garry Robson, actor, November 2017 Works Cited

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The Endgame Project: Me to Play, 2012 Endgame and Parkinson’s Disease Degeneration, Decline, Death: Endgame’s Dark Disabilities The Triumph of Contingency: Precarity and Live Performance Conclusion Interviews: Dan Moran, actor, June 2021

63 67 71

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17 22 32 43 45 52 55

80 84 85 xv

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Chris Jones, actor Interview, October 2017 Interview, May 2021 Works Cited 4

Not I: Touretteshero, 2017–2020 Not I: Compulsion and Creative Agency Not I and Tourette’s Syndrome Restaging Compulsion in Not I Auditor and Auditorium: Access and Affect Conclusion Interviews: Jess Thom, Touretteshero Interview, April 2017 Interview, April 2020 Works Cited

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Waiting for Godot: Culture Device and Hackney Showroom, 2018 Waiting for Godot: The Struggle to Be Disability Resonances in Waiting for Godot Autonomy and Interdependency The Dynamics of Performance Conclusion Interviews: Daniel Vais, Creative Director, Culture Device, April 2020 Sam Curtis Lindsay, Co-Artistic Director, Hackney Showroom, April 2020 Tommy Jessop, actor, April 2020 Sam Barnard, actor, May 2020 Otto Baxter, actor, May 2020 Works Cited

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Epilogue: Disability Performance and the Virtuosic Body Beckett and the Virtuosic Performance Interview: Edward Beckett, executor of the Beckett Estate, May 2021 Works Cited

Index

91 92 93 97 103 103 105 109 119 127 128 129 133 144 149 149 153 160 164 171 173 177 183 185 187 195 201 209 217 219 223

About the Author

Dr. Hannah Simpson is Lecturer in Drama and Performance in the Department of English at the University of Edinburgh. She was formerly the Rosemary Pountney Junior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness: Pain in Post-War Francophone Theatre (Oxford University Press, 2022), and is Theatre Review Editor at The Beckett Circle.

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Abbreviation

CDW

Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 2006

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3

Nabil Shaban (Hamm) and Garry Robson (Clov), Theatre Workshop Scotland, Edinburgh, 2007. Set design: Janis Hart and Sharmanka (Photo credit Robert Rae) Nabil Shaban (Hamm), Theatre Workshop Scotland, Edinburgh, 2007 (Photo credit Robert Rae) Nabil Shaban (Hamm), Theatre Workshop Scotland, Edinburgh, 2007 (Photo credit Robert Rae) Garry Robson (Clov), Theatre Workshop Scotland, Edinburgh, 2007 (Photo credit Robert Rae) Dan Moran (Hamm) and Chris Jones (Clov), Classic Stage Company, New York, 2012 (Photo credit Peter Angelo Simon) Dan Moran (Hamm) and Chris Jones (Clov), Classic Stage Company, New York, 2012 (Photo credit Peter Angelo Simon) Jess Thom in performance, Battersea Arts Centre, London, 2018 (Photo credit James Lindsay) The Touretteshero stage platform, Battersea Arts Centre, London, 2018 (Photo credit James Lindsay) Charmaine Wombwell and Jess Thom in performance at Battersea Arts Centre, London, 2018 (Photo credit James Lindsay)

20 21 36 36

72

73 114 115

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Tommy Jessop (Vladimir), Otto Baxter (Estragon), Rishard Beckett (Lucky) and Sam Barnard (Pozzo), Hackney Showroom, London, 2018 (Photo credit Hackney Showroom) Tommy Jessop (Vladimir) and Otto Baxter (Estragon) in performance, Hackney Showroom, London, 2018 (Photo credit Hackney Showroom) Otto Baxter in his drag persona, Horrora Shebang, as part of Culture Device’s Drag Syndrome at VFD, Dalston, 2018 (Photo credit Damien Frost)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Beckett’s Disabled Bodies

What does it mean to stage Samuel Beckett’s plays as disability performances? In 1994, five years after Beckett’s death, Tom Bishop lamented: While Beckett was alive, a certain restraint, due to world-wide respect for the author, gave relative protection to the work. But now that he is gone, what will preserve the integrity of the plays? Will we have to live through a musical comedy version of Godot or perhaps a Happy Days with the actress in a wheelchair? (Qtd. in Oppenheim 1994, 5)

Why, we might ask, is the idea of a wheelchair featuring in Happy Days such a shocking one? Winnie is, after all, already immobilised; indeed, her immobilisation and consequent approach to her day is one of the script’s defining features. And although a wheelchair might more properly be understood as a mobility aid rather than an immobilising force, Bishop’s concern here does not seem motivated by an anxiety about any increased range of movement on Winnie’s part. Rather, the intrusion of a wheelchair onstage where the stage directions do not explicitly specify one threatens the “integrity” of Beckett’s play, following Bishop’s logic. Just as the impaired body has been accused of disrupting the “models of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Simpson, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04133-4_1

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presumed physical or neurological integrity” that characterise the ‘normal’ body (Murray 2008, xvi), so here the disabled body in performance apparently violates the scripted integrity of Beckett’s playtexts. Of course, Beckett’s stage directions do not specify that Winnie, or the actor playing Winnie, does not sit in a wheelchair. The opening setting directions detail Winnie no further than her waist, the rest of her body being hidden within the sand mound. Celebrated Beckett actor Billie Whitelaw recalls hiding far more than a wheelchair within the mound for the 1979 Royal Court production of Happy Days : I had to have something of my own in the mound. I filled it with all the rabbits I’d been collecting for years […]. I had soft toy rabbits, pottery rabbits, wooden rabbits. I managed to find places for all of them in my mound. Then, when we started the run, I also shoved poor Roger Mitchell [Beckett’s assistant] in to be my prompter. (1995, 154)

Whitelaw’s performances of Beckett’s plays—often produced with the playwright himself in attendance in an advisory or directorial role, as in this instance—are widely accepted in Beckettian theatre history as authorially sanctioned models of successful staging. If toy rabbits and even a hapless director’s assistant can be hidden inside Winnie’s mound without violating the “integrity” of Beckett’s playtext, then anxieties concerning wheelchairs seem rather too discriminating—if not actively discriminatory. The term “disability performance” describes a theatre production in which one or more disabled actors perform, regardless of whether or not their roles are explicitly described as disabled in the original script. There have already been numerous critically and commercially successful disability performances of Beckett’s stage plays across the globe, particularly (although not exclusively) within recent decades. In fact, Bishop’s misgivings in 1994 were already outdated: four years before Beckett’s death, a wheelchair-user performed in a high-profile production of Happy Days . German-born Israeli actor Hanna Marron lost her leg in February 1970 as a result of injuries sustained in a terrorist attack in Munich, and later played Winnie in Michael Guvrin’s 1985 production of Happy Days at Tzavta Theatre, Tel Aviv. In a later interview, Marron described how her acquired disability, “my own experience with my leg, the way I find it hard to move”, had influenced her intense engagement with Beckett’s play: “I had long felt that Beckett had also written my story.

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I thought, how did he know? Every day having to start from the beginning, to remind myself of my situation – the loss of my leg, of having to get going, or continuing” (1992, 44). Two decades later, Harold Pinter’s performance as a wheelchair-using Krapp in Ian Rickson’s 2006 production of Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court Theatre in London received widespread acclaim. Seventy-six years old at the time of performance, Pinter had recently survived oesophageal cancer and pemphigus vulgaris (Taylor-Batty 2014, 188) and, because of his declining health, he used an electric wheelchair as a mobility aid during the performance. Several reviewers commented on the appropriately ‘Beckettian’ nature of the wheelchair, even if its presence was not technically sanctioned by the original stage directions. The Guardian critic Susannah Clapp wrote, “The electric wheelchair that whizzes round the stage truly looks like a Beckett prop” (2006), and The Times critic Benedict Nightingale observed that although “Pinter’s Krapp glides about on an electric wheelchair […] instead of tottering in and out of the drab old room”, nevertheless “this is surely a performance that would have delighted Beckett” (2006). Much insightful recent scholarship has demonstrated the relevance of disability to Beckett’s work. Specific physical and neurological conditions examined across Beckett’s plays, prose and poetry include autism (Valente 2020), aphasia (Salisbury 2008), blindness (Crozier 2021; Adar 2007), Parkinson’s disease (Bixby 2018; Salisbury 2015), Tourette’s syndrome (Maude 2008), Cotard’s syndrome (Fifield 2008), amnesia (Fifield 2009), schizophrenia (Barry 2016), obsessive–compulsive disorder (Chester 2017), anxiety disorder (Gourley 2017), and neuro-psychiatric and psychological disorders more broadly (Powell 2020; Barry et al. 2014; Oppenheim 2008). Yet when they lack Pinter’s self-evident star power, disability performances of Beckett’s work are often critiqued—or disallowed entirely—because of an anxiety that performance access measures will come at the expense of textual legitimacy, or that the disabled body onstage will introduce a new dimension to the performance that distracts from the ‘real’ concerns of Beckett’s plays. We confront, then, a series of pressing questions regarding disability performance of Beckett’s work. What is it about Beckett’s stage plays that attracts disability performance? What do such performances reveal about these playtexts’ persistent concern with the conditions of embodied existence, and with the impaired body and mind? Why such critical and scholarly anxiety over disability performances of Beckett’s plays, given that the texts themselves are already so deeply engaged in interrogating forms

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of impairment and alternative embodiment? And—following disability theory’s concept of “disability gain”, according to which bodily and mental impairment are not regarded as limiting, but as enabling new epistemological, aesthetic, and political forms (Davidson 2016a, 448)—what does a performance that translates a Beckett script in explicitly disabled terms do to our understanding of that text, or to our understanding of Beckett’s work more broadly? In order to address these questions more concretely, this book examines four post-2000 disability performances of Beckett’s work: Theatre Workshop Scotland’s 2007 Endgame, The Endgame Project’s 2012 Endgame, Touretteshero’s 2017–2020 Not I , and Culture Device’s 2018 Waiting for Godot . These productions saw Beckett’s characters performed by actors with a range of physical and mental disabilities including Parkinson’s disease, Tourette’s syndrome, Down syndrome, osteogenesis imperfecta and consequent restricted growth, and impaired mobility as a result of childhood polio. Without attempting to make Beckett’s playtexts about specific disabilities in any oversimplified sense, these productions illuminated crucial lines of corporeal, social, and ontological thought already present in the original scripts, elements not “added by disabled artists, but uncovered by them as important features of the text that have been there all along” (Johnston 2016, 106). To be clear: I am not interested here in disability performance as something that prioritises ethical concerns over (or to the exclusion of) aesthetic standards. There is much to be gained from amateur, therapeutic or communityfocused disability performance, and there is a great deal of insightful scholarship already in these fields,1 but this is a book about expert artists and practitioners who are engaged in producing professional-level 1 Examples of such scholarship include Petra Kuppers’s Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape (2011), many of the essays in Amanda Stuart Fisher and James Thompson’s Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Performance (2020), and Matt Hargrave’s Theatre of Learning Disability: Good, Bad, or Plain Ugly? (2015), which includes an extended consideration of the distinction between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ disability performance. There is also a rich vein of contemporary community- and therapy-focused disability performance of Beckett’s work, including Rosetta Life and Stroke Odyssey’s collaborative project This.Here, a 2019–2020 performance piece responding to Beckett’s work devised with stroke recovery patients led by performance maker and Beckett scholar Lucinda Jarrett (https://rosett alife.org/project-film/this-here/), and Echo’s Bones , a new 2021 performance responding to Beckett’s short stories devised by young autistic people, led by film and performance artist Sarah Browne (http://www.sarahbrowne.info/).

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theatrical work. Each of the productions discussed here constitutes part of the drive to produce aesthetically attuned and intellectually generative disability performances. My central contention is that disability performance offers a powerful opportunity to investigate the treatment of the body and related concerns about bodily agency and interpersonal relation in Beckett’s stage plays. As Julie Bates observes, disability is “an essential element” in Beckett’s work; these plays consistently reject idealised human form and functioning “in favour of the more disruptive creative potential contained within the disabled body” (2017, 116, 120). In turn, these productions are not mere virtue-signalling exercises, zealously following inclusive-casting policy without due attention to the nuances of Beckett’s scripts—although the very real issue of disability exclusion in the arts is a pressing one for contemporary theatre practice and studies, and one to which I will return across the following chapters.2 Rather, these performances emphasise or re-work previously undetected indicators of disability in the playtexts, revealing how Beckett’s writing compulsively interrogates alternative embodiments, unexpected forms of agency, and the extraordinary social interdependency of the human body. Disability “confounds any notion of a generalizable, stable physical self”, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson reminds us (1997, 24). What more Beckettian notion? Taking as a grounding principle the disability activist doctrine, “Nothing about us without us!”, which protests against excluding the perspective of disabled individuals from matters relating to disability culture, I offer here a platform for disabled theatre practitioners’ own voices.3 Alongside analysis of Beckett’s playtexts, this book reproduces original interviews with the actors and directors involved in the productions under discussion. Excerpts from these practitioners’ insights will be discussed in each chapter, but the interviews themselves are also intended to stand independently as scholarly resources in their own right.

2 Individuals with a disability or long-term illness have significantly lower rates of arts attendance than non-disabled individuals (Smith 2017, 40). Regarding disabled practitioners, Arts Council England recently reported that disability-led arts organisations make up just over 1% of their portfolio and receive less than 0.5% of their funding expenditure (Verrent 2015). See also Sandahl (2005) and Johnston (2016, 37–58). 3 For the history of the expression “Nothing about us without us” in disability activism and scholarship, see Charlton (1998, 14–25).

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Beckett’s Disability Aesthetic Beckett’s plays offer us no example of any ideally functioning human form. From motility issues and missing limbs to atypical speech patterns and memory problems, few Beckettian characters inhabit a perfectly functioning body. In fact, the figure of the impaired body is so pervasive in Beckett’s work that it constitutes a central Beckettian aesthetic. This disability aesthetic emphasises the fundamental unreliability of the human body, its refusal or inability to function precisely as we might expect or demand; it is an aesthetic “that rejects images of bodily health and physical integrity in favour of a vision of corporeal difference and human variation” (Bixby 2018, 120). Comparably, disability theorist Tobin Siebers posits the concept of a disability aesthetic common to much modern and contemporary creative work, one which “refuses to recognize the representation of the healthy body—and its definition of harmony, integrity, and beauty—as the sole determination of the aesthetic” (2010, 3): Disability aesthetics prizes physical and mental difference as a significant value in itself. It does not embrace an aesthetic taste that defines harmony, bodily integrity, and health as standards of beauty. Nor does it support the aversion to disability required by traditional conceptions of human or social perfection. […] Rather, disability aesthetics embraces beauty that seems by traditional standards to be broken, and yet is not less beautiful, but more so, as a result. (2010, 3, 19)

The marked parallels between Beckett’s stage imagery and Siebers’s description of a disability aesthetics indicate how well suited disability studies’ vocabulary and framework of thought are to examining Beckett’s interrogation of embodied subjectivity and idiosyncratic bodily functioning. However, Beckett’s plays and disability theory are not always such congenial bedfellows. Siebers’s emphasis on the term “beauty”, even in its radically re-worked sense, immediately alerts us to a certain affective disjunction here, the concept of “beauty” seemingly a rather distant concern from a series of plays that have more typically been read in terms of discomfort and an unsettling aesthetic awkwardness. This is symptomatic of a larger discontinuity of approach: Beckett’s broken, deteriorating, and isolated bodies jar with current disability theory’s reclamation of disability as a proud collective identity, one which “rejects the

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notion of impairment difference as a symbol of shame, and stresses instead solidarity and a positive identification” (Barnes and Mercer 2003, 102). Yael Levin has astutely articulated what she calls “the problem of the and linking disability and Beckett studies” (2018, 157), exploring how the activist drive to affirm disability existence as one of great potential happiness and achievement sits uneasily alongside Beckett’s “model of failure or impotence” (2018, 170). Equating Beckett’s struggling stage bodies with external models of disability can risk aligning “the idea of disability and impairment with inability and frustration” in problematic ways (Levin 2018, 170). This relation is rendered still more troubling when the reader or spectator attempts to impose a metaphorical reading of Beckett’s impaired characters, a practice for which literary critic Ato Quayson has maligned Beckett scholars in particular (2007, 56), but which also exists more broadly across common cultural consciousness. “In the western dramatic canon as well as in life”, disabled playwright Kaite O’Reilly reflects, “impairment has been a metaphor for tragedy, loss, mortality—the human condition. We are either villains or victims” (2009, 31).4 We exist in a social context in which disability is still frequently interpreted as the result of ‘someone doing something wrong’ (sin, a pregnant mother’s eating or drinking habits, an individual’s irresponsible attitude towards their own health), something to be healed by prayer or positive thinking, or a burden that renders life unworthy of living. Within this context of pervasive ideological interpretation of the impaired body, reading literary forms of disability as symbolic of “the metaphysical defects of man” (Chabert 1982, 24), “the metaphoric versions of perceptual and corporeal distortion” (Garner 1994, 35) or “a metaphorical signifier of social and individual collapse” (Mitchell and Snyder 2013, 222) sits uncomfortably on this same spectrum of ableist bias.5 In order to read Beckett’s bodies through the lens of disability scholarship, we

4 For further exploration of the cultural stereotyping of disabled individuals, see Clare (2017), Mintz (2007), Wilson and Lewiecki-Wilson (2001), Garland-Thomson (1997), and Longmore (1987). 5 Even metaphorical interpretation that is not explicitly negative risks occluding the

material reality of disability—for example, Odette Aslan’s argument that the “crippling infirmities” which “attack” Beckett’s characters “are symbolic” and that it is the job of the Beckett actor “to transform these primary physical handicaps into symbols” (1988, 44), or Elaine Wood’s recent exploration of what she terms the “metaphoricity of disability” in Happy Days (2015, 219).

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must contend with these potentially reductive pitfalls in our interpretative process. The primary models of theorising disability—the medical, social, and complex embodiment models—can help articulate how Beckett’s stage plays engage with physical and mental disability. The medical model of disability is biologically oriented, framing disability as a specific defect with an individual’s body that requires medical intervention and cure where possible. The social model of disability, developed in the 1970s in resistance to the medical model’s categorisation of the impaired individual as defective or lacking, defines disability in relation to the constructed environment in which the impaired individual exists, arguing that people are disabled by society, not by their own bodies. The social model thus distinguishes between the terms “impairment” and “disability”, as Lennard J. Davis explains: “Impairment is the physical fact of lacking an arm or a leg. Disability is the social process that turns an impairment into a negative by creating barriers to access” (2013, 265). A wheelchair user may have a physical impairment that affects their mobility, but they are not disabled until they encounter an environment without ramps or lifts. Finally, the theory of complex embodiment, also known as the relative model of disability (Hedlund 2009), builds on both the medical and social models, paying attention to the disabling effects of the social environment, but also acknowledging that certain physical painful or degenerative factors associated with disability are not entirely socially constructed (Shakespeare 2014, 11–14; Siebers 2011, 25). According to this model, disability arises as a combined result of social and cultural expectations of how a body ‘should’ function, and the individual body’s inability to meet these expectations. A familiarity with these theories of disability, and particularly the complex embodiment model, helps us to more readily conceptualise Beckett’s depictions of disability. As the complex embodiment model recognises both the bodily and the social dimensions of disability, so too Beckett’s stage plays present the disabled body as a material fact that both shapes and is shaped by intersubjective interaction. The body’s form and functioning influence the other’s response to that body, but the other’s response also influences the ways of meaning and being that are available to that same body. The corporeal facticity of these characters’ impairments is crucial to the workings of these playtexts, but is not necessarily bound to fixed ideological meaning or specific affective resonance—particularly in performance, where margins for “making” meaning, on the basis of both bodily presence and repeatedly shifting intersubjective encounters

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between audience and actor, widen still further. While calling attention to the material dimensions of the encounter between onstage and offstage bodies, Beckett assigns no absolute or stable value to the impaired figures on his stage, beyond the fact of their being there before us. Quayson reads this structuring of “disability as hermeneutical impasse” as evidence of Beckett problematically encouraging metaphorical readings of the impaired body (2007, 58), but such indeterminacy in fact closely aligns with “disability’s instability, and its constructed, mutable nature” emphasised in much other disability life-writing and scholarship (Fox 2011, 8). Thus Beckett’s plays—and particularly disability performances of these plays—open up space for multiple affective readings of impaired existence. The impaired body in Beckett’s theatre is simultaneously a source of pained frustration and of astonishing expressive potential. Certainly these plays stage bodily struggle, fragility, decline, and social isolation, framing these experiences as both common to and unavoidable for human beings. Yet they also offer arresting examples of endurance, mutually supportive interdependency, and unexpected virtuosity. As Nicholas Johnson observes: While much of Beckett’s work is known for representing physical challenge, constraint, chronic pain, co-dependence, and many forms of inability [….], there is also a deep strand of humour, care, persistence and compassion. Perhaps in enumerating so intensely the shared suffering of what it is to have a body, there is an opportunity for common humanity that crosses the boundaries of how we define “ability” at all. (2018)

More specifically, Beckett’s stage plays persistently blur the boundaries between concepts such as disabled and non-disabled, impaired and unimpaired, typical and atypical. In doing so, they challenge exclusionary concepts of bodily normalcy, particularly those standards born out of Enlightenment ideals of hierarchised human perfectibility, independence, and linear progress. Michael Davidson describes how, by scripting a stage world in which “disability is the norm”, Beckett’s work “counters the tendency to think of such conditions as belonging to ‘them’ and not to ‘us’. The human condition in Beckett’s plays is living with disability and dependence” (2016b, 112, 126; original emphasis). The inevitably impaired body in Beckett’s work testifies to the wider human experience

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of embodiment—not in the woolly metaphoric sense in which disability becomes symbolic of the contemporary human condition in toto,6 but in the sense that all human bodies deviate from an idealised standard of perfect form and functioning, are all impaired or threatened with impairment. Peopled as they are with afflicted beings, Beckett’s texts reject any baseline of “proper” human functioning. As Garland-Thomson observes, although non-disabled individuals are apt to think of disability as “an uncommon visitation that mostly happens to someone else”, in reality each of us “ineluctably acquires one or more disabilities—naming them variably as illness, disease, injury, old age, failure, dysfunctions, or dependence” (2009, 19). Bodily impairment is eventually a universal human experience, Beckett’s plays remind us, whether that impairment is culturally classified as “disability” or otherwise. They reflect the reality of embodied existence, in which ‘disabled’ and ‘non-disabled’ are relative points on a corporeal spectrum, rather than neatly discrete or enduring identities.

Ethics and Aesthetics Staging Beckett’s characters as recognisably disabled bodies, then, foregrounds his playtexts’ recurrent concern with the quirks of embodied existence and the cultural ciphering of the recalcitrant human body. Previous scholarship has recognised how Beckett’s playtexts stage “a radical transvaluation of vulnerability and otherness, using the public space of the stage to interrogate the law and norms that judge and marginalize non-normative identities and bodies” (McMullan 2012, 10). Within this landscape, the figure of the impaired body—non-normative yet commonplace, ‘other’ yet akin, and vulnerable to physical suffering and social codification—offers a tight coalescence of Beckettian ethics and aesthetics. Previous analysis of disability performances of Beckett’s work reveals the suspicion that “socio-political engagement” and “the aesthetic and artistic values of Beckett’s texts” sit somehow in mutual exclusion of each other (Horvat 2016, 172). This is a false dichotomy. Each of the disability performances discussed here created aesthetically nuanced and intellectually generative theatrical productions of Beckett’s work, combining close 6 See the debate between disability scholars Lennard J. Davis (2014, 18–20) and Carrie Sandahl (2004, 581–584) on this potential reading of Davis’s concept of “dismodernism”.

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engagement with the formal and aesthetic demands of Beckett’s playtexts with their attention to the socio-political implications of disability performance. These are productions which work to multiple aesthetic and ethical effects, blurring the previously accepted ‘meaning’ of these canonical playtexts and reanimating them with formerly unsuspected powers of signification. It is this intersection of new aesthetic functioning and ethical signifying practice that I explore across the following chapters. Disability performances of Beckett’s playtexts thus have the power to revitalise the intrinsic but sometimes overlooked interrogation of bodily functioning in these scripts. Disability performances can translate for us, in strikingly immediate and embodied terms, some of the crucial corporeal, social, and ontological concerns running through Beckett’s original playtexts: ideas about agency, co-dependency, social isolation, alternative forms of embodiment, and post-Cartesian subjectivity. The alterations made to staging practices render these concerns newly conspicuous, made materially manifest before the audience’s gaze. “Disability may be difference, but it does not follow that it is lack; it can be the conduit to radical innovation and insight”, Ann M. Fox reminds us (2011, 130). Disability performance brings new aesthetic innovation and textually grounded insight to Beckett’s plays, turning a spotlight on fundamental questions of embodied existence and interaction explored within these scripts.

A Note on Terminology Language has the capacity to legitimise, sustain, or resist social attitudes and assumptions. Here, I lay out the terminology used across this book in order to explain the reasoning behind the use of each term, while acknowledging that other individuals and communities may prefer different language within different contexts.7 Person-first and identity-first language: When referring to specific individuals such as interviewees and named performers, I use their preferred identifying language. In general instances, I move between “person-first” language (such as “an actor with Down syndrome” or “an actor with a disability”) and “disability-first” language (such as “an autistic actor” or

7 For an influential early discussion of terminology in disability studies, see Linton (1998, 8–33).

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“a disabled actor”) as appropriate, in line with mixed preferences within disability communities and across US and UK contexts.8 Value-laden language: I do not use value-laden terms that imply that a disability automatically equates to suffering, a reduced quality of life, or the need for pity, such as “suffers from”, “afflicted with”, “victim of”, “wheelchair-bound”, “confined to a wheelchair”, etc. Following Carrie Sandahl’s criticism of “words that make disabled people want to puke” (2018, 131), I also avoid patronising terms such as “handicapable”, “differently abled”. Such evasive language risks implying that there is something fundamentally unseemly about the identification (and thus the fact) of disability, and indeed dilutes expression to the point of meaninglessness: we are, of course, all “differently abled”. Disability and impairment: Although I more typically refer to “disability” and a “disabled practitioner”, I also use the terms “impairment” and “impaired”. Although I use the latter terms predominantly to highlight a focus on bodily or mental functioning without reference to social or environmental influence, following the social model of disability described above, I also acknowledge that, as Ato Quayson observes, “in practice, it is almost impossible to keep the two [terms] separate” (2007, 4)—particularly in the context of the theatre auditorium, where bodily materiality is so directly bound up in making meaning. Non-disabled and able-bodied: Following the stated preference of many of the interviewees in this book, and much previous disability activism and scholarship, I more typically use the term “non-disabled” rather than “able-bodied”. As well as resisting the implication of a disabled individual as lacking an “able body”, this terminology refuses an idea of an “ablebodied” existence as “the natural state, the neutral perspective” and recentres disability as “a normal aspect of life” and the privileged perspective of this study (Smith Rainey 2011, 11). Actor: I use the word “actor” as a gender-neutral term throughout this book. 8 For further discussion of person-first versus identity-first languages, see Bedell et al. (2018), Gernsbacher (2017), and Dunn and Andrews (2015).

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Works Cited Adar, Einat. “From Irish Philosophy to Irish Theatre: The Blind (Wo)Man Made to See”, Estudios Irlandeses 12, 2007, 1–11. Aslan, Odette. Roger Blin and Twentieth-Century Playwrights, trans. Ruby Cohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Barnes, Colin, and Geof Mercer. Disability. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Barry, Elizabeth. “All in My Head: Beckett, Schizophrenia, and Self”, The Journal of Medical Humanities 37.2, 2016, 183–192. Barry, Elizabeth, Matthew Broome, and Jonathan Heron. “Not I : Beckett and Psychiatry”, The British Journal of Psychiatry 204.3, 2014, 239. Bates, Julie. Beckett’s Art of Salvage: Writing and Material Imagination, 1932– 1987 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 2006. Bedell, Precious S., Anne C. Spaulding, Marvin So, and Jennifer C. Sarrett. “The Names Have Been Changed to Protect the… Humanity: PersonFirst Language in Correctional Health Epidemiology”, American Journal of Epidemiology 187.6, 2018, 1140–1142. Bixby, Patrick. “‘this… this… thing’: The Endgame Project, Corporeal Difference, and the Ethics of Witnessing”, Journal of Beckett Studies 27.1, 2018, 112–127. Chabert, Pierre. “The Body in Beckett’s Theatre”, Journal of Beckett Studies 8, 1982, 23–28. Charlton, James I. ‘Nothing About Us Without Us’: Disability Oppression and Empowerment. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Chester, Emily. “Obsessive-Compulsive Ir/Rationality in Watt ”, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 29.1, 2017, 92–103. Clapp, Susannah. “Clarity in His Master’s Voice”, The Guardian, 22 October 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2006/oct/22/theatre. haroldpinter Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Durham: Duke University Press 2017. Crozier, Molly. “‘Aveugle comme le destin’: Blindness and its Inevitability in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre”, French Studies, 2021, 1–17. Davidson, Michael. “Cripping Consensus: Disability Studies at the Intersection”, American Literary History 28.2, 2016a, 433–453. ———. “‘Every Man His Speciality’: Beckett, Disability, and Dependence”, in Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism, ed. Kirsty Johnson. London: Bloomsbury, 2016b, 109–128. Davis, Lennard J. “The End of Identity Politics: On Disability as an Unstable Category”, in Disability Studies Reader, 4th edn., ed. Lennard J. Davis. London: Routledge, 2013, 263–277.

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———. The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Dunn, Dana S., and Erin Andrews. “Person-First and Identity-First Language: Developing Psychiatrists’ Cultural Competence Using Disability Language”, American Psychologist 70.3, 2015, 255–264. Fifield, Peter. “Beckett, Cotard’s Syndrome and the Narrative Patient”, Journal of Beckett Studies 17.1–2, 2008, 169–186. ———. “Beckett’s Amnesiacs, Neuropsychology, and Temporal Moribundity”, in Beckett and Death, ed. Steven Barfield, Matthew Feldman and Philip Tew. London: Continuum, 2009, 128–146. Fox, Ann M. “Battles on the Body: Disability, Interpreting Dramatic Literature, and the Case of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined”, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 5.1, 2011, 1–16. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. ———. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Garner Jr., Stanton B. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Gernsbacher, Morton Ann. “The Use of First-Person Language in Scholarly Writing May Accentuate Stigma”, The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 58.7, 2017, 859–861. Gourley, James. “The Dialectic of Panic and Anxiety in Beckett’s ‘First Love’”, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 29.1, 2017, 150–161. Hargrave, Matt. Theatres of Learning Disability: Good, Bad, or Plain Ugly? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Hedlund, Marianne. “Understandings of the Disability Concept: A Complex and Diverse Concept”, in Disabilities: Insights from Across Fields and Around the World, ed. Catherine A. Marshall, Elizabeth Kendall, Martha E. Banks, and Reva Mariah S. Gover. Westport: Greenwood Publishing, 2009, 5–18. Horvat, Ksenija. “Mindscapes Among Thistle: Producing Samuel Beckett’s Plays in Scotland”, in Staging Beckett in Great Britain, ed. David Tucker and Trish McTighe. London: Bloomsbury, 2016, 157–176. Johnson, Nicholas. “Rethinking Difference and Disability with Samuel Beckett”, The Irish Times, 27 July 2018, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/ rethinking-difference-and-disability-with-samuel-beckett-1.3577469 Johnston, Kirsty. Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Kuppers, Petra. Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Levin, Yael. “Univocity, Exhaustion, and Failing Better: Reading Beckett with Disability Studies”, Journal of Beckett Studies 27.2, 2018, 157–174.

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Linton, Simi. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Longmore, Paul K. “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People in Television and Motion Pictures”, in Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images, ed. Alan Gartner and Tom Joe. New York: Praeger, 1987, 65–78. Marron, Hanna. Hanna Marron interviewed by Linda-Ben-Zvi. Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992, 41–46. Maude, Ulrika. “A Stirring Beyond Coming and Going: Beckett and Tourette’s”, Journal of Beckett Studies 17.1–2, 2008, 153–168. McMullan, Anna. Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. New York: Routledge, 2012. Mintz, Susannah B. Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. “Narrative Prosthesis”, in Disability Studies Reader, 4th edn., ed. Lennard J. Davis. London: Routledge, 2013, 222–235. Murray, Stuart. Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008. Nightingale, Benedict. “Krapp’s Last Tape”, The Times, 17 October 2006, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/krapps-last-tape-cd9x3lwdf3d Oppenheim, Lois. Directing Beckett. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. ———. “A Twenty-First Century Perspective on a Play by Samuel Beckett”, Journal of Beckett Studies 17.1–2, 2008, 187–198. O’Reilly, Kaite. “A Playwright Reflects on “Alternative Dramaturgies’”, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 14.1, 2009, 31–35. Powell, Joshua. Samuel Beckett and Experimental Psychology: Perception, Inattention and Experimental Psychology. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Salisbury, Laura. “‘What Is the Word’: Beckett’s Aphasic Modernism”, Journal of Beckett Studies 17.1–2, 2008, 78–126. ———. Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Sandahl, Carrie. “Black Man, Blind Man: Disability Identity Politics and Performance”, Theatre Journal 56.4, 2004, 579–602. ———. “The Tyranny of Neutral: Disability and Actor Training”, in Bodies in Commotion: Disability & Performance, ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, 255–268.

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———. “Using Our Words: Exploring Representational Conundrums in Disability Drama and Performance”, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability 12.2, 2018, 129–144. Shakespeare, Tom. Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited. London: Routledge, 2014. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. ———. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Smith, Denise. Disability in the United Kingdom 2016: Facts and Figures. Paperworth Everard: Papworth Trust, 2017. Smith Rainey, Sarah. Love, Sex, and Disability: The Pleasures of Care. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2011. Stuart Fisher, Amanda, and James Thompson, eds. Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Performance. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Taylor-Batty, Mark. The Theatre of Harold Pinter. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Valente, Joseph. “Murphy and the Tao of Autism”, in Beckett Beyond the Normal, ed. Seán Kennedy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, 1–20. Verrent, Jo. “Disability and the Arts: The Best of Times, the Worst of Times”, The Guardian, 23 March 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/culture-pro fessionals-network/2015/mar/23/disability-arts-best-worst-of-times Whitelaw, Billie. Billie Whitelaw… Who He? New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995. Wilson, James C., and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, eds. Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. Wood, Elaine. “Cript Sexuality in Happy Days ”, Journal of Beckett Studies 24.2, 2015, 210–222.

CHAPTER 2

Endgame: Theatre Workshop Scotland, 2007

Theatre Workshop Scotland’s Endgame: Aesthetic Disturbance and Affective Disquiet If physical disability pervades Beckett’s playtexts in general, it is a particularly integral part of Endgame (1957), both in terms of the sheer number of bodily impairments staged, and the degree to which the characters’ particular corporealities shape the narrative, affective, and aesthetic functioning of the play. It is no coincidence that the script has attracted a relatively wide range of productions featuring disabled actors,1 and this book dedicates two chapters to two notable (if very different) undertakings, beginning here with Robert Rae’s 2007 production for Theatre Workshop Scotland, starring Nabil Shaban and Garry Robson. In casting visibly disabled actors and emphasising their impairments on stage, Rae’s production offers particularly rich grounds for examining the central role that the disabled body plays in Endgame, as well as the limitations of attempting to discuss the characters’ disabilities in any straightforwardly 1 This chapter will also refer to Peter Dinklage’s performance as Clov in 2006, and Daniel Radcliffe’s performance as Clov in 2020. Dinklage, most famous for his role as Tyrion Lannister in HBO’s television series Game of Thrones (2011–2019), has achondroplasia, and Radcliffe of Harry Potter film franchise fame (2001–2011) has dyspraxia. See also Chapter 3 for extended discussion of The Endgame Project (2012), featuring two actors with late-stage Parkinson’s disease.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Simpson, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04133-4_2

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allegorical or socially realist manner. However, such discussion also highlights the often troubling dimensions that arise from Beckett’s use of the disabled body to generate the aesthetic disturbance and affective disquiet of Endgame—a discomfort which becomes particularly striking when we broach the question of casting disabled or non-disabled actors in these canonically impaired roles. In November 2007, Robert Rae directed Endgame, a co-production between Theatre Workshop Scotland and Sharmanka Theatre Glasgow.2 Theatre Workshop Scotland has worked with disabled artists from the 1970s, but its particular focus on disability and inclusive casting dates from Rae’s assuming artistic directorship in 1996, and his creation of a new inclusion policy in 2000 that made the company the first professional building-based theatre in Europe to cast disabled actors in all its main-house productions as a matter of policy (Johnston 2016, 101– 102). Rae’s Endgame production featured two wheelchair users: Nabil Shaban (Hamm), an actor with restricted growth due to osteogenesis imperfecta, and Garry Robson (Clov), who has mobility issues following childhood polio.3 The production’s development was distinguished by a

2 Theatre Workshop Scotland was originally founded in 1965 by Catherine Robbins and Ros Clark as Edinburgh’s first drama centre for children, and was incorporated as a professional theatre company in July 1975. Robert Rae was artistic director and CEO from 1996 until 2014, and the company was dissolved in September 2020. 3 Kirsty Johnston refers to Dolina Maclennan (Nell) and Raymond Short (Nagg) as “disabled actors” (2016, 104), but Shaban stresses that

this is misleading information, incorrect as far as I know. Dolly is an elderly actor but I doubt she considers herself ‘disabled’ any more than any other senior citizen. Theatre Workshop wasn’t regarded as a ‘disabled’ theatre company but an ‘inclusive’ company. All the productions produced and directed by Robert Rae […] sought to include at least one disabled performer in the cast. […] Robert made it TWS policy to always include at least one disabled actor in his productions. He also made it a policy to include at least one non-disabled actor. Hence, Endgame had two of each. Email correspondence, 3 December 2021 Director Rae confirms, “Dolina and Raymond had not, at the time of that production, declared any disability. My artistic policy […] was to employ as many disabled as TAB’s [temporarily able-bodied people] in every show. […] Sometimes the balance eventually was in favour of disabled actors […]. So Endgame involved two token TABS – and in my opinion the two finest disabled actors of their day!” (email correspondence, 2 December 2021).

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close engagement with the context and performance history of Beckett’s work. Robson came to his role having previously worked as a dramaturg on Martin Duncan’s 1999 production of Endgame at the Nottingham Playhouse—in which he “had several dealings with the estate and found them fairly relaxed and helpful”—and he recalls “introducing the director to Beckett’s Notebooks and him treating the Endgame one as something of a bible” during the Theatre Workshop Scotland production (interview, 2017). Alongside this attention to Endgame’s script and epitexts, however, the production introduced several staging details aimed at both accommodating and emphasising the actor’s specific disabilities. In performance, Shaban’s Hamm was positioned in a large gilded cage that hung from the ceiling above the stage. Robson’s Clov moved about the stage in a wheelchair equipped with prosthetic legs which allowed Clov to mimic the sound of walking when Hamm demanded that he climb the ladders to look out of the room’s windows; he used a periscope to inspect the outside world (see Figs. 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4). The scenographic adaptations were not as stark as those of some Endgame productions which have elicited legal intervention from the Beckett estate (JoAnne Akalaitis’s 1984 American Repertory Theatre version, for example, which set the play in an abandoned New York subway car, or Gildas Bourdet’s 1988 Comédie Française Fin de partie with its pink and red set) but they were enough to raise controversy. Despite Theatre Workshop Scotland’s long history as a theatre company specialising in disability performance—and despite the company’s declared respect for Beckett’s practice—the production’s alterations to Endgame’s stage directions were widely criticised as a recusant revision of Beckett’s script. The Telegraph’s theatre critic Mark Brown highlighted the casting of wheelchair user Robson as Clov, whose “debility is that he is unable to sit”, as “a particularly radical departure” from Beckett’s original text. Speculating that the Beckett estate would likely have preferred to censor the production, he suggested that Clov’s deception of Hamm via the prosthetic legs attached to his wheelchair profoundly reshaped the relationship between the two protagonists: “The pathos and cruel humour of Clov’s deception of Hamm, which Rae has introduced, are quite at odds with Beckett’s drama. The balance of power between the two men is altered almost beyond recognition, shifting away from Hamm towards Clov” (2007). The Herald’s anonymous reviewer, although identifying “dysfunction” as the keynote of Beckett’s play, accused Rae of creating an “overegged production [which] tries to desperately to make

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Fig. 2.1 Nabil Shaban (Hamm) and Garry Robson (Clov), Theatre Workshop Scotland, Edinburgh, 2007. Set design: Janis Hart and Sharmanka (Photo credit Robert Rae)

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Fig. 2.2 Nabil Shaban (Hamm), Theatre Workshop Scotland, Edinburgh, 2007 (Photo credit Robert Rae)

strange what is already in the text” in which only Robson’s “understated” performance “honours Beckett” (The Herald, 2007). Sita Ramamurthy, one of the specialist advisors from the Scottish Arts Council funding body, rated the production “poor” and argued that director Rae “tried too hard to convey his interpretation of the text as opposed to allowing the text to be revealed” (qtd. in Johnston 2016, 105). The terms of these criticisms, revolving around the idea of protecting or foregrounding what is “already in the text”, there to be “honour[ed]” or “revealed”, suggests a resistance to recognising physical disability itself as one of these already pre-existing scripted elements, echoing a scholarly perspective long dominant in Beckett criticism that sees the writer’s impaired stage figures not as disabled bodies but as allegories for metaphysical forms of suffering, confinement or incapacitation. Rae argued in response, “Apart from the adaptations required because of impairments of the actors, I was faithful to Beckett’s own directions” (qtd. in Johnston 2016, 105). Rae’s retort is somewhat disingenuous—the suspended gilded cage, for example, is a setting adaptation that seems unrooted in any impairment-related

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access measure—but we might nevertheless find such widespread criticism curious with regard to a script so populated with disabled characters. This is a play in which all four characters exhibit distinct mobility impairments: Hamm who can’t stand up, Clov who walks with a pronounced limp, and Nagg and Nell, “amputated at the groin” (Letters II , 2012, 657). As Kirsty Johnston queries, then, “How was this famous play that turns on disabled figures challenged by casting disabled actors?” (2016, 104). This chapter offers a means of reading the disabled bodies in Endgame that does not attempt to interpret the characters’ impairments allegorically or metaphorically, or to read the play as reflective of some broader social reality, neither of which are logical responses to Endgame’s framing of disability, and particularly to the Theatre Workshop Scotland’s staging of actually disabled bodies in a markedly non-realist setting. Robson and Shaban themselves emphasise their impression that Endgame is not a socially realistic of portrayal of disability, nor an uplifting or ‘educational’ depiction of disabled existence from which we might glean a greater understanding for disabled individuals or some putatively ethical or political stance on disability rights. Instead, I focus on the immediate material presence of the impaired body on Beckett’s stage, whether mimicked by a non-disabled actor or materialised by a disabled actor. I examine how Beckett uses the visibly impaired body as a means of generating Endgame’s intense affective disquiet in performance, and the key lines of disturbance, distress, and even outright horror that characterise the play. Such deployment of the disabled body—particularly set in conversation with Ato Quayson’s influential concept of “aesthetic nervousness”, discussed in more detail in this chapter—opens up a discomforting conversation about how Beckett exploits disability for unsettling affective impact on stage. However, acknowledging how Endgame scripts the impaired body for specific affective and aesthetic ends allows Shaban and Robson to distinguish themselves as virtuosic performers of Beckett’s playtext—and allows us in turn to recognise the disabled actor’s body as ideally suited to staging Endgame to the fullest effect.

Disability in Endgame: Star Turns and Cripping Up The disabled body is central to Endgame. Each of the characters in the play has some form of physical impairment, and these impairments exert a crucial influence on the onstage action, the characters’ interactions, and

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the aesthetics of the play itself. The stage directions for Clov’s first appearance onstage foreground his “[s ]tiff, staggering walk” (CDW , 92), and his disability is paralleled by Hamm’s own mobility problems: CLOV: I can’t sit. HAMM: True. And I can’t stand. (CDW , 97)

Pushed about by Clov in his armchair on castors, Hamm longs for “a proper wheelchair. With big wheels” (CDW , 104). As it is, he must content himself with other prostheses and medical aids: the dark glasses that cover his sightless eyes, and the catheter that Clov hurries to bring him. The other onstage characters are likewise impaired: early in Nagg’s first appearance onstage, Hamm references his and Nell’s amputated “stumps” (CDW , 96), and the pair are also losing their sight, apparently along with their hearing: NAGG: Can you see me? NELL: Hardly. And you? NAGG: What? NELL: Can you see me? NAGG: Hardly. […] Our sight has failed. […] Our hearing hasn’t failed. NELL: Our what? (CDW , 99)

As Mary Bryden notes, even Hamm’s toy dog lacks a leg (1994, 117). Bodily impairment is deeply inscribed in Beckett’s script. Moreover, performance records demonstrate that Beckett also paid careful attention to the staging of the characters’ bodily impairments when he was involved in various production rehearsals. Jean Martin recalls that “Sam showed me how to walk” in the Fin de partie première production at the Royal Court Theatre in 1957, and Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld note that “the stooped posture of Clov adopted by Martin in this first production has been a feature of all Clovs directed by Beckett” (1988, 171). Donald McWhinnie remembers how, during rehearsals for the 1976 Royal Court Endgame, Beckett spent time working with actor Stephen Rea “to get Clov’s walk right. ‘It’s never been done satisfactorily’, he said. They tried one stiff leg. Then Sam said, ‘What about a slight limp?’ Stephen tried two stiff legs, and Sam said, ‘No, one leg is better’. Stephen spent a long time walking and just feeling

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about physically. Finally Sam said, ‘That’s it’” (McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, 176). Beckett’s rigorous attention to the exact staging of the Endgame characters’ bodily impairments in performance underlines the central significance of disability in the play. One further extratextual indication of how crucial physical disability is to Endgame’s aesthetic and affective impact is the intriguing number of scholars and reviewers who ‘see’ or assume the presence of a wheelchair in the play. Hamm’s high-backed “armchair on castors ” is a striking visual presence on the spartan Endgame stage (CDW , 92), and the play’s dialogue emphasises Hamm’s own longing for “a proper wheel-chair. With big wheels” in place of his makeshift furniture (CDW , 104). Nevertheless, scholars as accomplished as James Acheson (1997, 157), Michael Davidson (2019, 99), Yoshiki Tajiri (2007, 42), and Anna McMullan (2021, 14) have referred erroneously to Hamm’s “wheelchair”. James Woodall at Arts Desk and the anonymous reviewer at the Evening Standard cited a wheelchair in Simon McBurney’s 2009 production at the Duchess Theatre; Shari Barrett at Broadway World and Dany Margolies at Daily News both reported that Alan Mandell performed in wheelchair in his 2016 Kirk Douglas Theatre production; Olivia Lunn at A Younger Theatre and Steven Ross at Times Square Chronicles referenced a wheelchair in the Old Vic’s 2020 production. Both Paul Taylor and Kate Bassett at The Independent described Hamm as “wheelchairbound” in their separate reviews of Matthew Warchus’s 2004 production at the Albery, as did several other reviewers at smaller outlets (Bennett 2004; Loveridge 2004). Frank Scheck at the New York Post and Dan Bacalzo at Theater Mania cited a wheelchair in Andrei Belgrader’s 2008 production; Charles Isherwood at the New York Times likewise described one in Charlotte Moore’s 2005 Irish Repertory Theatre production. Press images reveal that none of these productions used a wheelchair onstage, but rather offered various styles of Hamm’s script-mandated armchair.4 I point out these inaccuracies not to be petty or pedantic—few of us when writing performance reviews have not committed comparable

4 Pan Pan Theatre’s 2019 Endgame production at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin

did place Andrew Bennett (a non-disabled actor) in a wheelchair for his performance as Hamm—although without eliciting the critical backlash that Theatre Workshop Scotland received. Press images of the production are available on Pan Pan Theatre’s website: https://www.panpantheatre.com/shows/endgame. See Bates (2017, 135–144) for an extended reading of the wheelchair across Beckett’s prose and theatre.

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errors—but rather to call attention to the significance of such continued misreading, following Kate Elswit’s theorising of often revelatory nature of spectators’ “affective, creative, and translative”—if unconscious—reinterpretation of onstage action (2014, xvi). These misreadings, repeated by multiple skilled readers and spectators, indicate just how insistently physical disability resonates in Endgame. The relative lack of critical analysis of disability in Endgame belies its emphatic presence in the play for many (disabled and non-disabled) readers and spectators. However, despite bodily disability being an essential shaping element of the narrative and aesthetics of Endgame, the characters are rarely played by disabled actors in performance. More frequently, non-disabled actors simulate the characters’ disabilities. Historically, the roles of Hamm and Clov have been played by non-disabled actors: Roger Blin, Lester Rawlins, George Devine, Robert Somerset, Christian La Hire, and Patrick Magee played Hamm in the first two decades of Endgame’s production history, and Jean Martin, Alvin Epstein, Jack MacGowran, Barry McGovern, John Molloy, Jean-Pierre Laruy, André Julien, and Stephen Rea played Clov.5 Beyond the Theatre Workshop Scotland and the Endgame Project productions explored in this and the next chapter, a few disabled actors have appeared in Endgame in recent decades, including Peter Dinklage as Clov in Charles Sturridge’s 2006 Barbican and Gate Theatre production and Daniel Radcliffe as Clov in Richard Jones’s 2020 Old Vic staging. Dinklage has achondroplasia resulting in restricted growth. Radcliffe has a mild form of the neurological disorder dyspraxia, which impairs motor skill co-ordination; he has spoken about how his dyspraxia affects his ability to perform certain fine motor tasks, such as writing by hand and tying his shoelaces (Friedman 2008). More typically, however, the roles of 5 Roger Blin directed Jean Martin as Clov and himself as Hamm at the Royal Court, London and the Studio des Champs-Élysées, Paris in 1957; Alan Schneider directed Lester Rawlins as Hamm and Alvin Epstein as Clov at the Cherry Lane Theatre, New York in 1958; George Devine directed Jack MacGowran as Clov and himself as Hamm at the Royal Court, London in 1958; Louis Lentin directed Robert Somerset as Hamm and John Molloy as Clov in the Players’ Theatre at Trinity College Dublin in 1959; JeanPierre Laruy directed Christian La Hire as Hamm and himself as Clov at the Hôtel de Sully, Paris as part of the 1963 Festival du Marais; Beckett directed Patrick Magee as Hamm and Jack MacGowran as Clov at the Studio des Champs-Élysées, Paris and the Aldwych Theatre, London in 1964; Chris O’Neill directed Alan Devlin as Hamm and Barry McGovern as Clov at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin in 1971; Donald McWhinnie directed Patrick Magee as Hamm and Stephen Rea as Clov at the Royal Court, London in 1976.

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Clov and Hamm have become “star turn” roles for popular non-disabled actors, with critical acclaim often reserved for those performers who mimic the characters’ impairments with particular skill. An array of actors have taken on either role at the height of their fame, including Michael Gambon, Mark Rylance, Hugo Weaving, John Turturro, Serge Merlin, and Alan Cumming as Hamm, and Stephen Dillane, Lee Evans, Conleth Hill, and Simon McBurney as Clov.6 None of these actors had any specific motor or mobility disability, but popular and critical response to their performances often focused on their ability to simulate one convincingly.7 Lee Evans was widely praised for his “shuffling, malformed” performance as Clov in the 2004 Albery production, for example, which Matt Wolf described as “a tour de force of motor control” (Variety, 2004). Stephen Dillane was “an amazing hump-backed, effortfully shuffling” figure in Katie Mitchell’s 1996 Donmar Warehouse staging, according to The Independent ’s Paul Taylor (1996), and David Tredinnick apparently produced a “spine-tinglingly” performance which “capture[d] the very essence of Clov”, “trudging round the stage with his stilted legs and deformed toes” at the 2008 Melbourne Arts Festival (Australian Stage, 2008). In each of these reviews, the actor’s ability to credibly mimic the characters’ scripted impairments, to ‘become’ disabled on stage, is foregrounded as evidence of their actorly skill in the role. As disability theorist Tobin Siebers observes, “the audience perceives the disabled body as a sign of 6 Katie Mitchell directed Stephen Dillane as Clov at the Donmar Warehouse, London in 1996; Matthew Warchus directed Michael Gambon as Hamm and Lee Evans as Clov at the Albery Theatre, London in 2004; Mark Lambert directed Conleth Hill as Clov at the Waterfront Hall, Belfast in 2006; Andrei Belgrader directed John Turturro as Hamm at the BAM Harvey Theater, New York in 2008; Simon McBurney directed Mark Rylance as Hamm and as Clov himself at the Duchess Theatre, London in 2010 (replacing the equally well-known originally contracted actors Richard Briers and Adrian Scarborough); Alain Françon directed Serge Merlin as Hamm at the Théâtre de la Madeleine, Paris in 2011; Andrew Upton directed Hugo Weaving as Hamm at the Rosalyn Packer Theatre, Sydney in 2016; Richard Jones directed Alan Cumming as Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe as Clov at the Old Vic, London in 2020. 7 Admittedly, the often blurry line between ‘disabled’ and ‘non-disabled’ is particularly hazy here in the case of several performers who might have been categorised as disabled when younger but had recovered by the time they performed in Endgame. Weaving reports that he had stopped having epilepsy seizures in the decades prior to his performance as Hamm, stating in a 2014 Guardian interview, “I was diagnosed as epileptic when I was 13 and had seizures once a year until my 40s. Then they just stopped” (Weaving 2014). Similarly, although Lee Evans was born with a hole in his heart, it healed during his teenage years (Evans 2011, 1–8).

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the acting abilities of the performer—the more disabled the character, the greater the ability of the actor” (2011, 116). The previous decade has seen intensified debate around the practice of non-disabled actors “cripping up”—that is, acting disabilities they do not have. For many, and particularly for many non-disabled commentators, to act a disability is no different to any other mode of performance. Theatre scholar Stanton B. Garner argues, for example, “all acting involves acts of impersonation”, and “all actors engage otherness to one extent or another” in performance (2018, 245; original emphasis). However, cripping up has also been criticised as an appropriation and exploitation of minority characteristics which continues the under-representation of disabled people in mainstream culture, and risks perpetuating damaging stereotypes or descending into outright caricature or ridicule. The fiercest critics of cripping up draw comparisons with the historical phenomenon of blackface (Cameron 2011, 4; Wade qtd. in Tolan 2011, 21; Ryan 2015); Ann. M. Fox refers to the practice as “a kind of disability minstrelsy, in which they approximate a representation of disability more reflective of stereotypes or tropes than lived realities” (2016, 131). The same frustration motivated Rae’s own inclusive-casting practice, as well as Hamm actor Nabil Shaban, who co-founded Graeae Theatre Company with Richard Tomlinson in 1980 to produce professional disability-led theatre.8 Shaban has spoken in many interviews about his frustration with how repeatedly “we hear bloody stories about yet another Hollywood star who’s not disabled, you know, [but] is getting a plum part in some movie about a disabled character” (Disability Arts Online, 2021). He highlights the perversity of such casting: The thing is, you’re scoring an own goal if you are trying to say something about disabled people, and then get an able-bodied person to play the part. You are sort of saying that “we don’t really believe that disabled people are as good”. It defeats the object, and I just think that if you’re doing a film about a Black liberation fighter, you don’t get a white guy in to play the part. If you are doing a film about Emmeline Pankhurst, you don’t get a man to play the part of Emmeline Pankhurst, because to do that is to destroy the credibility of your argument. (1993)

8 See Graeae.org and Sealey (2018) for more information on Graeae’s history and contemporary industry practice.

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Shaban is speaking more broadly here on the subject of disability casting rather than with regard to Endgame specifically, and the terms of his argument raise the question of how far Endgame is “about disabled people”. That is, if the disabled body is integral to the play’s narrative, characterisations and aesthetics, Endgame nevertheless does not seem to be “about disabled people” in any clear political or activist sense, in the same way that a film featuring Emmeline Pankhurst or a Black liberation fighter might be “about” women’s suffrage or Black civil rights respectively; we will return to this larger question in the next section. Garry Robson calls the topic of authentic disability casting a “difficult” one, reflecting, “I would not want to just be able to play disabled characters, and similarly would not wish to deny non-disabled colleagues the right to play a whole range of characters”, but adding that, given that there is “patently still not a level playing field for d/Deaf and disabled actors”, it is “vital that disabled performers are at least seen for what parts are out there” (interview, 2017). The issue of disability casting becomes still more complex if we refuse to think of “disability” as a single, monolithic identity, but rather a vastly wide-ranging spectrum of various physical and cognitive states. Physical impairment, neurological disorder, chronic illness, intellectual or developmental disability, psychiatric disorder; a congenital or an acquired disability, a visible or invisible, painful or painless one; an impairment that requires a prosthetic device, a carer’s aid, surgical intervention, or none of the above: the term “disability” encompasses a range of often extremely disparate life experiences that cannot be easily lumped together into one coherent category of existence. While a collective disability identity politics can provide a foundation for civil rights campaigning and community support, the question becomes more complicated in relation to the idea of ‘authentic’ disability casting. How far does Peter Dinklage’s dwarfism, Daniel Radcliffe’s dyspraxia, or Hugo Weaving’s epilepsy ‘qualify’ them to play the role of the pained, limping Clov, or the blind, semi-paralysed Hamm? Or, as Ann M. Fox and Carrie Sandahl pose the question of “what makes casting authentic for disabled characters”: “Is it the disabled actors’ impairment and its physical manifestations? Or is it the disabled actor’s lived experience of bodily difference that infuses metaphor with additional meaning?” (2018, 136–137). Even in Rae’s production, Robson and Shaban’s own disabilities do not match up precisely to those in the Endgame script: Shaban is not blind, and Robson’s mobility impairment necessitates a wheelchair rather than a limp or “stiff, staggering

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walk”.9 Of course, such quibbling might be judged somewhat churlish, given the typically much wider margin of reinterpretation of scripted impairments onto non-disabled actors’ bodies when Beckett’s work is staged. While this chapter is not going to solve the larger industry questions around cripping-up casting, I do want to place the discussion into the particular context of Beckett’s stage practice, in order to probe the specific resonances of the actor’s actual body in Beckettian performance. Beckett repeatedly stated his preference for physiological rather than psychological acting methods—that is, methods focused on the mechanics of bodily performance, rather than inner reflection—when directing or advising on his own plays in performance. He typically rejected the use of acting methods that relied on the performer’s search for their character’s psychologically or emotionally driven inner motivation to explain their behaviour: “Not for me these Grotowskis and Methods”, he allegedly declared (Bair 1978, 513). Instead, he prioritised the precise physiological enactment of the scripted scene, in what Phillip Zarrilli has termed the “psychophysical” method of acting, whereby the precise execution of scripted movement permits a successful expression of character.10 He would emphasise to actor Hildegard Schmahl in 1976, for example, “the importance of the footsteps” and the “exact posture” of the body as essential to the performance of Footfalls (Asmus 1977, 83, 86), in lieu of information about May’s emotional state of mind or backstory.

9 Despite the number of Beckett’s characters with explicit or implicit visual impairments, this book offers no extended discussion of blindness in Beckett’s playtexts, in part because at time of writing I have not encountered any contemporary professional production featuring an actor with a significant visual impairment. The most recent instance of such casting was Dana Elcar’s performance as Vladimir in Deborah Levine’s 1992 Santa Paula Theatre Center production of Waiting for Godot , shortly after he was declared legally blind as a result of glaucoma in 1991 (Loewenthal 1992); Elcar has already played Vladimir as a sighted actor in James D. Waring’s 1965 Waiting for Godot at Olney Theatre, Maryland with Olympia Dukakis and in the 1977 “Theater in America” TV movie, filmed in Los Angeles Actors’ Theater. For further consideration of blindness in Beckett’s theatre plays, see Crozier (2021), McTighe (2013), Adar (2007), Moorjani (2004), and Phelan (2004). For a description of the staging of the “Spectator” in Eleutheria as a blind man in in Vahid Rahbani’s 2005 production, see Graf (2013). For Beckett’s willingness to see his work translated into Braille, see his 26 July 1956 letter to Rosica Colin (Letters II , 2012, 639); for his own cataract problems, see Knowlson (1997, 555, 579–583). 10 See Paraskeva (2013) for relevant study of the influence of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s theories of acting on Beckett’s directorial work.

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This physiologically focused approach foregrounds the importance of the physicality of the actor’s task in Beckettian performance, in accordance with the emphasis on literalised forms of onstage experience in Beckett’s theatre. Jonathan Kalb observes the “quality of unnerving straightforwardness” in Beckett’s stage plays, which “are not about experiences; they are those experiences themselves ” (1989, 4; original emphasis). Beckett’s plays demand a near-exact staging of their scripted states of being. Waiting (Waiting for Godot ), restricted opportunity for action (Happy Days ), dialogue with the past self (Krapp’s Last Tape), compulsive speech (Not I ), compulsive movement (Footfalls ), manipulation of the actor’s body (Catastrophe): each of these conditions is embodied very literally on Beckett’s stage by dint of the actors’ actual physical experience. As such, one of the actor’s key tasks is to embody these scenarios on stage; the accomplished Beckett actor “inhabits a given space, adopts a specific physical attitude, as a self-sufficient activity because, for Beckett, that physical predicament is the figure’s complete ontological condition” (Kalb 1989, 148; original emphasis). In terms of physical state of being, the actor is asked to present rather than represent on Beckett’s stage. If the physical materialising of the actual bodily states described in Beckett’s script are integral to successful Beckettian performance, then, the question of the actor’s own bodily disability becomes something more than a purely ideological issue in plays featuring specific forms of physical impairment. Following Beckett’s own recommended acting methodology, it is not merely the visual illusion of impairment but the actor’s own actual realisation of that physical state that is paramount to these plays in performance. Here, the actually disabled actor holds an immediate advantage over his or her non-disabled peers. Indeed, several high-profile productions of Endgame have tried to artificially replicate the exact conditions of impairment described in the script in order to enhance performance. For example, although the rug specified in Beckett’s stage directions as covering Hamm’s knees hides the actor’s limbs from sight and thus removes the necessity of ‘acting’ his impairment visibly, a number of actors playing Hamm have engaged in further simulation of his mobility impairment. Michael Haerdter’s rehearsal diary for the 1967 Beckett-directed Schiller production records how Ernst Schroeder asked to bind his legs together in performance “[i]n order to feel the cripple’s immobility and hold only his upper body free to move” (qtd. in McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, 213). In Andrew Upton’s 2015 Sydney Theatre Company production, Hugo

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Weaving’s Hamm wore extremely thick woollen socks that simultaneously gave the impression of swollen, misshapen feet and cut off his blood circulation, sending his feet to sleep and often making it difficult for him to stand up and walk for the curtain call (qtd. in “Yvette”, 2015, n.p.). In Simon McBurney’s 2010 Complicité production at the Duchess Theatre, Mark Rylance played Hamm with his legs tucked under him and prosthetic limbs on display, “two lifeless limbs fractionally distinct from his real legs dangled from the chair without touching the floor” (Tucker 2010, 300); similarly, in Richards Jones’s 2020 production at the Old Vic, Alan Cumming as Hamm dangled withered prosthetic legs from below his lap rug. Recurrently, then, we find non-disabled actors physically ‘disabling’ themselves in order to play Hamm, in ways beyond what is necessarily visible to the audience—or explicitly scripted by Beckett’s playtext—for the sake of a ‘better’ performance. However, such artificial enactment of disability often backfires, particularly when “attempts to mimic disability hinder the performance”, as Shaban puts it (interview, 2017). If unconvincing renditions of Clov’s limp regularly provoke criticism,11 stagings of Hamm’s mobility impairment have likewise elicited negative reviews. Alan Cumming’s 2020 performance as Hamm offers one recent example. Although Cumming’s fake legs, unveiled below an open dressing-gown up to his lap, were realistic enough to have apparently fooled several audience members into believing they were Cumming’s own legs,12 the prostheses were widely criticised as 11 To cite only a few recent examples: Luke Mullins’s performance as Clov in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2015 production was disparaged by multiple reviewers for his inconsistent limp, which became “less and less exaggerated through the course of the evening” (Barron 2015) and occasionally shifted from one leg to the other (Bache 2015). Sally Hales similarly criticised Radcliffe’s limp in the Old Vic’s 2020 production as “distractingly inconsistent” (Exeunt, 2020), and Jonathan McAllister complained that “Radcliffe’s young and healthy body never quite coalesced with that of his character” (2020, 275). See also actor Jess Thom’s explanation of “the benefit of authentic [disability] casting” in eliciting a more convincing onstage performance: “I don’t need to act. I don’t need to try to get in the headspace of what it’s like [to live with a disability] […]. So I can concentrate on delivering the text in the best way possible, in a way that draws on my lived experience, and that honours the text and its context” (interview, 2020, Chapter 4). 12 Mark Shenton’s vituperative review claimed that Cumming’s “naked, hairless matchstick legs reminded me of Glenda Jackson’s similar uncovering in King Lear” (2020), and one audience member voiced his distaste on an internet discussion board after the production: “Not relevant to the production, but what is going on with the state of Alan Cumming’s legs? I get paranoid about showing my pasty white legs off when I go

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“awkward” by reviewers (McAllister 2020, 275). The prosthetic legs “put too heavy an accent on Hamm’s disability”, The Independent ’s Paul Taylor complained (2020); they simultaneously drew attention to Hamm’s disability and to Cumming’s non-disability. Criticising the prosthetics legs’ “fake” appearance, The Stage’s Tim Bano asked, “Why didn’t they just cast a disabled actor?” (2020).

“Subliminal Fear and Moral Panic”: Responding to the Disabled Body in Endgame Why didn’t they just cast a disabled actor, indeed? The response to Bano’s question encompasses both pragmatic issues of discriminatory practice in the theatre industry, and culturally dominant ableist modes of response to the impaired body which often condition the reception of disabled actors in specific ways. In our interview, Shaban offers several reasons for the lack of widespread disability casting, including the barriers to professional actor-training programs and drama schools, and widespread assumptions about disabled practitioners’ abilities to perform in “physically demanding” roles. He cites the recurrent suggestion he himself receives that he perform as Krapp, who “doesn’t do much!” in Krapp’s Last Tape, as one example of how many directors and producers underestimate the physical ability of wheelchair-using actors in performance (interview, 2017). The “bottom line”, however, he suggests, is “money and maximising audiences”—particularly when most mainstream target audiences are still assumed to be non-disabled: Producers first of all want to make sure that they get the money back at least of the investors, and they are petrified that people won’t come and see things if they’ve got these funny creatures which are alarming or make you feel uncomfortable or whatever. So they would prefer just to make sure they get a good audience at the box office. We do suffer so much from the star system.13 You want that money back, you’re not going to

anywhere remotely sunny, but here he was, with possibly the skinniest legs in existence (the memory I shall take away from this was two uncooked strands of spaghetti)” (“Marwood”, Theatre Board, 2020). 13 It’s worth noting that Shaban himself approaches something like “star” status in his own career; see the introduction to the interview appended to this chapter.

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take risks, so you’d much rather cast Daniel Day-Lewis as the spastic than the real spastic who no-one’s ever heard of. It’s a vicious circle. (Interview, 2017)

Shaban has spoken at length elsewhere on what he interprets as how “the mainstream industry in all honesty does not want us on their stages or on their screens. […] They don’t want non-disabled audiences to be frightened of disabled and deformed bodies” (2018, 32). Alongside these theatre industry obstacles to disabled actors, however, we must also recognise that there is a broader cultural idea of a primarily symbolic functioning of disability in literary texts, which discourages readings of the scripted disabled body as a literal disabled body and thus impedes the casting of actual disabled actors in these roles. Very often, the impaired body is read as “a metaphor for evil, sin, helplessness” or some other broken aspect of the general human condition (Sandahl 2011, 22). Popular and scholarly reception of Beckett’s work has not been immune to such metaphorically inclined readings. As Ato Quayson notes, disabilities in Endgame in particular have been displaced from critical attention: “physical disability is assimilated to a variety of philosophical categories in such a way as to obliterate the specificity of the body and to render it a marker of something else”, and specifical impairments have been widely interpreted more as “ciphers of the frailty of the human condition and not to be read as markers of any real disability as such” (2007, 56, 83). In Happy Days , Winnie’s immobilised legs have been read as “symbolically dead” (Campbell 2005, 165), and Elaine Wood presents an extended exploration of “the metaphoricity of disability” in the play (2015, 219); Sandra Wynands has offered a chapter-length reading of Mouth’s compulsive speech in Not I as metaphorical (2007, 77–112). Peggy Phelan describes the range of blind or nearly blind characters in Beckett’s work as representative of a post-war “longing for less insight” and “the scandal of ethical blindness underlying the catastrophe of the Holocaust” (2004, 1281–1282), and Stanton B. Garner explicitly rejects the idea of interpreting Beckett’s characters as “particular forms of clinical dysfunction” in favour of attending to “the metaphoric versions of perceptual and corporeal distortion” they evidence, which he declares are “clearly designed to reflect features and principles of normal [sic] corporeal subjectivity” (1993, 454). Regarding Endgame specifically, James Acheson reads Hamm’s blindness in line with how the Freudian id “blindly strives to satisfy its desires” (1997, 155), and Odette Aslan asserts unequivocally

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that the bodily “infirmities” in Endgame “are symbolic. It is up to the actor confined to his wheelchair (Hamm) or incapable of bending his knees (Clov) to transform these primary physical handicaps into symbols” (1988, 44). More recently, reviewer Lizzie Loveridge has interpreted the limping, recursive movement of Clov across the Endgame stage as “a metaphor for the repetition and ennui of our existence” (2004), and reviewer Kate Herbert, musing on the impaired bodily state of every character in the play, claims that they “represent all humanity, all damaged in some way” (2006). Even Rae’s production of Endgame, in which the casting of disabled actors might have been predicted to mitigate metaphorical readings of bodily impairment, was not spared this mode of interpretation. Reviewer Adam McCully wrote, for example, that “Clov’s disability reflects the impossibility of escape, and his physical incapabilities act as a metaphor for the profound emotional shortcomings of the main characters” (2007). The culturally conditioned impulse to read disability as symbolic or allegorical is deeply engrained enough to shape responses even to live encounters with disabled actors on stage, it seems—let alone their scripted textual counterparts. Disabled individuals and disability theorists have called for resistance to such reading and writing strategies, pointing out that the lived reality of disability should not be reduced to a metaphorical expression of the non-disabled imagination. Much modern literary scholarship has productively challenged such reductive interpretative methods, and Yael Levin makes a convincing case for non-metaphorical reading practices in the case of Beckett’s disabled characters in particular. If “the emergence of theories of disability in the last decades has rendered figurative interpretation suspect”, and “the neglect of literal and material truth has been hailed as unethical, the exercising of an ableist bias that utilizes physical impairment as a rhetorical device”, she writes, then the practice of assigning neat symbolic or allegorical value to the impaired body is also particularly inadvisable in relation to Beckett’s texts, given the author’s resistance to metaphorical readings of his work in general. Pointing out that “[a]s early as 1969, Stanley Cavell faults Beckett readers for reading the author figuratively”, Levin explains that a “compelling argument against such hermeneutic practice might be that Beckett does not substitute. […] It is precisely in these objections to metaphor that disability studies readers are most Beckettian” (2018, 157, 158, 165). “Don’t look for symbols in my plays”, Beckett reportedly admonished Patrick Magee and Jack MacGowran in rehearsals for Aldwych Theatre production of Endgame in

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1964 (qtd. in Macmillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, 181). Similarly, speaking of his work directing Endgame in 1958, Alan Schneider recalled that Hamm and Clov were to be played as actual people in an actual situation. Beckett himself has always stressed that he was writing about what he termed a “local situation”, i.e. […] individual personalities operating in a given set of circumstances. They were not to be considered as abstraction or symbols, or as representing anything other than themselves. After that, if the audience or the critics—wanted to look for significance of some kind, let them do so, at their own initiative—and peril. (Chelsea Review, Autumn 1958; qtd. in Graver and Federman 2005, 202)

However, contemporary ideologies of the ethics of reading, writing, and performing disability should not distract us from the specifics of Beckett’s own textual representation of the impaired bodies in Endgame. If the Endgame script does not offer stable grounding for any fully allegorical or metaphorical reading of the characters’ impairments, it is nevertheless not a straightforward socially realistic representation of disability, or ‘about’ disability in any clear-cut political sense. As Julie Campbell remarks, “Beckett is not a realist. It is a mistake to approach his work as if he is” (2007, 254). Shaban muses, “I don’t really think Endgame is necessarily about disability […] or about a disabled person as such”, guessing that “Beckett had never thought about disabled people playing these parts, writing for a non-disabled theatre public, and he wasn’t really writing the plays to be seen or experienced by disabled people” (interview, 2017). Rae’s production did not attempt to emphasise any supposed elements of social realism in the script; Hamm’s suspended gilded cage, Clov’s stamping prosthetic legs, and the surrealist-inflected, industrial-chic Sharmanka set design all pushed the production further into a distinctly non-realist dimension, in line with the script’s own heavily stylised and dystopian non-realist elements: characters living in dustbins, neighbours dying of darkness, an end to painkiller, bicycles, and bonbons (see Figs. 2.3 and 2.4).14 If it is overly limiting to impose a straightforward single allegorical interpretation on Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell’s impaired bodies that

14 More images of the Sharmanka set design can be viewed at https://www.sharmanka. com/Home/Endgame.html.

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Fig. 2.3 Nabil Shaban (Hamm), Theatre Workshop Scotland, Edinburgh, 2007 (Photo credit Robert Rae)

Fig. 2.4 Garry Robson (Clov), Theatre Workshop Scotland, Edinburgh, 2007 (Photo credit Robert Rae)

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would have them stand for some abstract or existential human condition, or to attempt to foist some recognisable social framework onto their apocalyptic existence, how might we more generatively read the disabled figures in Endgame? One answer is to pay fuller attention to the carefully calculated affective and aesthetic resonances of the disabled bodies in Beckett’s play. If Endgame refuses any stable grounding for either an allegorical or socially realistic depiction of disability, the play does deploy these bodies to very specific—and specifically distressing—affective impact. Endgame stages four disabled figures in a play concerned with a particularly disquieting experience of entrapment and radically reduced agency, playing purposely on how, “constructed as the embodiment of corporeal insufficiency and deviance, the physical disabled body becomes a repository for social anxieties about such troubling concerns as vulnerability [and] control”, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson describes the response to the disabled body in modern culture more broadly (1997, 6). Shaban explains that his performance in the Theatre Workshop Scotland Endgame production was influenced by the impression that Beckett’s play is not “about disability” in any obvious material or sociological sense, but rather, in a reorientation of the disability-as-symbol trope, uses “the short-hand of impaired bodies or senses to evoke feelings of anguish and anomie in the audience”: I think Beckett was using impairments to suggest something else: alienation or anger or despair or hopelessness or powerlessness. […] And in a way that’s kind of a typical non-disabled person’s attitude towards disabled people. Beckett is looking at it as something else. […] He was providing ideas or experience of human existence, and using impairment or limitations of human sensories or mobilities as expressions of his frustration and his fears. (Interview, 2017)

If the keynote of Endgame is spectatorial discomfort, the play’s presentation of physical disability is central to generating this discomfort. It would be disingenuous to claim that the representation of bodily disability in the play is affectively neutral, let alone affirmative or destigmatising. Both Hamm and Clov’s impairments apparently cause them excruciating pain (CDW , 115, 127), and both fantasise about death ending their suffering: Clov proclaims, “When I fall, I’ll weep for happiness” (CDW , 132); Hamm pleads with Clov to “hit me with the axe” and imagines how

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he might “drag myself down to the sea! I’d make a pillow of sand for my head and the tide would come” (CDW , 130, 122). Hamm is a particularly abject vision of disability throughout the play: he begs in vain for pity and painkiller, urinates on himself (CDW , 108), and threatens the audience with the sight of his eyes which have “gone all white” (CDW , 94) and of himself scrambling wretchedly on the ground: “Perhaps I could throw myself out on the floor. [He pushes himself painfully off his seat, falls back again.] Dig my nails into the cracks and drag myself forward with my fingernails” (CDW , 126). He describes the condition of blindness in nightmarish terms—“Infinite emptiness will be all around you […] sitting there, a speck in the void, in the dark, forever” (CDW , 109; see also Crozier 2021, 15)—and dreams of regaining his sight and mobility: “I’d go into the woods. My eyes would see… the sky, the earth. I’d run, run” (CDW , 100). “You should be horrified by Hamm, and also sorry for him”, Beckett advised Patrick Magee in rehearsals at the Aldwych Theatre in 1964 (McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, 180). Amid the play’s broader apocalyptic aesthetic, Endgame positions physical disability as a particularly pronounced element of what makes the characters’ existence so unbearable. Multiple disability theorists and activists have called attention to the deeply entrenched normative concept of how a human body ‘should’ be that informs much discriminatory response to disabled individuals in our contemporary cultural and social sphere: the “ideology of ability” which “makes us fear disability” (Siebers 2013, 179).15 Endgame plays directly on this broader ableist response that perceives disability as an unequivocally negative phenomenon. There is, of course, a potential emotional or political discomfort to recognising this aspect of Beckett’s script, and one which should discourage us from overly glib optimistic or determinedly redemptive readings of the depiction of disability in Endgame—particularly when considering the play’s reception by disabled readers and spectators. Shaban reads to me from his diary entry of 27 November

15 See, for example, Robert McRuer’s discussion of what he has termed “compulsory able-bodiedness”, the socially constructed supposition of the superiority of non-disabled existence that “assumes in advance that we all agree: able-bodied identities, able-bodied perspectives are preferable and what we all, collectively, are aiming for” (2006, 9). For further interrogation of the construction of particular cultural social discourses that generate the “discomfort that nondisabled people often feel around people with disabilities” (Ferris 2005, 58), see Hughes (2013) and Hahn (1988).

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2007, the final performance of the production’s run at DadaFest, Liverpool’s disability arts festival: “‘Unity Theatre Liverpool. Final show. Bit of an anti-climax. There seemed to be a stony atmosphere from the predominantly crip audience, probably because they felt that Beckett was mocking disability’. That felt to me like a bit of a downer, that final show” (interview, 2017).16 (Shaban adds diplomatically, “I’m not sure about mocking, but it’s not a play that a disabled person wants to see, if they want to see something positive about themselves.”) Physical impairment is used to heighten the affective distress occasioned by the characters’ disturbing situation—and the casting of visibly disabled actors in the roles of Hamm and Clov emphasises this unsettling dynamic, to a decidedly discomfiting degree. This affective distress echoes Quayson’s theorising as to “the peculiar aesthetic nervousness of Beckett’s representation of disability” (2007, 84). Quayson begins by arguing that the disabled body in Beckett’s writing produces an “aesthetic nervousness” because of its position as a “hermeneutical conundrum” in the texts, denied any stable ontological status or allegorical meaning (2007, 84). However, he extends this reading of how disability functions in Beckett’s work and other modern fiction by suggesting that the encounter with the (textual or real) disabled body always and necessarily elicits anxiety as a result of how it disturbs normative ideals of the able body. “Ultimately, aesthetic nervousness has to be seen as co-extensive with the nervousness regarding the disabled [body] in the real world”, Quayson claims, aligning the “aesthetic nervousness” generated by Beckett’s ontologically unstable representation of disability with a larger idea of the “nervousness” occasioned by disability more generally (2007, 19). In a sweeping transhistorical and transcultural reading, Quayson alleges that the disabled body invariably causes a “subliminal fear and moral panic” in the viewing subject, due to the manner in which it disrupts “symbolic notions of wholeness and normativity” and “sharply recalls to the nondisabled [observer] the provisional and temporary nature of able-bodiedness” (2007, 14, 15). 16 The term “crip” as Shaban uses it here indicates a radical, celebratory reclaiming of the disabled identity, in opposition to the cultural idealisation of able-bodied existence. See Sandahl (2003) and Johnson (2016, 32–33) for further detail, and in particular Robert McRuer’s chapter “Coming Out Crip: Malibu is Burning” (2006, 33–76) for a fuller exploration of the queer (in the sense of being disruptive and resistant to the normative) practice of “coming out crip […] in response to systemic able-bodied subordination and oppression” (35).

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I would contest Quayson’s application of aesthetic nervousness to all disabled bodies, in all cultural representations and all scenarios. “Every disabled person is different, and depending on their impairments they may get different attitudes or reactions”, Shaban reminds us (interview, 2017), to say nothing of the range of different emotional standpoints an observer may bring with them. Intense emotional distress is the only possible response that Quayson allows in the encounter with the disabled body— there is no space for acceptance, celebration, admiration, erotic interest, or even indifference—regardless of whether or not the observing subject has a lived experience of disability (2007, 16, 18). To accept Quayson’s theory of how “aesthetic nervousness” functions across Beckett’s writing, we are also asked to accept the idea of the disabled body’s invariably unsettling presence on which Quayson grounds his claims. This acceptance is not always readily forthcoming. When I ask Shaban to respond to a brief excerpt of Quayson’s theory that the “subliminal fear and moral panic” provoked in the spectator is central to Endgame’s emotional functioning, he sighs and says, “Well, I’m a disabled person, so I’m unlikely to experience aesthetic nervousness on seeing another person onstage. So I wouldn’t know what on earth they’re talking about” (interview, 2017). Shaban’s response underscores the difficulty (even the moral distastefulness) of attempting to align Quayson’s theory of the claimed “nervous” response to the impaired body with a disabled individual’s concept of their own existence, and gives the lie to the idea of a monolithically resistant response to the disabled body. However, Shaban also points out that Endgame specifically does deliberately use the impaired body as a means of generating an intense affective form of “nervous” response—if not one grounded in a quite so immutably ableist response as Quayson suggests—drawing on “the shorthand of impaired bodies or senses to evoke feelings of anguish and anomie in the audience” (interview, 2017). Later chapters in this book will explore how Beckett’s stage plays in performance offer instances of the disabled body engaged in radical forms of joy, warmth, exhilaration, playfulness, agency, triumph, and extraordinary virtuosity. However, this chapter deals specifically with Endgame as one of Beckett’s bleakest plays—his “one-act howl” (Letters II , 2012, 626)—in which the depiction and discussion of bodily impairment is deliberately scripted to elicit aesthetic disturbance and spectatorial unease. If there is a certain awkwardness to acknowledging the deliberately disconcerting ways in

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which Endgame employs the impaired body, this recognition nevertheless illuminates the startlingly effective role that the visibly disabled actor can play on Beckett’s stage—particularly in productions that seek to reanimate Endgame’s original unnerving impact in live performance. Even following the advent of En attendant Godot in 1953 and Waiting for Godot 1955, Endgame was experienced as a deeply distressing, avantgarde production of unexpectedly disturbing darkness and bleak humour when it first premiered, as indicated by the reaction of reviewers to the early productions. A play of “masochistic voluptuousness”, according to Marc Bernard (1957, 10), a “frightening, dizzying […] vigorous, savage […] grim play”, as described by Jacques Lemarchand (1957, 14), a “harangue of disgust” characterised by “perversities of expression” and a “driving harshness that is baleful and mad, and that stings the nerves of the audience”, according to Brooks Atkinson (1958, 32). Spectatorial alarm and discomfort are key components of the play’s affective field— or, as Eric Prince has more recently observed, “If we see Endgame in conventional theatre comfort and still feel comfortable after the experience, then something is clearly amiss” (2002, 108). Today, it is difficult to recapture that same impact in performance. The play now occupies a more comfortable mainstream canonical status: a frequent West End and Broadway showcase, a vehicle for celebrity performance, a commonly assigned high-school and university text.17 If we are interested in new productions of Endgame that can capture something of the play’s original affective power when it was first released to the public in 1957, the visibly disabled actor has much to offer. As Shaban exultantly puts it, “You want unease, I’m going to give you unease!” (interview, 2017). 17 In 2004, The Guardian reviewer Michael Billington went so far as to diagnose a certain “Endgame fatigue resulting from the play’s third London revival in eight years” (2004). Several critics have pointed an accusing finger at the Beckett estate’s reluctance to allow alterations or updates to the play’s stage direction as one obstacle to Endgame’s continued impact on the contemporary stage. Arts journalist Van Badham, for example, complains that we have “been exposed to Beckett in this precise form for 50 years so the style no longer surprises”, and that “the strict edicts of the Beckett estate trap the work” in a static and overly familiar guise (2015). See Chapter 4 for discussion of the Beckett estate’s more generative engagement in Jess Thom’s Touretteshero production of Not I (2017–2020), and the Epilogue for further discussion of the Beckett estate’s approach to disability-centric productions of Beckett’s work, including an interview with estate executor Edward Beckett. See also Hartley (2020) for further detail and sustained discussion of Beckett’s and the Beckett estate’s intervention in productions of his plays between 1973 and 2016.

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Robson and Shaban both emphasise the role played by their impaired bodies in distancing the audience from any comfortable recognition or easy assimilation of Endgame’s onstage situation. Robson notes that his appearance “can help create a sense of otherness” for non-disabled spectators “who sometimes still struggle with seeing a disabled body on stage” (interview, 2017). Shaban, despite his rejection of Quayson’s broader theorising of some invariably negative encounter with the disabled body, similarly testifies to the anxious or even an actively distressed response to what he terms his own “uneasy body”, both on and off the stage: A certain section of the audience on seeing me for the first time may feel a kind of panic—I don’t know if it’s a moral panic—and they may feel uneasy. And I’m pretty sure that on a day-to-day basis, if I encounter someone on the street and they see me for the first time, they may well feel uneasy, and wonder, “Oh god, how do I react to this” or whatever. […] And I think in theatre I don’t delude myself that the first five minutes of my arrival on the stage, there could well be gasps from the audience, or shock, or “Jesus Christ, what the fuck is that?” In fact, I have heard something like that being said when I’m seen by the audience for the first time and I think, well, they’ve not seen disabled people or they’ve not been exposed, and you’ve got to expect it. (Interview, 2017)

Shaban and Robson identify Endgame as a play which draws on the affective resonance of the performance of impairment in order to generate a spectatorial disquiet. In this context, they recognise their own impaired bodies as ideally fitted to perform these roles. Shaban draws explicit attention to his advantage as a performer of Endgame in this respect: I can’t imagine a non-disabled audience, going to see non-disabled actors who are pretending to have some kind of impairment, are going to feel any unease, because they know it is just a piece of theatre. They’re not stupid. And even if Daniel Day-Lewis is shaking all over the place and dribbling and moaning and groaning, people will still be saying, “That’s Daniel Day-Lewis”—they’re not going to be disturbed by it. (Interview, 2017)

Shaban highlights the spectator’s “unease” and their being “disturbed” as the desired response to Endgame in performance—and he positions his own visibly disabled body as a crucial vehicle for eliciting that response.

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Where other theatrical productions might fear casting performers whose presence or bodies “are alarming or make you feel uncomfortable”, as we have seen Shaban suggest (interview, 2017), spectatorial shock and discomfort are essential constitutive elements of Endgame as a play that is “mostly dependent on the power of the text to claw” at the spectator’s sensibilities, in Beckett’s own estimation (Letters II , 2012, 628). If contemporary productions of Endgame are to “claw” back some of the playtext’s original aesthetic and affective impacts in performance— the shock of the unfamiliar or defamiliarised body on stage, the unsettling tension between recoil and allure—then the accomplished, visibly disabled actor can help them do so.

Conclusion The disabled body is central to Endgame’s functioning, as emphasised by Beckett’s own careful attention to the dynamics of performing mobility impairment when directing or assisting on productions of the play. However, the play’s disabled characters have typically been performed by non-disabled actors cripping up, in part because of long-term industry obstacles to professional disabled actors, and in part because of the socially conditioned tendency to ‘read’ the disabled body as an object of pity, allegorical symbol, or as a source of existential threat. Through the lens of the Theatre Workshop Scotland’s production of Endgame and its lead actors’ reflections on the experience, this chapter offers a way of reading the disabled body on Beckett’s stage that does not depend on either a purely metaphorical interpretation or a doggedly imposed socially realist or politically activist framework, and instead foregrounds Beckett’s own discomforting scripting of the disabled body. Endgame employs its visibly impaired and non-normative human bodies to unsettling affective and aesthetic ends as a means of establishing its vision of unbearable post-apocalyptic decline, “a place where everything is running down and everyone is in some way broken” (Robson interview, 2017). Recognising this can entail a certain discomfort for those who would perhaps rather find a comforting ethical valence in Beckett’s plays, an unwelcome collision with our wish to read his work as rejecting rather than profiting by ableist suspicion or fear of the non-normative body. However, Endgame’s use of the impaired human figure to generate an intensely distressing affect also provides a space in

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which the disabled actor can be recognised as an aesthetically consummate figure in performance. If Endgame is not a play which depicts “disabled people in an affirmative position, in a positive, constructive situation” (Shaban 2021) and is not a piece of disability activist theatre that “allows for enlightenment and education […] a tool whereby the reality of disability and the realities of people who have disabilities can be introduced, demonstrated and discussed” (Tomlinson 1982, 13), it nevertheless still offers the disabled actor a significant sphere of influence and of artistic power. This is an alternative type of value rendered to the disabled body, one grounded in the agency derived from skilled and compelling performance rather than in the specific textual representation of disability in the pre-existing script. It follows the legacy of much avant-garde disability performance art that confronts its audience with deliberately discomforting, crass, surreal, or outrightly aggressive material, “no longer interested in pride or entry into mainstream aesthetics” by way of any sentimentalised or sanitised depiction of disability (Kuppers 2017, 55).18 Rae’s production of Endgame refused to minimise the visible disabilities of lead actors Robson and Shaban, and instead emphasised their impairments as a key part of the aesthetic and affective field of the performance. The seemingly rather circumspect ethics of the production’s rescripting of Beckett’s stage directions, and the use of the disabled body as a source of able-bodied anxiety, in fact offer a revealingly close attention to the affective demands of Beckett’s original script. Indeed, contemporary performances of Endgame may even come to depend on the visibly disabled actor for full affective and aesthetic impact, in order to achieve something of the play’s original avant-garde shock in performance. Disability scholar Michael Davidson calls attention to the power of the visibly impaired figure to provoke precisely this Beckettian form of “aesthetic defamiliarisation” of the body, given “the

18 See, for example, Martin O’Brien’s pain-based durational performance work foregrounding his cystic fibrosis in Breathe for Me (2011), Mucus Factory (2011), Regimes of Hardship (2012) and The Last Breath (2021), and Bob Flanagan’s similar sado-masochistic cystic fibrosis performance practice in works including Nailed (1989) and Visiting Hours (1992). See also less grotesque but similarly frank work such as the performance poetry and one-woman show Sassy Girl: Memoirs of a Poster Child Gone Awry (1994) by selfproclaimed “queen of gnarly” Cheryl Marie Wade exploring her rheumatoid arthritis, Jamie Hale’s confrontational NOT DYING (2018), and Robert Softley Gale’s candid cerebral palsy-focused work If These Spasms Could Speak (2012), Purposeless Movements (2016), My Left/Right Foot: The Musical (2019) and Come to Bed with Me (2020).

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ways that disability lays bare the body as an unstable, uncontainable site” (2008, 225). Robson himself draws the term “avant-garde” explicitly into our conversation about disability performance, countering Allan Radcliffe’s claim that “disability is perhaps the last remaining taboo when it comes to positive representation in the arts” (2010) with the rejoinder that it is rather, perhaps, “the last avant-garde” (interview, 2017). If disability is an integral part of Endgame, then the disabled actor can play an integral part in staging the play to full effect.

Interviews: Nabil Shaban, actor, October 2017 Nabil Shaban is a British-Jordanian actor, writer, and disability activist. As an actor, he has appeared multiple times at the National Theatre (in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea Stories in 1998, in Henrik Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean in 2011, and in David Hare’s adaptation of Peer Gynt in 2019) and the Royal Court, London (with the English Stage Company in Ryszard Kapuscinksi’s The Emperor in 1987, in Gregory Motton’s Downfall in 1988, and in Tariq Ali’s Iranian Nights in 1989). His television and film appearances including the BBC’s Doctor Who, in which he played the recurring role of the ruthless alien Sil (1985, 1986, 2009, 2014, and 2019), Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein (1993), and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006). He is also the author of the play The First to Go (Sirius, 1996), and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Surrey (1997) and Goldsmiths, University of London (2019). From making his first stage appearance at the age of nine in the role of “Astronaut” in the Nativity play at the disabled children’s home in which he grew up—a role he scripted himself to ensure he received stage time—Shaban has been a fierce advocate of disability inclusion in the arts. Perhaps most significantly, he co-founded Graeae Theatre Company in 1980 along with Richard Tomlinson.19 Shaban and Tomlinson created Graeae to promote D/deaf and disabled actors and theatre practitioners

19 For

further detail on Shaban’s childhood and early career, see episode 21 of the Graeae and Disability Arts Online Disability and… podcast hosted by Nickie Miles-Wildin, “Disability and… Graeae with Nabil Shaban”, 12 February 2021, https://disabilityarts.online/magazine/opinion/podcast-ep-21-disabilityand-graeae-with-nabil-shaban/. For further information on the founding of Graeae, see Shaban (2018).

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in professional mainstream performance, and the company has continued to spearhead professional disability-led theatre productions and to provide actor and writing training programmes since its inception. Graeae has produced many original pieces, including Kaite O’Reilly’s peeling (2002) and the smash-hit Reasons to be Cheerful, a punk-rock musical based on the songs of Ian Dury and the Blockheads first produced in 2010 and frequently revived for national and international tours over the last decade. Graeae has also adapted and performed many canonical theatrical and literary texts, including Alfred Jarry’s Ubu (1994), Ben Johnson’s Volpone (adapted as Flesh Fly in 1996), Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw (1997), Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (2000), Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (2000), Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children (2003) and The Threepenny Opera (2014), Martin Sherman’s Bent (2004), Sarah Kane’s Blasted (2006), and Frederico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding (2011) and The House of Bernarda Alba (2017). To date, however, Graeae has not produced any of Beckett’s plays. How do you define your disability? My growth has been restricted, which is a consequence of me having a congenital disease or impairment known as brittle bones—or technically osteogenesis imperfecta—so I have to use a wheelchair. How did you come to be involved in performing Beckett’s work? In the course of my acting career, at various points I encountered directors who for some reason or other thought that I should do Krapp’s Last Tape or Endgame. I don’t think I’d read any Beckett at that point, so I was intrigued. I wondered why they were interested in me being in either of those. So I did eventually get around to reading them, and then I met [Theatre Workshop Scotland director] Robert Rae,20 and his ambition was to get disabled people, professional actors who were disabled, recognised as proper actors. We worked together, and he then suggested

20 Robert Rae was the director of the 2007 Theatre Workshop Production of Endgame

in which Robson and Shaban starred. Rae was also artistic director of Theatre Workshop Scotland from 1996 to 2014, and was instrumental in creating the company’s 2000 inclusion policy which saw the company become the first professional building-based theatre in Europe to cast disabled actors in all its main-house productions as a matter of policy. For further detail, see https://www.robertrae.co.uk/robert-rae/biography/.

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Endgame to me. And I was already kind of prepared, because as I said, it was a subject that had cropped up over the last twenty-odd years, and I always like a challenge. I can’t say that at the time I fully understood Endgame, and I knew that it was going to be a hard job getting to grips to it. Do you have a sense of why Krapp’s Last Tape was the other play that kept being suggested to you? Probably because Krapp doesn’t do much! The thing is, many directors or producers in theatre, they come across a disabled person who they like as an actor, but he or she is in a wheelchair, and they generally don’t really think of them as being physical. They imagine that they’re just going to be sitting in one place and not doing much. And of course Krapp’s Last Tape allows for that—well, as do many of Beckett’s plays, just a head in the sand or a mouth or whatever. And what does a disability performance of Endgame reveal about the play? Endgame is about a decline, a decline of the faculties. It’s the end of the game, it’s about the last years, the end of the relationship between Hamm and Clov. The disabled body is there to highlight the idea that everything is disappearing. All your parts are degenerating, going away, as you degenerate. This is something that happens to every single one of us: no matter how much we are able-bodied, we all are going to come to that situation where we lose everything. There is a relationship, I think, between Beckett’s absurdist, surreal universe, and the disability experience. I think possibly many disabled people experience their lives as being absurd or surreal. I certainly do. I see absurdity or surrealism everywhere. ‘Disabled’ situations often seem ridiculous or unexpected. For example, how many times have I been sitting outside on a street corner or in the park, sipping from a can of coke or plastic cup of coffee, minding my own business, when a passer-by puts a coin in my drink, thinking I am collecting either for myself (i.e. begging) or for charity. My impaired or restricted or “behindered” existence—to use the German word21 —makes me appreciate the world as an absurd, bizarre, disjointed, anachronistic, incongruous place.

21 Behindert: disabled.

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Then there’s the question of the body’s pain. The painkillers run out, and then what do you do? Those people who have experienced a lot of pain in their life, as indeed I have, with broken bones and so on, you understand how important the painkiller is. And it’s also a way again in which Hamm can keep control of Clov. He can say, “I’m suffering, you don’t care about my suffering, you do your stuff all the time but I’m in pain”. He can constantly remind Clov that he’s in pain and Clov’s the only one who can help him out, so he’s putting the responsibility onto Clov, to make his life better. My wife, Marcella, she works in an old people’s home, she’s a carer. She saw the Endgame production in 2014, and it hit her then: she suddenly understood it. She said, “This is about ageing”. The characters Hamm and Clov reminded her of residents at her home. To her none of that was a surprise: she’s used to it, she’s seen it. And also these inexplicable rages. When you get to a point where you’re having to be cared for in an old people’s home, you are often either very immobile and you’re sitting in that chair all day until someone comes along and helps you go to the loo, takes you for your meals, takes you for your bath, cleans you up—that’s most of her job, cleaning people up. I kind of imagine as Hamm that I’m spending most of the day sitting in my own shit and piss. So the relationship between Endgame and disability is a complicated one? Even a troubling one? I don’t really think Endgame is necessarily about disability. I think Beckett was using impairments to suggest something else: alienation or anger or despair or hopelessness or powerlessness. Becket uses the shorthand of impaired bodies or senses to evoke feelings of anguish and anomie in the audience, in the same way Shakespeare often resorted to the shorthand of physical irregularities or deformities to denote an evil person. And in a way that’s kind of a typical non-disabled person’s attitude towards disabled people. In reality, I’ve known loads of blind people, and I’ve never met a blind person who behaves like Hamm. Equally, Clov, who seems to have some kind of mobility impairment—again, he’s not really like anyone I’ve known with a mobility impairment. Beckett is looking at it as something else. And obviously Beckett had never thought about disabled people playing these parts, writing for a non-disabled theatre public, and he wasn’t really writing the plays to be seen or experienced

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by disabled people. He was providing ideas or experience of human existence, and using impairment or limitations of human sensories or mobilities as expressions of his frustration and his fears. So I don’t think of the play as being about disability or about a disabled person as such. I don’t think Endgame is designed by a disabled person to focus on disability, although it probably feels that way to a non-disabled person. Interestingly, when I look back in my diaries to the final performance of our run, which was on 27 November 2007, at a disability arts festival, I wrote, “Unity Theatre Liverpool. Final show. Bit of an anti-climax. There seemed to be a stony atmosphere from the predominantly crip audience,22 probably because they felt that Beckett was mocking disability”. That felt to me like a bit of a downer, that final show. But that’s typical when you do a show about disability, to get a mixed reaction from a disabled audience. There’d be some who would say, “How dare you speak for us, it’s not at all like that, blah blah blah”. You’d get others who would say, “Yeah, I can relate to that, that’s so true” or whatever. Quite frankly, I think that every disabled person is different, and depending on their impairments you may get different attitudes or reactions to a piece. And do you think that there’s something mocking in the play? I’m not sure about mocking, but it’s not a play that a disabled person wants to see, if they want to see something positive about themselves. I’m not a blind person, but of course many blind people may dislike the idea of blindness being presented as a metaphor for a state of stubbornness or entrapment or whatever. Although I also wondered whether Hamm was faking being blind, because it’s a way of controlling Clov, keeping him there—because his biggest worry is that Clov will just get up and go, and he’ll feel abandoned, helpless, and so he uses a lot of emotional blackmail to try to keep him there. But this is my quarrel whenever non-disabled actors are cast in these roles—their attempts to mimic a disability hinder the performance, I think. They’re so busy trying to get the technique right. But if the actor doesn’t have to worry about getting the spasms in the right place or whatever, they can just play the character, and play the story. And the piece can 22 The term “crip” as Shaban uses it here indicates a radical, celebratory reclaiming of the disabled identity, in opposition to the cultural idealisation of able-bodied existence.

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then have an authentic quality about it. It’s like not wanting someone to black up for a performance. We actually want to see, as closely as possible, the real thing. But showbusiness is still very backward when it comes to disabled people. And why do you think that those questions around disability have been slower to be challenged? Well, the bottom line is often money and maximising the audiences. And the fact is that most audiences are still non-disabled. Producers first of all want to make sure that they get the money back at least of the investors, and they are petrified that people won’t come and see things if they’ve got these funny creatures which are alarming or make you feel uncomfortable or whatever. So they would prefer just to make sure they get a good audience at the box office. We do suffer so much from the star system. You want that money back, you’re not going to take risks, so you’d much rather cast Daniel Day-Lewis as the spastic than the real spastic who noone’s ever heard of. It’s a vicious circle. If disabled actors don’t get the breaks, you can’t become stars, and then if they don’t become stars then they will continue to be just tokenism or playing cameo roles who are there to help the production tick boxes and so on. But the thing I’ve noticed in my thirty-odd years in the profession is that the more money that goes into a project, the less adventurous it will be, and the more safe it will try to be. Another barrier is because there is this misconception that it would be difficult for us, or it would be too physically demanding. And of course they want people who have had proper training, which for most disabled people even today—despite the fact that Graeae has been around since the 1980s, and there are quite a few disabled actors who have been relatively high profile—even so it’s still very difficult for the majority of disabled people who want to be actors to get into drama school, to get the training. So you don’t get too many people getting the experience of working with a disabled actor. The majority of people who are directing at the National Theatre, the Royal Court, the RSC, the BBC, RTE, and so on, they’ve had no experience themselves of working with a disabled performer, and so there are many misconceptions, many prejudices, many fears there, and many imagine it will be a block, that it will be much harder than it actually would be.

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You mentioned the sense that there might be a resistance in audiences in coming to see a disabled actor. Ato Quayson talks about “aesthetic nervousness” around disability representation in literature, “the subliminal fear and moral panic” that arises from how “the disabled body sharply recalls to the nondisabled the provisional and temporary nature of able-bodiedness” (2007, 14), and which he sees as crucial to Endgame. What do you make of that? [Pained sigh] Well, first of all, I’m a disabled person, so I’m unlikely to experience aesthetic nervousness on seeing another person onstage. So I wouldn’t know what on earth they’re talking about. And this “subliminal unease” or “moral panic” invoked by the disabled body, I don’t know. I mean, you’ve obviously watched Endgame quite a few times, can you say that you’ve experienced “subliminal unease and moral panic”? And it’s often not really a disabled body anyway. If it is, like mine is a disabled body playing Hamm, then a certain section of the audience on seeing me for the first time may feel a kind of panic—I don’t know if it’s a moral panic—and they may feel uneasy and I’m pretty sure that on a day-to-day basis, if I encounter someone on the street and they see me for the first time, they may well feel uneasy, and wonder, “Oh god, how do I react to this” or whatever. Part of their problem is that they don’t want me to notice their unease. Obviously, I’m not blind, and I do see reactions, and they are varied and I encounter them. But I think, you know, I can’t get too much of a hang-up about that, otherwise I will just spend my entire time fighting to deal with it. And I think in theatre I don’t delude myself that the first five minutes of my arrival on the stage, there could well be gasps from the audience, or shock, or “Jesus Christ, what the fuck is that?” In fact I have heard something like that being said when I’m seen by the audience for the first time and I think, well, they’ve not seen disabled people or they’ve not been exposed, and you’ve got to expect it. What you’re about as an actor is to engage them, in the story and in the character that you’re playing, and if you can do both those things, then it doesn’t take long for them to forget about your uneasy body. You could say something similar if you have a woman onstage and she’s the only woman, and there’s an audience and they’re all kind of seeing her as a sex object, and they’re not noticing really the character that she’s playing or the story that she’s telling, in which case partly she’s failed to engage them in the story—and the writer has, and the director has, because they’ve made a play that’s boring, and they’ve given the audience space to look at stuff that is really

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irrelevant. If I come across audiences that just talk about my disability after the show, then as an actor I’ve failed. But generally, no, I can’t imagine a non-disabled audience, going to see non-disabled actors who are pretending to have some kind of impairment, are going to feel any unease, because they know it is just a piece of theatre. They’re not stupid. And even if Daniel Day-Lewis is shaking all over the place and dribbling and moaning and groaning, people will still be saying, “That’s Daniel Day-Lewis”—they’re not going to be disturbed by it. In a way, I think yes, possibly, people who are not used to seeing a disabled person in the flesh and are seeing it for the first time on stage may feel an unease. But as I say, it won’t happen for Endgame, because very few disabled people get to be in that, and even the two characters in the dustbin who are supposed to be amputees, you never see that. Now, what would be interesting would be if you knock the dustbins over and Nagg and Nell fell out, and you saw, yeah, wow, they really haven’t got any legs! They’re crawling about! Which I might do! I’d do that, just to disturb the audience! You want unease, I’m going to give you unease!

Garry Robson, actor, November 2017 Garry Robson is an actor, writer, singer, director and performance artist, and the founder and director of disability-led theatre production company Fittings Multimedia Arts. He’s a frequent collaborator with Graeae, having performed in Jim Cartwright’s Two (1998), Mike Kenny’s Fittings: The Last Freakshow (2005, produced in collaboration with Robson’s company Fittings), Reasons to be Cheerful (2010, 2012), and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (2014), as well as in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Paralympic Games, directed by Graeae’s current artistic director Jenny Sealey. He also performs with disability theatre company Ramps on the Moon, including most recently in Pete Townsend’s The Who’s Tommy (2017) and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good (2018). He’s the director of The Unlimited House of Krip (2018), a documentary charting the formation of a “House” of Deaf performers to walk in the Legendary House of Suarez Vogue Ball, and has appeared on BBC television dramas including Silent Witness (2005–2020) and Casualty (2015), and as the presenter of CBBC children’s game show Crisis Control (2009). He has also served as the artistic director of Birds of Paradise Theatre Company, artistic director of disability arts festival DaDaFest International in 2008 and 2010, Drama Advisor for

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the Arts Council England and—somewhat ironically, given their criticism of Theatre Workshop Scotland’s Endgame—the Scottish Arts Council. How do you define your own disability? I operate pretty much within the social model and refer to myself as a disabled person.23 The medical model says I have impaired mobility due to polio as a young child and am a wheelchair user. How did you come to be involved in performing Beckett’s work? And were you aware of any interactions that the production had with the Beckett estate? I was approached by Theatre Workshop Scotland, where I had worked in the past. At that time the company made integrated productions featuring mixed casts of disabled and non-disabled professional performers. I was not aware of what involvement, if any, they had had with the Beckett estate. While working at Nottingham Playhouse some years previously on a version of Endgame directed by Martin Duncan, I had acted as dramaturg and had had several dealings with the estate, and had found them fairly relaxed and helpful. What are your memories of rehearsing and performing Endgame? A wonderful set designed by Russian kinetic sculptors Sharmanka. A very strong team of actors. Introducing the director to the Beckett’s Notebooks and him treating the Endgame one as something of a bible. Lots of awkward lines to learn but loving the text. Discovering the comedy. What are your memories of how people responded to the production? Very positively. I still get stopped and complimented… although of course I’m easily recognisable. Do you think Endgame has something particular to offer the disability performance? Does it lend itself particularly well to a disability-centric production?

23 Here, Robson refers to the distinction between the “medical model” of disability,

which frames disability as a specific fault or defect within an individual’s body, and the “social model” of disability, which argues that people with impairments are ‘disabled’ by the shortcomings of the constructed environment in which they live. See this book’s introductory chapter for a fuller discussion of the medical, social, and complex embodiment models of disability.

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Not particularly. I’ve always thought Beckett lends itself well to, for want of a better word, “colour-blind casting”. The situations he creates, the conversations he envisages, are universal. However, for audiences who sometimes still struggle with seeing a disabled body on stage, the setting of Endgame—a place where everything is running down and everyone is in some way broken—can allow the disabled body to make perfect sense. It can help create a sense of otherness. And a disability production of the play offers a lived experience of the disabilities Beckett ascribes to his characters. However, a good disabled actor is the same as any other actor. After an initial frisson, hopefully the audience see just the character. How would you respond to the argument that able-bodied actors in Endgame may be “cripping up”?24 I think this is a very difficult argument. I would not want to just be able to play disabled characters, and similarly would not wish to deny non-disabled colleagues the right to play a whole range of characters. However, there is patently still not a level playing field for d/Deaf and disabled actors, and it is often only “disabled characters” they are considered for—although this is improving. It is vital that disabled performers are at least seen for what parts there are out there. Allan Radcliffe claimed in 2010 that “disability is perhaps the last remaining taboo when it comes to positive representation in the arts”.25 Would you agree? Or as others have put it, the last avant-garde. Yes, in terms of many directors, casting directors, producers who can only see—if they see us at all—the difficulties and not the creative possibilities. And for many writers we are still largely a metaphor for evil, or for bravely struggling against the odds. But not for all.

24 The term “cripping up” refers to the practice of able-bodied performers ‘acting’ disabilities which they do not themselves have. See the section “Disability in Endgame: Star Turns and Cripping Up” in this chapter for fuller discussion. 25 https://www.list.co.uk/article/30730-dadafest-international-scotland-showcaseswork-by-deaf-and-disabled-practitioners/.

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Works Cited Acheson, James. Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice: Criticism, Drama and Early Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1997. Adar, Einat. “From Irish Philosophy to Irish Theatre: The Blind (Wo)Man Made to See”, Estudios Irlandeses 12, 2007, 1–11. Aslan, Odette. Roger Blin and Twentieth-Century Playwrights, trans. Ruby Cohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Asmus, Walter. “Practical Aspects of Theatre, Radio and Television: Rehearsal Notes for the German Première of Beckett’s That Time and Footfalls at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt, Berlin”, trans. Helen Watanabe, Journal of Beckett Studies 2, 1977, 82–95. Atkinson, Brooks. “Beckett’s Endgame”, The New York Times, 29 January 1958, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/ reviews/beckett-endgame.html Australian Stage, “Endgame / The Eleventh Hour”, 21 October 2008, https:// www.australianstage.com.au/200810211995/reviews/miaf/endgame-%7Cthe-eleventh-hour.html Bacalzo, Dan. “Endgame: John Turturro Disappoints in This Otherwise WellActed Production of Samuel Beckett’s Post-apocalyptic Drama”, Theater Mania, 1 May 2008, https://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/ reviews/endgame_13746.html Bache, Byron. “Theatre Review: Does Beckett’s Endgame Still Belong on the Main Stage at Melbourne Theatre Company? This Reviewer Thinks Not”, Herald Sun, 1 April 2015, https://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/ arts/theatre-review-does-becketts-endgame-still-belong-on-the-main-stageat-melbourne-theatre-company-this-critic-thinks-not/news-story/16b64a947 5892295a774cce83c6e3c7c Badham, Van. “Endgame Review—Innovation Choked by Samuel Beckett’s Strict Staging Edicts”, The Guardian, 6 April 2015, https://www.thegua rdian.com/culture/2015/apr/06/endgame-review-innovation-choked-bysamuel-becketts-strict-staging-edicts Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, 1978. Bano, Tim. “Endgame”, The Stage, 5 February 2020, https://www.thestage. co.uk/reviews/endgame-and-rough-for-theatre-ii-review-at-the-old-vic-lon don---wonderful-comic-performances-from-alan-cumming-and-daniel-rad cliffe Barrett, Shari. “BBW Review: Beckett’s Endgame Brings the Absurdist’s World to the Kirk Douglas Theatre”, Broadway World, 2 May 2016, https:// www.broadwayworld.com/los-angeles/article/BWW-Review-Becketts-END GAME-Brings-the-Absurdists-World-to-the-Kirk-Douglas-Theatre-20160502 Barron, Aleksia. “Endgame”, Arts Hub, 30 March 2015, https://www.artshub. com.au/2015/03/30/endgame-247566/

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Bassett, Kate. “Endgame, Albery, London; Ladybird, Royal Court Upstairs, London; When the Night Begins, Hampstead, London”, The Independent, 14 March 2004, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatredance/reviews/endgame-albery-londonladybird-royal-court-upstairs-london when-the-night-begins-hampstead-london-64395.html Bates, Julie. Beckett’s Art of Salvage: Writing and Material Imagination, 1932– 1987 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 2006. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: 1941–1956, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Bennett, Ray. “Theatre Review: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame”, The Cliff Edge, 11 March 2004, http://thecliffedge.com/?p=7455 Bernard, Marc. Review of Fin de partie, Nouvelles Littéraires 10, 9 May 1957. English translation by Larysa Mykyta and Mark Schumacher, printed in Graver and Federman 2005, 183–184. Billington, Michael. “Endgame”, The Guardian, 11 March 2004, https://www. theguardian.com/stage/2004/mar/11/theatre Bixby, Patrick. “‘this… this… thing’: The Endgame Project, Corporeal Difference, and the Ethics of Witnessing”, Journal of Beckett Studies 27.1, 2018, 112–127. Brown, Mark. “Endgame: Another Side of Beckett”, The Telegraph, 28 November 2007, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture.theatre/3669567/ Endgame-Another-side-of-Beckett.html Bryden, Mary. “Endgame Review”, Journal of Beckett Studies 3.2, 1994, 117– 120. Cameron, Ben. “Sharing the Spotlight”, American Theatre 18.4, 2011, 4. Campbell, Julie. “The Entrapment of the Female Body in Beckett’s Plays in Relation to Jung’s Third Tavistock Lecture”, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 15, 2005, 161–172. ———. “Endgame and Performance”, in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, ed. Mark S. Byron, 2007, 253–274. Crozier, Molly. “‘Aveugle comme le destin’: Blindness and its Inevitability in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre”, French Studies, 2021, 1–17. Davidson, Michael. Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. ———. “‘Every Man His Speciality’: Beckett, Disability, and Dependence”, in Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism, Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury, 2016, 109–128. ———. Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Elswit, Kate. Watching Weimar Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

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Evans, Lee. The Life of Lee. London: Penguin, 2011. Evening Standard, “Mark Rylance Is a Masterclass in Hamm Acting in Endgame”, 15 October 2009, https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/theatre/ mark-rylance-is-a-masterclass-in-hamm-acting-in-endgame-7417062.html Ferris, Jim. “Aesthetic Distance and the Fiction of Disability”, in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, 56–67. Fox, Ann M. “Reclaiming the Ordinary Extraordinary Body, or, the Importance of The Glass Menagerie for Literary Disability Studies”, in Johnston 2016, 129–152. Fox, Ann M., and Carrie Sandahl. “Beyond ‘Cripping Up’: An Introduction”, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 12.2, 2018, 121–127. Friedman, Emily. “Dyspraxia Explains Harry Potter’s Klutziness”, ABC News, 18 August 2008, https://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=5605093&page=1 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Garner Jr., Stanton B. Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre: Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement. London: Palgrave, 2018. Graf, Stephen. “Seeing ‘the Boards’: An Interview with Vahid Rahbani on the Iranian Production of Eleutheria”, The Beckett Circle, Spring 2013, 4–8. Graver, Lawrence, and Raymond Federman, eds. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 2005. Hahn, Harlan. “The Politics of Physical Difference: Disability and Discrimination”, Journal of Social Issues 44, 1988, 39–47. Hales, Sally. “Review: Endgame at Old Vic”, Exeunt, 8 February 2020, http:// exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/review-endgame-old-vic/ Hartley, Alexander. “Beckett’s Legal Scuffles and the Interpretation of the Plays”, Journal of Modern Literature 43.3, 2020, 132–149. The Herald, “Endgame, Theatre Workshop, Edinburgh”, 6 November 2007, https://www.heraldscotland.com/default_content/12448999.endgame-the atre-workshop-edinburgh/ Herbert, Kate. “Review: For Samuel Beckett, Eleventh Hour, Nov 29, 2006”, Kate Herbert Theatre Reviews, 20 November 2006, https://kateherbertthea trereviews.blogspot.com/2006/11/for-samuel-beckett-eleventh-hour-nov29.html Horvat, Ksenija. “Mindscapes Among Thistle: Producing Samuel Beckett’s Plays in Scotland”, in Staging Beckett in Great Britain, ed. David Tucker and Trish McTighe. London: Bloomsbury, 157–176. Hughes, Bill. “Fear, Pity and Disgust: Emotions and the Non-Disabled Imaginary”, in Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. Nick Watson and Simo Vehmas. London: Routledge, 2013, 67–78.

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Isherwood, Charles. “A Sugarplum Vision Becomes a Taunting Specter”, New York Times, 25 February 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/25/the ater/reviews/a-sugarplum-vision-becomes-a-taunting-specter.html Johnston, Kirsty. Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Kalb, Jonathan. Beckett in Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Kuppers, Petra. Theatre & Disability. London: Palgrave, 2017. Lawson, Mark. “Endgame Review—Daniel Radcliffe and Alan Cumming Await the Apocalypse”, The Guardian, 5 February 2020, https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2020/feb/05/endgame-review-daniel-radcliffe-alan-cumming Lemarchand, Jacques. “Fin de partie de Samuel Beckett au Studio des ChampsElysées”, Le Figaro Littéraire 14, 11 May 1957. English translation by Jean M. Sommermeyer, printed in Graver and Federman, 2005, 185–187. Levin, Yael. “Univocity, Exhaustion and Failing Better: Reading Beckett with Disability Studies”, Journal of Beckett Studies 27.2, 2018, 157–174. Loewenthal, Robyn. “A New Stage: Dana Elcar, Who Will Play in Waiting for Godot, Is Learning That Blindness Doesn’t Have to Stop Him from Being Active”, Los Angeles Times, 11 June 1992, https://www.latimes.com/ archives/la-xpm-1992-06-11-vl-275-story.html Loveridge, Lizzie. “Endgame”, Curtain Up, 10 March 2004, http://www.cur tainup.com/endgame.html Lukowsi, Andrzej. “Endgame”, Time Out, 5 February 2020, https://www.tim eout.com/london/theatre/endgame-cancelled Lunn, Olivia. “Review: Endgame, The Old Vic”, A Younger Theatre, 18 February 2020, https://www.ayoungertheatre.com/review-endgame-andrough-for-theatre-ii-the-old-vic/ Margolies, Dany. “Theater Review: Kirk Douglas Theatre Delivers a Winning Endgame”, Daily News, 13 May 2016, https://www.dailynews.com/2016/ 05/13/theater-review-kirk-douglas-theatre-delivers-a-winning-endgame/ “Marwood”. Post on Theatre Board discussion board “Endgame/Rough—Old Vic”, 16 February 2020, https://theatreboard.co.uk/post/336127 McAllister, Jonathan. “Rough for Theatre II and Endgame, directed by Richard Jones”, Journal of Beckett Studies 29.2, 2020, 273–280. McCully, Adam. “Review: Endgame”, The Skinny, 7 December 2007, https:// www.theskinny.co.uk/theatre/shows/reviews/endgame McMillan, Dougald, and Martha Fehsenfeld. Beckett in the Theatre: The Author as Practical Playwright and Director. London: John Calder, 1988.

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McMullan, Anna. Beckett’s Intermedial Ecosystems: Closed Space Environments Across the Stage, Prose and Media Works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006. McTighe, Trish. “Eye: Failing, Myopic, Grainy”, in The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. London: Palgrave, 2013, 13–34. Moorjani, Angela. “Peau de chagrin: Beckett and Bion on Looking Not to See”, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 14, 2004, 25–38. Paraskeva, Anthony. “Beckett, Biomechanics and Eisenstein’s Reading of Kleist’s Marionettes”, Journal of Beckett Studies 22.2, 2013, 161–179. Phelan, Peggy. “Lessons in Blindness from Samuel Beckett”, PMLA 119.5, 2004, 1279–1288. Prince, Eric. “A Storm in a Billycan: Godot and Endgame in Sydney”, Journal of Beckett Studies 11.2, 2002, 98–108. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Radcliffe, Allan. “Dadafest International Scotland Showcases Work by Deaf and Disabled Practitioners”, The List, 15 November 2010, https://www.list.co. uk/article/30730-dadafest-international-scotland-showcases-work-by-deafand-disabled-practitioners/ Robson, Garry. Interview with Hannah Simpson. November 2017. Ross, Steven. “The Old Vic Streams a Double Dose of Beckett, Full of Stars and Void of Natural Tides”, Times Square Chronicles, 20 April 2020, https://t2conline.com/the-old-vic-streams-a-double-dose-of-beckettfull-of-stars-and-void-of-natural-tides/ Ryan, Frances. “We Wouldn’t Accept Actors Blacking Up, So Why Applaud ‘Cripping Up’?”, The Guardian, 13 January 2015, https://www.thegua rdian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/13/eddie-redmayne-golden-globe-ste phen-hawking-disabled-actors-characters Sandahl, Carrie. “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer? Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance”, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9.1–2, 2003, 25–56. ———. “Seven Plays About Physical Difference”, American Theatre 18.4, 2011, 22–28. Scheck, Frank. “Winning Endgame”, New York Post, 2 May 2008, https://nyp ost.com/2008/05/02/winning-endgame/ Sealey, Jenny, ed. Reasons to be Graeae: A Work in Progress. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Shaban, Nabil. Interview with Alan Stevens. “Nabil Shaban”, Kaldor City, Spring 1993, https://www.kaldorcity.com/people/DWnsinterview.html ———. Interview with Hannah Simpson, October 2017.

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———. “How It All Began: Interview with Jenny Sealey”, in Reasons to be Graeae: A Work in Progress, ed. Jenny Sealey. London: Bloomsbury, 2018, 24–35. ———. Interview with Nickie Miles-Wildin. “Podcast ep. 21 Disability and… Graeae with Nabil Shaban”, Disability Arts Online, 12 February 2021, https://disabilityarts.online/magazine/opinion/podcast-ep-21-disabi lity-and-graeae-with-nabil-shaban/ Shenton, Mark, “Review—Alan Cumming and Daniel Radcliffe in Endgame at the Old Vic”, London Theatre, 5 February 2020, https://www.londonthe atre.co.uk/reviews/review-alan-cumming-and-daniel-radcliffe-in-endgame-atthe-old-vic Shinn, Christopher. “Disability Is Not Just a Metaphor”, The Atlantic, 23 July 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/07/ why-disabled-characters-are-never-played-by-disabled-actors/374822/ Siebers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010. ———. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. ———. “Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment—For Identity Politics in a New Register”, in Disability Studies Readers, ed. Lennard J. Davis. London: Routledge, 2013, 278–297. Swain, Marianka. “Endgame/Rough for Theatre II , Old Vic Review—Beckett Played for Laughs”, The Arts Desk, 5 February 2020, https://theartsdesk. com/theatre/endgamerough-theatre-ii-old-vic-review-beckett-played-laughs Tajiri, Yoshiki. Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism. London: Palgrave, 2007. Taylor, Paul. “Theatre Endgame Donmar Warehouse”, The Independent, 18 April 1996, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-end game-donmar-warehouse-1305606.html ———. “Endgame, Albery Theatre, London: Odd Couple Make an Inspired Double Act”, The Independent, 11 March 2004, https://www.independent. co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/endgame-albery-theatrelondon-565953.html ———. “Daniel Radcliffe’s Sarky Slapstick Is Brilliant in Endgame, a Stark Vision of a Post-Apocalyptic World—Review”, The Independent, 5 February 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/culture/endgamedaniel-radcliffe-alan-cumming-review-old-vic-samuel-beckett-a9319357.html Tolan, Kathleen, ed. “We Are Not a Metaphor: A Conversation about Representation”, American Theatre 18.4, 2011, 17–21. Tomlinson, Richard. Disability, Theatre, and Education. London: Souvenir Press, 1982. Tucker, David. “Review of Endgame, Directed by Simon McBurney”, Journal of Beckett Studies 19.2, 2010, 298–305.

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Weaving, Hugo. Interview with Rhik Samadder. “Hugo Weaving: ‘I Can’t Get Up in Front of an Audience. I’m Very Insecure’”, The Guardian, 25 August 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/25/hugo-wea ving-this-much-i-know Wood, Elaine. “Cript Sexuality in Happy Days ”, Journal of Beckett Studies 24.2, 2015, 210–222. Woodall, James. “Endgame, Duchess Theatre: Complicité Pays Homage to Beckett but Does It Make Him New?”, Arts Desk, 16 October 2009, https:// theartsdesk.com/reviews/endgame-duchess-theatre Wolf, Matt. “Endgame”, Variety, 11 March 2004, https://variety.com/2004/ legit/reviews/endgame-6-1200534572/ Wynands, Sandra. Iconic Spaces: The Dark Theology of Samuel Beckett’s Drama. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. “Yvette”. “STC Endgame: ‘A Night with the Actors’ Transcript and New Photos”, Hugonuts News, 17 April 2015, https://hugonuts-news.livejournal. com/70062.html Zarrilli, Phillip. “Meditations on Loss: Beyond Discourses of Pain and Torture in the Work of the Beckett Actor”, Contemporary Theatre Review 28.1, 2018, 95–113.

CHAPTER 3

The Endgame Project: Me to Play, 2012

The Endgame Project , directed by Joe Grifasi and staged at the Classic Stage Company theatre in New York in July 2012, starred two actors with Parkinson’s disease, Dan Moran and Chris Jones, playing Hamm and Clov respectively. Moran explains that the project began when he started reading a copy of Endgame during a Parkinson’s-related bout of insomnia in 2011: “I was in full-blown Parkinson’s mode, and I thought, ‘This is exactly what fucking Parkinson’s is like’” (“Dan’s Story”, 2012). He elaborates: I just felt, like, this guy is, like, talking about my life here, about Parkinson’s. That’s what it really felt like. Especially when it got to the line, “Have you not had enough?” And Clov says, “Yes. Of what?” and I go, “Of this, this… thing”. And I thought, Parkinson’s. And I thought, the room, they’re locked in this room, and I thought, oh, Parkinson’s. One guy can walk, one guy can’t: Parkinson’s. (“The Actors Discuss”, 2012)

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder of the central nervous system, in which dopaminergic neuron death in the substantia nigra in the brain leads to a dopamine deficit and associated motor problems (Kalia and Lang 2015, 896). It is believed to be the second most common neurodegenerative disorder following Alzheimer’s © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Simpson, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04133-4_3

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disease, affecting approximately seven million people worldwide (Rajput 2009, 1). Early Parkinson’s symptoms tend to affect motor functioning, manifesting in resting muscle tremors, limb rigidity, bradykinesia (slowed movement), and increased difficulty in walking and maintaining balance. Common non-motor symptoms are disordered sleep, cognitive impairment, pain, fatigue, and depression. Later symptoms in advanced Parkinson’s include speech dysfunction (particularly involuntary reduced volume of voice), hypomimia (reduced facial expression), akinesia (muscle ‘freezing’, or the loss of ability to move voluntarily), diminished cognitive ability, and some autonomic dysfunction. Beyond symptom management and mitigation, there is currently no cure for Parkinson’s. Beckett had several family connections with Parkinson’s disease.1 His mother May Beckett was diagnosed with the condition in the mid-1940s, and Beckett, kept abreast of her deterioration by his brother Frank’s letters and his own periodic visits back to Ireland, investigated both orthodox and alternative medicines in his attempts to ease her suffering across the subsequent years. James Knowlson records Beckett obtaining Parpanit, an early prescription drug for Parkinson’s, via his pharmacist friend Yvonne Lefèvre while he was working at the Irish Red Cross Hospital in St-Lô (1997, 348). In a November 1947 letter to Thomas MacGreevy from Paris, Beckett notes that he is still sending May this “new Swiss medicine that I hope may do her good. She is very lonely and desolate and can’t write to me any more” (Letters II , 66). Later, in March 1949, he wrote again to MacGreevy that his friend Benjamin Frédéric Cauvet-Duhamel “very kindly sent me from Liverpool a newspaper cutting about a new discovery for treatment of Parkinsonism. I sent it to Frank […]. It is probably only another form of palliative, but perhaps more satisfactory that the Parpanit” (Letters II , 145). He would also send a lock of his mother’s hair to Dr Roger Clarac, a homeopath whom Suzanne trusted, to “practise long-distance diagnosis and healing on her” (Knowlson 1997, 367). In the summer of 1950, Beckett stayed in Dublin during May’s last few weeks of life in the Merrion Nursing Home, and in 1987 he would describe to fellow writer Lawrence Shainberg how profoundly the experience impacted on him not only emotionally, but 1 Genetic predisposition appears to be a significant risk factor for Parkinson’s (Noyce et al. 2012, 897; Dalvi and Walsh 2009, 56). Chris Jones, for example, reports that his maternal grandfather, fraternal grandmother, and both his brothers also had Parkinson’s (interview, 2021).

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also in terms of his artistic priorities: “Her face was a mask, completely unrecognisable. Looking at her, I had a sudden realization that all the work I’d done before was on the wrong track. […]. What I had to do was investigate not-knowing, not-perceiving, the whole world of incompleteness” (qtd. in Shainberg 1987, 106). If Beckett’s attention to debility and depletion has more typically been traced to his reaction away from James Joyce’s “omniscience and omnipotence” towards his own concern with “impotence, ignorance […] the experience of a non-knower, a noncan-er” (qtd. in Shenker, 148), Beckett’s encounter with his mother’s Parkinson’s disease appears to have had an equally profound effect on his fixation with struggle, decline, and failure in his writing: concerns which we can trace with particular clarity in Endgame, written five years after May Becket’s death.2 Furthermore, Beckett’s aunt Cissie Sinclair had likewise exhibited Parkinson’s symptoms since the late 1930s, and would die in 1951, shortly after May Beckett (Bixby 2018, 120). Remarking on Cissie Sinclair’s use of a wheelchair in the last years of her life as a result of the combined symptoms of Parkinson’s and rheumatoid arthritis, Anthony Cronin theorises that the stage imagery of Endgame “had its genesis in the life and circumstances of Cissie Sinclair toward the close of her days” (1997, 459). Others have argued for the influence of Parkinson’s across Beckett’s body of writing more broadly: Hugh Culik traces hints of the disease’s symptoms in Murphy, Watt , Footfalls and Rockaby (2008, 143–147; 1989, 41–53), and Laura Salisbury reads its resonance in Beckett’s late work and particularly Ill Seen Ill Said (2015, 155– 159), in what she describes as Beckett’s interest in neurological disorder “and Parkinson’s disease in particular” as a site for exploring “both the effect and affects of an almost cod Cartesian disjunction between an ineffectively intending mind and an unpredictably responsive body” (2008, 86).3 Patrick Bixby has written in considerable depth on The Endgame 2 Beckett began work on Fin de partie in early 1955. He would continue working intermittently on the play throughout 1955 and 1956, and it would eventually be published by Éditions de Minuit in January 1957. 3 Jean Martin has also recounted his research into and mimicking of the symptoms of Parkinson’s when constructing the character of Lucky in the première production of En attendant Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone in January 1953 (Martin 1992, 28–29). In a strange coincidence, it was the similarly named French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot who would first coin the name “Parkinson’s disease” (in 1872 in French, and in 1877 in English), after reading English surgeon James Parkinson’s seminal 1817 work An Essay on the Shaking Palsy (Toodayan 2018, 386).

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Project performance itself, calling attention to how “Beckett may be read as a writer of disability”, and to Moran and Jones as actors particularly well placed “to make the presence of disability in Beckett’s aesthetic more immediate, more visceral” in performance (2018, 123, 125). Here, I focus on the issues of bodily precarity, degeneration, and radical contingency that characterise both Parkinson’s disease and the characters’ situation in Endgame, and which The Endgame Project ’s production illuminated in performance. Endgame stages Hamm and Clov at a moment when they both long for and yet fear an end to their suffering, when “getting on” (CDW , 96) is increasingly difficult and yet the best that can be hoped for, since the future promises only further decline and eventual death. Jones’s and Moran’s own degenerative illness—and their acknowledgement that The Endgame Project was likely to be their final stage performance—foregrounded the Endgame script’s focus on bodily precarity and degeneration. In this respect, The Endgame Project offered a very different “disability performance” of Beckett’s play than did the Theatre Workshop Scotland production examined in the previous chapter, because of the distinction between congenital and the acquired disability. Jones and Moran developed Parkinson’s, a specifically degenerative condition, late in life, in contrast to Shaban and Robson having known and lived in their impaired bodies from childhood onwards. This chapter thus looks to The Endgame Project as a performance project which draws attention to the centrality of the deteriorating body to Beckett’s aesthetic preoccupations in Endgame. This intensely embodied concern was accentuated in the actors’ physical struggles onstage, and was re-emphasised in the production’s paratextual material, including in the interviews published here and Jim Bernfield’s 2021 Me to Play documentary charting the play’s staging. This emphasis on inevitable bodily decline generates much of Endgame’s unsettling darkness. Indeed, spectators have often recoiled from Endgame’s bleak vision of degeneration, from Maurice Nadeau’s 1957 comment that it would be difficult to find “une pièce aussi dure, aussi dépourvue de concessions, aussi désespérée et désespérante” (“a play quite so harsh, quite so devoid of all concessions, quite so desperate and despairing” 1957, 4) to Clive Davis’s critique of Endgame as “the theatrical equivalent of a man with a sandwich board parading up and down the streets proclaiming that humanity is doomed” (2020, n.p.). Simultaneously, however, The Endgame Project framed the fact

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of continued performance as a profound—and profoundly conditional— triumph in and of itself, as their Parkinson’s symptoms, “once deemed an obstacle to their work as actors, became integral to that work” (Bixby 2018, 124). In stressing the corporeal vulnerability of its actors as they performed, The Endgame Project embraced the script’s interrogation of bodily struggle and the threat of some inevitably encroaching “end”— and yet also threw new light on the play’s urgent forms of endurance, as both characters and actors enacted their own continued (ambivalent, precarious) survival.

Endgame and Parkinson’s Disease Parkinson’s performance might seem like a paradoxical endeavour. The Endgame Project company emphasises Parkinson’s as a disease that “affects all the elements essential to an actor’s craft” (http://www.the endgameproject.com/; see also Bixby 2018, 118). Control of the body, control of the voice, control of the facial expression: the loss of these finely honed skills quickly endangers the actor’s career prospects. “I began chasing off casting directors by telling them I had PD”, Moran recalls (interview, 2021): “Once I opened up to the acting world that I had Parkinson’s, my agents dropped me. The calls pretty much stopped coming, and that was that” (Radiolab Live, “Apocalyptical” 2013). Jones reflects: As an actor, my body is my instrument. Before I was diagnosed, and before I showed any symptoms of my disease, I would respond to an impulse from another actor on stage. That impulse would be like a stone tossed into a pool of water. It would go “Kerplop”, and a wave would emanate outward from the spot where the stone landed in the pool. That pool is my body, and the difficulty arises post-diagnosis, when the stone goes “Thud” instead of “Kerplop” … as if it has landed in sand rather than water. (Interview, 2017)

Likewise, the actor Michael J. Fox—who is perhaps, alongside Muhammad Ali, the best-known ‘face’ of Parkinson’s disease in the Anglophone world—has detailed how Parkinson’s symptoms such as speech dysfunction and the mask-like hypomimia of the face which “get in the way of verbally expressing feelings and ideas” have threatened his

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professional craft: “My lips, tongue, and jaw muscles simply won’t cooperate. […] Try as I might, I can’t inflect my speech to reflect my state of mind. And it’s not like I can liven up my halting monotone with a raised eyebrow; my face, utterly expressionless, simply won’t respond” (2003, 256). This curbing of the body, voice, and face’s expressive range that characterises late-stage Parkinson’s would seem to signal the end of the actor’s career. Yet many of the visible symptoms of Parkinson’s, when transplanted to the stage, align neatly with Beckett’s stage directions for Endgame. Clov’s “[s ]tiff, staggering walk” (CDW , 92) parallels the “slow shuffling gait” and muscular rigidity that typifies the Parkinson’s patient. Hamm’s struggle to leave his armchair—“Perhaps I could throw myself out on the floor. (He pushes himself painfully off his seat, falls back again)” (CDW , 126)—replicates the “difficulty getting in and out of a chair or bed” that Parkinson’s often occasions (Rajput 2009, 4). Still more striking is the broader correspondence between Parkinson’s symptomology and Beckett’s preferred acting style. The “impassive” expression (CDW , 133), lines spoken “tonelessly” (CDW , 93, 131), and limited range of bodily movement that Endgame’s stage directions demand accord with the hypomimia (reduced facial expression), slowed or expressionless speech, bradykinesia (slowed movement) and limb rigidity of Parkinson’s disease. Indeed, these physical propensities fit more generally with the performance style in which Beckett as a director regularly instructed his actors, in what Martin Puchner has called his “crusade against imitative acting” (2002, 157). Actor Billie Whitelaw has testified to Beckett’s preference for a distinctly understated style of performance, recalling that as her director he “would repeat over and over again: ‘Too much colour, no no, too much colour’” (1995, 120–121); she recalls passing similar advice on to Albert Finney when he was struggling with the role of Krapp in Donald McWhinnie’s 1973 production at the Royal Court Theatre: “Albert, put all your colours back in the cupboard. Just keep out the white, the black and the grey” (1995, 120–121). Jones’s wife Mary Beth Coudal uses precisely the same metaphor of leached colour to describe Jones’s new Parkinsonian-inflected style: “His range is narrowing. His palette used to be rainbow-coloured, and now it’s come down to shades of grey” (Bernfield 2021). Whitelaw herself has spoken of drawing on her memory of her own mother’s five-year battle with Parkinson’s—and specifically her “blank staring face”—as informing her portrayal of W in Rockaby

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in 1981 (Kalb 1987, 474).4 Jones laughs at the unexpected advantage that Parkinson’s has accorded his acting: “What’s kind of extraordinary is what people say about my acting these days: it’s so… it’s so economical! [Laughs ] You don’t do anything! It’s so pure!” (“The Actors Discuss”, 2012). Visible Parkinson’s symptomology harmonises compellingly with Beckett’s preferred acting style, and with the stage directions of Endgame in particular. Jones and Moran point out further specific parallels between the symptoms of Parkinson’s and the scripted details of Endgame, or what Jones calls the play’s “resonance with our condition” (interview, 2021). The sudden memory lapses and difficulty of “com[ing] up with the simplest words sometimes” that often typify Parkinson’s (“Dan’s Story”, 2012), for example, are reflected in the play’s concern with diminishing memory and “the words that remain” (CDW , 132). Jones’s experience of it getting steadily “harder and harder to move” his body, the loss of the ability to make his limbs move at will (Radiolab Live, 2013), echoes hauntingly in Hamm’s warning to Clov about the inevitable demise of bodily function: “One day you’ll say to yourself, I’m tired, I’ll sit down, and you’ll go and sit down. […] But you won’t get up” (CDW , 109). The chronic pain common to late-stage Parkinson’s is reproduced in the “unbelievable” pain in Clov’s legs (CDW , 115), and in the protracted physical suffering that drives Hamm’s repeated requests for painkillers. Jones and Moran, then, each had a certain sensorimotor insight into Hamm and Clov’s embodied experiences on which to draw in their performance.5 Bixby highlights Jones’s and Moran’s particular aptitude for performing Hamm and Clov: “Who could embody these figures more fully? […] Who could better understand this hesitation to end, this desire to endure?”, he asks (2018, 113). However, The Endgame Project production did not claim to have identified any specific ‘diagnosis’ for Hamm and Clov, and Bixby likewise clarifies that he draws attention to Beckett’s first-hand knowledge of the symptomology of Parkinson’s “not to identify a particular referent for 4 Whitelaw’s mother died only a few months before Rockaby rehearsals began. Hugh Culik has also pointed to the concordance between May’s speech and gait patterns in Footfalls , citing Beckett’s mother May in the later stages of Parkinson’s as a possible biographical source for the text (2008, 145). 5 See Chapter Two for more detailed discussion of the relevance of Beckett’s preference for physiologically rather than psychologically based acting methods in this context.

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the images of disability in Endgame, but to suggest a certain urgency” in Beckett’s writing about the deteriorating body on stage, and his development of a broader aesthetic that “rejects images of bodily health and physical integrity in favour of a vision of corporeal difference and human variation” (2018, 121, 120). Speaking to Hamm’s line “this… this… thing”, Bixby points out that Beckett’s text remains deliberately nebulous here: “The meaning of Hamm’s utterance (the identity of this ‘thing’) is contingent on an indeterminate determiner and a pronoun without a clear antecedent. […] There is, in short, plenty of doubt about what ‘this’ is”, and “it is this very uncertainty that allowed [Moran] to claim the play for his experience, for his body” (2018, 116). Where Ato Quayson criticises Beckett’s portrayal of impairment for “the peculiarly self-undermining structures” in his work that make it difficult to confidently identify or neatly categorise any character’s disability (2007, 28), Bixby locates an interpretative value in “the openness of the play’s textuality” which permits various reclamations of the script’s stakes in performance (2018, 117). Jones in turn specifies a relationship of resonance between his illness and Beckett’s play—a parallelism rather than a precise representation—describing how Endgame “dovetails perfectly with the symptoms of our Parkinson’s” (“The Actors Discuss”, 2012), and pointing to “a certain elegance to the thought that in our production of Endgame two actors with diminishing physical abilities would be playing two characters with diminishing physical abilities”, rather than claiming the play as a direct statement ‘about’ Parkinson’s specifically (interview, 2017). He rejects the idea that his Parkinson’s gives him any innate or corrective comprehension of Clov’s character beyond the play’s scripted detail, maintaining that “the argument that we would be better able to understand the characters we were playing because of our Parkinson’s is one that does not hold water” (interview, 2017), and instead citing the theory that “the way an actor gives depth to a character is by having secrets that nobody else knows. And it is conceivable that the secrets for Hamm and Clov could be that they suffer from Parkinson’s” (interview, 2017). Parkinson’s here becomes simultaneously a biological fact and a concealed hypothetical lurking in the margins of The Endgame Project production, rooted ambivalently in the onstage bodies of the performers but not necessarily in those of the characters themselves. As in Robert Rae’s 2007 Theatre Workshop Scotland production of Endgame discussed in the previous chapter, here the disabled actor’s body becomes

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a direct actualisation of the script’s attention to weightily material alternative modes of embodiment, rather than a claim to any textually mandated specificity of ‘diagnosis’.

Degeneration, Decline, Death: Endgame ’s Dark Disabilities Rather than trying to assign any definitive diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease to the characters in Endgame, then, we might focus more specifically on the terms in which Beckett described the impact of witnessing his mother’s Parkinson’s degeneration on his own artistic practice. The description is worth quoting again in full here: Her face was a mask, completely unrecognisable. Looking at her, I had a sudden realization that all the work I’d done before was on the wrong track. I guess you’d have to call it a revelation. Strong word, I know, but so it was. I simply understood that there was no sense adding to the store of information, gathering knowledge. The whole attempt at knowledge, it seemed to me, had come to nothing. It was all haywire. What I had to do was investigate not-knowing, not-perceiving, the whole world of incompleteness. (Qtd. in Shainberg 1987, 106)

Beckett’s emphasis here is on forms of dysfunction, decline, and failing: states of misrecognition, of having “come to nothing”, of not knowing and not perceiving. Crucially, though, these are framed as modes of ongoing process, of attenuated and altered yet continued existence rather than any definitive end. If Beckett’s work focuses compulsively on forms of bodily weakening, wounding and waning, these are particularly generative forms of degeneration. Contemplating his mother’s Parkinson’s experience is a “revelation” that undermines Beckett’s sense of his previous writing, but does not deny the possibility of future work along radically different lines, along the presumably “right” rather than the “wrong track”—a new avenue for continued creation. If the additive process of “gathering knowledge” is henceforth to be shunned, the supposedly impeded states that replace it are still construed as ongoing actions: “not-knowing, not-perceiving”, the gerund verb form indicating continuance rather than cessation. This is not “incompleteness” in the sense of something abandoned or left wanting, but rather a distinctly

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promising “whole world of incompleteness” waiting to be explored. There is a creative interest here in the mal functioning rather than the nonfunctioning, the abnormal or atypical perspective that offers potential new artistic insight. The dynamic is restated in the title of the later Mal vu mal dit (1981) or Ill Seen Ill Said (1982): not the unseen or the unsaid, but the ill seen, the abnormally said, the atypically functioning as a focal point for artistic innovation. And if the adverb “ill” signifies “poorly” or “badly”, the word also is haunted by its adjectival sense of “unwell” or “ailing”; the impaired body provides an instructive model for Beckett’s artistic practice, its very endurance across his literary career echoing the singular energy of the impaired body itself as it appears in his work (Figs. 3.1 and 3.2). There is a persistent tension between decline and continued endurance underlying Endgame which The Endgame Project ’s disability performance throws into stark relief. As discussed in the previous chapter, Endgame does not offer an emotionally neutral or reparative idea of disability, but rather a disquieting vision of entrapment and radically reduced agency,

Fig. 3.1 Dan Moran (Hamm) and Chris Jones (Clov), Classic Stage Company, New York, 2012 (Photo credit Peter Angelo Simon)

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Fig. 3.2 Dan Moran (Hamm) and Chris Jones (Clov), Classic Stage Company, New York, 2012 (Photo credit Peter Angelo Simon)

in which physical impairment is used to heighten the affective charged distress of the characters’ disturbing situation. Key here are the tropes of bodily degeneration and decline towards death that we find in Endgame’s script, and which are paralleled in the symptomology of Parkinson’s itself.6 Parkinson’s is a degenerative condition that typically manifests late in life: age is the greatest risk factor for the disease, with prevalence and incidence peaking in populations over eighty years old, and early on-set Parkinson’s represents a minority of diagnosed cases (Driver et al. 2009). Consequently, Parkinson’s is often perceived as a steady deterioration towards death, even though the disease itself is not terminal. If, as Elizabeth Barry notes, “ageing is usually understood as an inexorable decline” in literary and broader cultural terms (2015, 132), Parkinson’s induces 6 The term “degeneration” is used in this chapter to denote the specifically bodily process of deterioration in the individual’s physiological functioning. For exploration of Max Nordau’s nineteenth-century conception of “degeneration” as the worsening quality of the human race in relation to Beckett’s work, see McNaughton (2018), Salisbury and Code (2016), Purcell (2015), and Maude (2008).

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a heightened version of this response, as a degenerative disease involving a progressively worsening symptomology. At the time of writing, there are no standard therapies to stop or reverse the rate of neurodegeneration and disease progression for Parkinson’s. The only available treatments focus on symptom management, but long-term antiparkinsonian therapy (and particularly the use of levodopa, the most commonly prescribed drug for treating symptoms) typically becomes less effective as the disease progresses, and can lead to further disabling complications, including nausea, hallucinations, psychosis, and exacerbated dyskinesias (Kalia and Lang 2015, 896–897; Isaacson 2009, 67; Lyons and Pahwa 2009, 71). Not for nothing does Michael J. Fox call Parkinson’s “the gift that keeps on taking” (2003, 6): the disease involves a persistent decline into increasingly severe physical symptomology and an intensified confrontation with the body’s mortality. This distinguishes Parkinson’s from the congenital disabilities encountered elsewhere in this book, such as Down syndrome, Tourette’s syndrome, and osteogenesis imperfecta, in terms of the lived experience of bodily deterioration. In cases of congenital disability, the disabled body is typically not in decline from any former state of ‘better health’, but is rather the individual’s always-and-only-known condition of existence, and more easily conceptualised as being as valid and as valuable as any other mode of being (by the disabled individual, if not always by an ableist surrounding culture). By contrast, as a late developing, progressively disabling disease, Parkinson’s is more often experienced as an ordeal of steady degeneration. This perspective is highlighted in Moran’s and Jones’s own descriptions of their life with Parkinson’s, and particularly in Jones’s response to Quayson’s premise of the disabled body as provoking a “subliminal fear and moral panic” in the viewing subject by disrupting “symbolic notions of wholeness and normativity” (2007, 14, 204). In contrast to Nabil Shaban’s frustrated dismissal of the idea of the disabled body’s automatically disconcerting effect (interview, 2017, Chapter Two), when I ask Jones his opinion of Quayson’s theory, he judges it “a brilliant observation, hauntingly expressed” (personal correspondence, 2017). Where Shaban rejects Quayson’s theorising of the disabled body as inevitably anxiogenic, Jones finds a recognisable articulation of his own experience of his newly and progressively disabled body, and his dispirited sense of himself as “damaged goods” (interview, 2017). Moran too speaks openly in our interview about his struggle in coming to terms with the lived specifics of his Parkinson’s diagnosis, and the inevitability of further

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decline. It is “a little bit hellish”, he admits: “I don’t wish for death, but I don’t wish for this kind of life, either. It’s not fun. It’s hard. […] I’ve lost the joy of ‘What’s next?’ Because what’s next is not really a great thought” (interview, 2021). There is a discomforting parallel here between the degenerative nature and associated distress occasioned by Parkinson’s disease, and the grim vision of bodily decline in Beckett’s script. Endgame advances a particularly bleak reading of the human body, for all the script’s dark comedy and Moran’s and Jones’s fine comic acting in performance. Writing in the aftermath of the deaths of his mother in 1950 and his brother Frank in 1954, Beckett offers a desolate vision of corporeal struggle and deterioration, shadowed with the spectre of impending death. The characters’ bodily degeneration is set against the apparent decline of the entire human population, evoked in Clov’s descriptions of the barren outside world, and Hamm’s chronicle of his neighbourhood’s steady demise and his complaint that “[t]he whole place stinks of corpses” (CDW , 114). Alongside the textually explicit death of Mother Pegg and the uncertainly narrated onstage death of Nell, Anna McMullan catalogues references to World War I, the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Irish and Biblical Egyptian famines, and the Biblical flood as among “the accumulated corpses of history [that] haunt the stage” in Endgame, and which are “anchored or sedimented in the deteriorating bodies” of the house’s inhabitants (2012, 44). These ordeals are doubly “sedimented” in Moran’s and Jones’s own embodied presence in The Endgame Project , the body of the disabled actor onstage functioning here as part of the play’s broader evocation of suffering and death. Moran admits to his own emotional strain in tackling the play’s dark musings on bodily decline: “You know, the guy is talking about the end of life. […] There’s shit I gotta say that I have to mean, and be a part of, that is not fun to touch. Especially, you know, with Parkinson’s and all that shit. And feeling like I’m going to die” (Bernfield 2021). Far from any uplifting or reparative vision, Endgame’s script offers a decidedly grim reading of the fragile, degenerating body—and one which intrudes unsettlingly in disability performance. There is no audience laughter when Jones-as-Clov declares, “When I fall I’ll weep for happiness” (CDW , 132). Bodily decline and eventual death are, of course, inevitable conditions of all human life, and not the preserve of only those individuals diagnosed with a degenerative disease such as Parkinson’s. As medical philosopher Havi Carel observes, if “serious illness is often the first sign of the end

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of life, and hence reveals human life is finite”, this does not negate the fact that all life “is a process of dying”, and degenerative illness is simply “a ‘being towards death’ in its most intense form” (2018, 151, 155, 150). The confrontation with serious illness or impairment is more properly a reminder or—to borrow Beckett’s language—at most a revelation of human mortality, rather than an entirely separate order of existence.7 Bodily decline illustrates “an important axiom for disability studies: that if we live long enough, we will all become disabled” (Bixby 2018, 124). The second-person construction of Hamm’s description of the inevitability of bodily degeneration in Endgame sees the unstable deictic “you” in his baleful prediction slip uneasily between addressing Clov and addressing the play’s spectators: One day you’ll be blind like me. You’ll be sitting here, a speck in the void, in the dark forever. One day you’ll say to yourself, I’m tired, I’ll sit down, and you’ll go and sit down. Then you’ll say, I’m hungry, I’ll get up and get something to eat, but you won’t get up. You’ll say, I shouldn’t have sat down. But since I have, I’ll sit down a little longer, then I’ll get up and get something to eat. But you won’t get up, and you won’t get anything to eat. You’ll look at the wall a while, then you’ll say, I’ll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep. After that, I’ll feel better. And you’ll close them. (2006, 109)8 7 Carel’s focus is on chronic illness rather than disability per se, but her theorising of illness bears close relation to most conceptualisings of disability: she distinguishes between “illness” and “sickness” on the grounds of durational chronicity, with illness being “serious, chronic, and life-changing” and “not followed by complete recovery within a short period of time” (2018, 2). The terms “illness”, “disease” and “disability” overlap repeatedly but not consistently across commonplace usage, and can only be distinguished provisionally at best, with many case-by-case caveats. Indeed, as suggested in the differing terminology of “disease” in the term Parkinson’s disease versus “syndrome” in Down syndrome and Tourette’s syndrome, Parkinson’s itself sits uncertainly on the murky line between illness and disability. 8 Science writer Jim Schnabel’s description of Parkinsonian degeneration chimes uncannily with Hamm’s monologue in Endgame, including in its second-person address:

The first thing you notice might be a slight twitching in your finger. You imagine that it will go away, but it worsens, turning into a tremor of your hand and eventually your entire arm. Your ever-clenching muscles begin to feel stiff, sore and weak. You find it harder to lift things. In time, you become reluctant even to get up from a chair and walk. Your posture begins to slump forward. Your gait shortens. Your speech slows. Your face, once expressive, becomes an immobile mask. (2010, S2)

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As Molly Crozier observes, Hamm’s speech here “is straightforwardly in the future tense: there is nothing conditional” about his prediction, “reminding Clov, and by extension the audience, that disability is inevitable” (2021, 482). If there is always potential for the audience to hear these lines as speaking to their own state of being, Jones’s and Moran’s onstage presence heighten this resonance by illustrating the actual reality of bodily decline. Jones’s physical difficulties are particularly noticeable in performance: his shoulders are hunched, and he walks with shuffling, slightly unbalanced steps, tentative on the ladder, and tilting slightly to one side when he comes to rest. At times, he leans briefly against the set’s doorframe for support, and it is impossible to tell if this is a choreographed ‘bit’ performed in character as Clov, or for his own sake. Moran explains how his understanding of Endgame’s vision of decline has changed over the years: “Whenever I was younger I used to think, well, this is definitely post-apocalyptic, but as I got older, I thought, no, this is just what everybody’s life becomes” (interview, 2021).9 Diminishing bodily health and eventual death is not an exceptional state, but an inevitable one, Endgame reminds us, and the Parkinson’s body on stage in The Endgame Project very intensely evokes the ineluctable finitude of physical wellbeing and human life rather than some unrecognisable “other” ontological state: the stage-audience dynamic is not one of radically visible difference, but of discomforting recognition. The play is a memento aegrescˇere as well as a memento mori: that is, “Remember you will sicken” as well as “Remember you will die”.10 The Endgame Project production starkly underlined this element of Beckett’s script, to a sometime distressing degree; Moran recalls one spectator’s ambivalent response to the unsettling power of his performance: “One person wrote me, and said, ‘Well, I can’t say that I loved it. I didn’t love it – but good work, I guess’” (interview, 2021). As Stanton B. Garner observes, the close encounter with another’s disability, disease or non-normative embodiment can call an uncomfortable attention to the observer’s own

9 Endgame actor Nabil Shaban likewise observes that, if “Endgame is about decline, the decline of the faculties”, this is “something that happens to every single one of us: no matter how much we were able-bodied, we all are going to come to that” (interview, 2017, Chapter Two). 10 My thanks to James Brophy for his help with this translation.

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bodily contingencies and vulnerabilities, presenting “disability as a vicarious and potentially ownable form of kinesthetic experience” (2018, 242). Scripting the human body as a deeply vulnerable, already decaying entity in its “endgame” of life, Beckett’s play destabilises complacent modes of viewing the body (and particularly the disabled body) onstage, and intensifies the play’s troubling charge. It is precisely this raw note of anguish and vulnerability, however, that constitutes Endgame’s value as a comfortingly dark or darkly comforting play, and which fits it for a particular disability politics in performance. Endgame refuses to gloss over the misfortunes and vulnerabilities of embodied existence in general; The Endgame Project refuses to gloss over the difficulties and distress occasioned by Parkinson’s disease specifically. There is often an odd solace in texts which chart life’s extreme hardships without trying to qualify or erase their misery. These works console simply by testifying to the very fact of such experiences, affirming that such struggle or grief is real, recognisable, familiar, that it exists elsewhere in the world beyond one’s own lonely sphere. Reflecting on my suggestion that they have chosen one of Beckett’s darkest plays for performance, Moran muses, “Definitely. But I like dark. I like the darkness of it” (interview, 2021). As Mary F. Cantanzaro puts it, “Endgame’s appeal, strangely, comes from its cold-heartedness”, its willingness to confront “the harsher realities” of human struggle that are often elided elsewhere (2007, 168–9). Such elision, indeed, often occurs in mainstream disability narratives inflected with a logic of compulsory optimism: the pervasive narrative of the disabled individual’s journey of triumph over adversity via their miraculous recovery, heroic striving to overcome the physical limitation of their impairment, or the disabled individual’s adjustment of their own bitter or self-pitying “bad attitude” towards their condition.11 Not all stories about disability need to be reparative, restitutive, or uplifting; 11 Representative examples include Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel The Secret Garden (1911), Oliver Stone’s film Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Jojo Moyes’s novel Me Before You (2012), and Andy Serkis’s film Breathe (2017), all of which follow the logic that “success or failure in living with a disability results almost solely from the emotional choice, courage, and character of the individual” (Longmore 1987, 72). I model the term “compulsory optimism” on Robert McRuer’s concept of “compulsory able-bodiedness”— the assumption that “able-bodied identities, able-bodied perspectives are preferable and what we all, collectively, are aiming for” (2006, 9), that able-bodiedness is not only the presumed norm but also the baseline of recognisable humanity—which McRuer in turn models on Adrienne Rich’s “compulsory heterosexuality” (1980, 631–60). See also Patrick McKelvey’s formulation of “compulsory non-disabledness” (2019, 72) and Beth

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there is a value in narratives that “do not seek to soften or redeem illness’s horrors, and also largely demur from a glorification of bodily suffering” (Fifield 2020, 228). Indeed, the sanitising of stories about impairment— too often offered as a panacea that makes depiction of disability palatable or manageable to non-disabled audiences—erases fuller recognition of the broader spectrum of bodily experiences.12 Disability activist Cheryl Marie Wade justifies her deliberately “blunt, crude” description of how she and many others “must have our asses cleaned after we shit and pee. Or we have others’ fingers inserted into our rectums to assist shitting” with the argument that “if we are ever to be really at home in the world and in ourselves, then we must say these things out loud” (1994, 88–89). In this respect, Endgame offers an ideal text for a franker form of disability representation, with its candid acknowledgement of catheters, painkillers, and bodily dependency and interdependency. Comparably, in the paratextual material of The Endgame Project , the company maintains a careful emphasis on the difficulty of theatrical performance with Parkinson’s, and does not omit the distressing elements of the subjects’ experience of the disease. In one promotional video later reproduced in part in the Me to Play documentary, the camera lingers on Moran in tears as he declares, “It’s not fair. I can’t do this thing that I’ve done my whole life” (“Dan’s Story”, 2012). Jones’s wife Mary Beth appears in an emotional interview in which she articulates her and her family’s struggle with his illness: I feel a great loss for me and the kids. […] Chris and Dan’s resilience is incredible, and [so is] the fact that they’re still carving out this beautiful creative life, but it comes at a cost. And it’s not easy for those who they live with, and I don’t think any chronic illness is easy. And I’m sorry if I DeVolder’s “compulsory heroism” (2013, 746–54). Also relevant here is Thomas Thoelen’s convincing reading of how Beckett’s novel Molloy (1951) refuses common tropes of the disabled individual “contained within sentimental representational frameworks” of pity and uplift—a sentimentality which in fact “facilitates social violence by dehumanizing those towards whom it is directed” (2020, 312). 12 For a relevant examination of “inspiration porn”—the framing of disabled individuals’ activities as an uplifting source of motivation or “inspiration” for abled-bodied observers— see Young (2012, 2014) and Haller and Preston (2017). See also Yael Levin’s astute interrogation of how “attempts to normalize or reframe disability by employing models of achievement and overcoming” collides with how insistently “Beckett clearly denounces the idea of achievement; his art conjoins failure, impotence and ignorance with physical and mental disability” (2018, 170).

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sound bitter. You know, when people tell me that Chris is doing great, I feel like, oh, yeah? You should see him asleep at the computer, you know, at five in the afternoon. Or you should help him on with his shirt at six in the morning. You think he’s doing so great? He’s not doing that great! (“Chris’s Story”, 2012)

Coudal has written about her frustration with Michael J. Fox’s sunny outlook on life with Parkinson’s, and her wish that “for once, someone famous who is struggling with a chronic illness like Parkinson’s, would say, ‘It ain’t always easy.’ That’s it. […] I long to hear, ‘We have struggled with this.’ Okay, then give it a beat and continue, ‘But we’re still here. We’re still trying to make our best lives’” (Coudal 2018, n.p.).13 The acknowledgement of bodily struggle and deterioration in The Endgame Project ’s paratextual material offers an alternative form of disability visibility to that of the narrative of heroic optimism: one that encompasses distress and decline as well as triumphant endurance or overcoming. It is this same refusal to gloss over the sheer inevitability of suffering and bodily degeneration, and the “strange energies that come forth at the period of ending, or in its contemplation” (Barry 2015, 132), which animate Beckett’s play. The Endgame Project makes emphatically visible the bodily struggle and degeneration in Beckett’s script, and accentuates the play’s refusal to soften the edges of these lived realities. Endgame and The Endgame Project production mutually serve each other in their shared emphasis on the reality of bodily vulnerability and suffering—and in the dark comfort accorded by that very emphasis.

The Triumph of Contingency: Precarity and Live Performance If Endgame is a play that emphasises the radical contingency of both human life and able-bodied health, The Endgame Project finds a conditional, caveated creative triumph in working within the bounds of this

13 In his most recent autobiography, No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers

Mortality (2020), Fox reflects on the limits of his own determinedly cheery perspective on his condition: “Have I oversold optimism as a panacea, commodified hope? […] I try to make sense out of this shit-show, but none of my all-purpose bromides and affirmations serve the moment. There is no spinning this. It’s just pain and regret. There is no finding the positive” (160, 3).

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ongoing contingency—and within in the necessarily precarious functioning of the theatre medium itself. Precarious endurance is the play’s keynote: constantly renewed activity hesitates on the edge of collapse. Endgame circles around an encroaching end held in tension with precarious ongoing activity, the “prolonged creative effort”, as Hamm puts it (CDW , 122). Painkillers and wheelchairs may have vanished, but Hamm does not die, and he continues narrating his story. Clov may leave but has not yet, compulsively repeating “I have things to do” (CDW , 94, 96, 97, 110). Fleas lie doggo (or possibly even lay), and the rat in the kitchen remains only half-dead; a “potential procreator” appears on the horizon (CDW , 131). This precarity is accentuated in the material action of live performance, where the embodied action on stage introduces an extra dimension of ongoing contingency: the possibility of unforeseen disaster in performance, and the embodied vulnerability of the actors themselves. The affective charge of live performance is generated in part by what theatre scholar Kirsten Shepherd-Barr calls “the uncertainty of liveness, the unpredictability of what will happen” (CDW , 5). All live performance is vulnerable to the risks of theatrical failure (falling scenery, forgotten lines, missed cues, power cuts, onstage collapse). So too are all living human bodies vulnerable to the risks of bodily failure (injury, illness, disability, death). If “the body with its various ailments and disorders is the locus of contingency in Beckett’s œuvre” (Maude 2009, 134), Beckett’s turn to the theatre medium foregrounds this contingency by allying the precarity of bodily existence with the precarity of live theatrical performance. The dual meaning of the homonym “live” points us towards this doubled contingency: the onstage body is “live” both in the sense that it performs in real time before its assembled audience, and in the sense that it is “living”, a mortal human body susceptible to injury or collapse. As theatre theorist and director Herbert Blau observes, “the ontology of theatre may be predicated on the existential fact that the person performing is dying in front of your eyes” (2011, 244). Live theatrical performance, then, redoubles the sense of precarious endurance that Endgame traces: the ephemeral living body is framed within the ephemeral live performance; the biological vulnerability of the body is paralleled by the vulnerability of the live performance to chance disaster. This volatility was magnified in The Endgame Project . The sheer precarity of Jones’s and Moran’s own bodies on stage helped to provoke a particularly acute affect of intense physical contingency, of constant nearcollapse or ‘near-ending’ remarkably well suited to Endgame’s textual

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concerns. Both Jones and Moran emphasise their production as a constant struggle against the threat of collapse or failure. Jones acknowledges that “the Parkinson’s made it so difficult. We lived in constant fear that we would not be up to the task” of the performance (interview, 2017). “Soon I won’t be able to do it any more”, Clov muses (CDW , 113); Jones echoes this anxiety in his own description of preparing for performance: “It could just as easily have been a ‘No, you can’t do this any more. You’ve had it. That’s it. Good night’” (interview, 2021). Moran recalls his similar struggle with the precarity of their planned performance: “At one point I said to Chris, ‘I can’t learn these lines. There’s no way I can learn these lines. I’ll never get ‘em all. I don’t know if I can… [Long pause] In fact, I don’t know if I can do it at all, if I can do Hamm’” (interview, 2021). Much like Hamm and Clov’s own daily exertions, the existence of The Endgame Project was sustained only by the force of continued activity in the face of seeming collapse. Moran describes how “we hit some real dark days, when it was like, ‘This is never, never going to happen. Never.’ And then we’d go back to square one and start over again” (interview, 2021). But where Hamm and Clov’s continually renewed exertions in the face of an encroaching end are tinged with a pained desperation, Jones’s and Moran’s own performances became a statement of enduring ability, the accomplished flexing of the “theatre muscle” or “acting muscle”, as Jones describes it. Moran likewise draws on a descriptive framework of skilled bodily labour when he speaks of the success of the live production: “We knew how to perform. The muscles kick in. Awesome – you’re alive, you’re moving, you’re talking” (interview, 2021). The eventual Endgame Project performance was a triumph of radical contingency, a figuring of a “different way to endure, a space where enduring could paradoxically mean both suffering and playing” (Bixby 2018, 125–6). It was a staging of bodily struggle that accentuated Hamm and Clov’s own ongoing torment, while re-working the play’s undertones into a more exultant feat of endurance—albeit one still edged with a dark recognition of vulnerability. In fact, Moran and Jones intentionally heightened the difficulty (and accompanying risk of failure) of the task before them. Alongside the unavoidable challenges occasioned by the nature of their production—such as learning a long and exacting script despite the memory impairment caused by Parkinson’s, and managing medication to fit with rehearsal schedules—they cast the roles of Hamm and Clov between them

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so as to exacerbate their own physical struggle in performance. Moran explains: We decided, Chris is having more trouble with his movement than I am, and I’m having more trouble with my speech than Chris is, so I thought, well, why don’t I take on the part with all the speech, and you got trouble with moving, so you do the part with all the movement – that makes sense. (Laughs.) (Radiolab Live, 2013)

This apparently counterintuitive casting “makes sense” only if we recognise the onstage enactment of intensely precarious activity as key to The Endgame Project ’s performance of the play’s preoccupation with impending-yet-undetermined end. The performance replicates Endgame’s own depiction of precarious yet compulsively enacted endurance. Jones calls specific attention to this trembling on the brink of failure as an asset in their performance, explaining that the production’s advantage over a non-disabled staging of the play was “a certain tension derived from the fear that the whole thing was just going to implode” (interview, 2017).14 Here, disability performance intensifies the generative tension between strength and weakness, vitality and fragility, that characterises live performance—and particularly the demandingly precise Beckettian performance. Parkinson’s on the Endgame stage bodies forth, “with the ruthlessness of disease, a congruent mode of ‘strong weakness’”, as Laura Salibsury puts it (2015, 157). The radically contingent conditions of theatre’s liveness entwine strength and weakness at the same point: if theatre’s live quality is part of the medium’s “strength and glory, the source of its unique persistence” (Kershaw 2009, 209), it is also the source of its potential weakness, enlarging as it does the scope for unforeseen disaster. Likewise, the symptoms that seem to threaten Jones’s and Moran’s performance with collapse or failure are simultaneously the elements of their performance that bring the central concerns of Beckett’s script to urgently embodied life. The decision to “lean into our weaknesses”, as Moran describes their casting (interview, 2021), is also a leaning into Endgame’s theatrical strength.

14 See Chapter Four for further discussion of how the possibility of Jess Thom undergoing a Tourette’s “ticcing fit” in performance produced a similarly generative tension in her Touretteshero production of Not I .

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Conclusion The embodied actuality of the actors’ Parkinsonian presence produced a striking impact in performance. Jones recalls, “The response was fantastic. Audience members commented that the play had never been clearer” (interview, 2017). The tangible presence of Jones’s and Moran’s physical impairments on stage seems to have rendered the script’s probing of bodily vulnerability and threatened demise more viscerally to its spectators. By committing to the physical difficulties of performance, Jones and Moran generated a specific form of disability-related “aesthetic nervousness”, to repurpose Quayson’s term: one occasioned by the profound contingency of their own bodies onstage, interwoven with the precarity of live theatrical performance and the human body’s more general fragility “in a world governed by radical contingency” (Quayson 2007, 17). This is a high-risk strategy that simultaneously threatens and serves the performance at hand—or, rather, serves the performance precisely by threatening it. In emphasising the profound bodily vulnerability of its actors, who nevertheless continue with the performance at hand, The Endgame Project aligned its performance aesthetics with the unrelenting textual menace of some catastrophic or entropic “end” to come, twinned with its characters’ persistence in remaining in play. The spectre of a final ending occasioned the sense of triumph in continued survival, but also continuously threatened it, hovering ominously on the horizon. If Beckett’s work presents disability as the norm rather than the exception, reflecting the reality that all human bodies deviate from an idealised standard of perfect functioning, and all acquire various impairments over the course of the lives (whether diagnosed as disability, dysfunction, dependency, injury, illness, or old age), in Endgame this recognition is underscored with a particularly dark menace rather than a utopian acceptance. In response, The Endgame Project walks a delicate line. It does not brighten Beckett’s Endgame; it leans into the script’s interrogation of bodily struggle and encroaching death. However, it also reclaims something from the play’s preoccupation with continuance-atany-cost, and rescripts it as a feat of willed endurance from Jones and Moran, enacting their own continued survival as live-performance actors. Moran describes how the line “And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to… to end” (CDW , 93) spoke to him in his post-diagnosis career: “Screw these people who won’t hire me because I’ve got this fucking little disease that makes me shake, or talk funny” (Radiolab Live, “Apocalyptical”,

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2013). The Endgame Project magnifies both Endgame’s concern with bodily precarity, impairment and decline, and the ephemeral, conditional triumph of live theatrical performance itself. In fact, The Endgame Project works in part because it so frankly does not lighten the darkness—the sometimes oddly comforting darkness—of Beckett’s original script, its “sombre, yet oddly sustaining, vision” (Bixby 2018, 113). It offers a retort to unduly optimistic readings of Becket’s rawly sceptical work, and to sanitised or sentimentalised disability narratives of ‘overcoming’ or ‘inspiration’. In its frank revelation of its actors’ physical struggle and precarious survival, The Endgame Project framed the fact of continued performance as a profoundly conditional triumph in itself.

Interviews: Dan Moran, actor, June 2021 A graduate of the NYU School of Arts and a veteran of both the San Francisco New Shakespeare Company and the Massachusetts Shakespeare & Company troupe, Dan has a long history of both stage and screen acting, including appearances in five Woody Allen films: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Celebrity (1998), Deconstructing Harry (1997), and Mighty Aphrodite (1995). He’s straight-talking and often very funny in conversation, his New Yorker machismo balanced by his willingness to speak eloquently and often vulnerably about life following his Parkinson’s diagnosis, and by his deep affection for his wife Ruthie. How did The Endgame Project get started? What focused you on Beckett’s work? Well, first I was just reading the plays. I heard of Beckett when I was in high school, and checked out Waiting for Godot and Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape and some of his shorter works. But it really started when my wife Ruthie [Ruth Kreshka] stage-managed for Joe Chaikin and Sam Shepard and all these other people—but Joe Chaikin had a contact with Beckett. We went to France and we met up with them. And I did a production of Happy Days with Olympia Dukakis at her theatre in New Jersey.15 And before that I don’t think I did any Beckett. I’d been reading him constantly, though—especially his shorter pieces—and I got

15 Happy Days , dir. William Foeller, Whole Theatre, 1989–1990.

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more knowledgeable about it. So many people hate him! So many people just say, “I just can’t stand Beckett. I can’t stand him. He just drives me crazy”. I love that. And then, I don’t know, I just kept reading a lot, getting deeper and deeper into him. Not really with any thought of performing, but just to get his words—his words are so great. And then I sort of dropped him, didn’t read him for a while. Then there was my Parkinson’s, and he popped out of my bookshelf—and he was… perfect. It was the perfect thing to be working on. But at the time, I still didn’t know that Beckett’s mother had Parkinson’s. We were in rehearsals when Joe [Grifasi, the director] or somebody told me that—and I said, “Oh!” [Laughs ] No wonder I thought this was right! [Laughs ] It’s nice to be proved right sometimes, isn’t it? And how then did you move on to producing a full staged performance with Chris? I was chasing off casting directors by telling them that I had PD. Well, it didn’t take long for me to say fuck them! I had already started three or four theatre companies in my life, so it was natural for me to think, “I’ll just do this myself”. And in the beginning, Chris and I did a lot of it by ourselves. We had about a year before we really started moving on to production. And then finally one day, Chris said, “Well, why don’t we do a show?” And I said, “Well, I was hoping to, but I don’t know, man. What do you think? How are you feeling?” Because he would fall asleep much more than I would. He would fall asleep all the time. And I kept worrying that he wasn’t gonna be able to stay awake long enough to do the play. [Laughs ] You know, that I’d be up there one night doing the play and Clov wouldn’t make his entrance. All you would hear is [mimics snoring ]. I had that really loud whistle, though! And Ruthie would be around backstage, to give him a shove if he needed a shove. So me and Chris just started going more and more, practising three or four days a week. And it was really tough. It was really tough with the medication. It was hard to match what time we’d take our pills in the morning, and how they would affect us. Each doctor, you know, has their own way of medicating. And yeah, my speech—I’d been having so much trouble with my speech. Sometime Ruthie can’t understand me, and she’ll say, “What?”

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and I’ll say the same thing again, quieter. She moves in, and I get quieter. [Laughs ] And she goes, “Why do you do that?” Well, I’m not trying to do it! I’m not trying to drive you crazy. It just happens. [Mimes talking affectionately to Ruthie] “I’m here to drive you crazy”. But you know, at one point I said to Chris, “I can’t learn these lines. There’s no way I can learn these lines. I’ll never get ‘em all. I don’t know if I can… [Long pause] In fact, I don’t know if I can do it at all, if I can do Hamm”. And it seemed to me that, if we were going to test ourselves, we should lean into our weaknesses. We should try and see what would happen. Like, if the boat you’re on starts sinking, well, are you going to swim or aren’t you? And I wanted to show myself that I still had the capabilities to perform. But we hit some real dark days, when it was like, “This is never, never going to happen. Never”. And then we’d go back to square one and start over again. How did you deal with that issue of learning the lines? Repetition. Repetition. I think they mention that in the documentary, how I would run through his whole part twice a day, old school—but it was probably more than that. I would get up in the middle of the night and I would just get the script and look at it and look at it and look at it. That damn speech about the son, and the father coming, the story—Hamm’s story. Holy cow, I kept saying, “Can’t we just cut this?” [Laughs ] Nobody cares! Nobody wants to know this! They said, “You’re going to love it, by the time you perform it. You’re going to love doing this speech”. But I didn’t! I hated doing that story. Every time we came to it, and I’d break into that story, I was like, “Oh god, story time”. Nobody knows the story on stage. Nobody’s gonna help you. Were there lines that you particularly liked doing? Or that you still remember fondly? Lots from Beckett’s other works. My favourite is, “Ever try, ever fail. No matter. Try again, fail better” [from Worstward Ho]. That’s great. And “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” [from The Unnamable]—that was really the theme of our show, of doing Beckett, you know. This feeling of, “I can’t stand where he’s put me, I can’t stand where I’m at with it” became “Well, get on past it, man. Why are you wallowing in that? You’ll figure it out next time”.

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And those last few lines [of Endgame] … I think it’s such a rhythmic ending: the muscles stop, when he last calls for Clov, and okay, so be it, and he checks through his things, and gets them done. It’s funny, too— we never really came up with a choice as to whether or not Clov leaves, or anybody dies. We didn’t even make a choice, because it didn’t seem important. It was more important just to get the words out. The words, they tell you what you need to know and what you want to feel. Perhaps this is an unfair question, but what it is you like about Beckett? What is it that’s so valuable, or so compelling, in his work? To me, it’s his brevity. Those great words. The way that, in just a word, or three, he puts in so much meaning, and so many different ways to say it. And he’s got to come up with that answer, what “it” is. He’s got to question himself. And that becomes your goal every night: can you hit that question honestly, and without cheating somehow. And it’s fun, you know. It’s so fun when you get there, and people are laughing, and you go, “Ah, god damn, they get it”. You know? How nice! Because so often people think Beckett must be dark and ugly and awful. Because it does feel like Endgame is one of the most “wallowing” of Beckett’s plays, to return to that word—and from Hamm’s perspective, particularly. If they’re all quite static plays, about “continuing” but not “going on” in that sense, it still seems here like you’ve chosen one of the darkest of Beckett’s scripts. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. But I like dark. I like the darkness of it. In the beginning, I didn’t take anything from the Parkinson’s, like, “I have to do this because of my Parkinson’s”. Although it spoke to me, that night when I was reading it, when I took it down from the shelf and started reading it, it spoke to me. You know, the bunker they’re in, it’s like my body. It’s like these thick walls, two little windows—which I always thought were the eyes—and what he sees, everything is grey. Everything is grey. Nobody is out, nobody is alive. Whenever I was younger, I used to think, well, this is definitely post-apocalyptic, but as I got older, I thought, no, this is just what everybody’s life becomes. Maybe somebody’s pushing you around in your wheelchair, or maybe you’re pushing yourself. Maybe you’re just laying there. Maybe you’re like Nagg and Nell, with your shanks cut. You’re stuck.

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Yes—this is the inevitable eventual position Yeah. With death being the final chapter. You just sort of go along. This is sort of like this period now in my life; it’s a little bit hellish, because I have to be so careful not to hurt myself. I used to be so active and so physically with it. Now, I don’t wish for death, but I don’t wish for this kind of life, either. It’s not fun. It’s hard. I have to use a walker now. Used to be a cane, but the cane started tripping me up. And I’m sorry that I had to move out of New York, but I have. I really miss her; I like New York a lot. It was just becoming impossible, because the people move too fast, there’s too many people—I’d bump into people all the time and get in fights on the street. I remember one fight I had where I was hitting this guy on the street, like, “I’m beating you up and I have Parkinson’s. Do you realise that?” I felt so proud of myself. [Laughs ]. And my family won’t let me drive [smiles ruefully] so I can’t drive a car any more. And now it’s like, I can’t go anywhere, or somebody’s got to come with me, because they’re worried about me. Which is lovely—it’s lovely that I have people who care. I’m sure, you know, people in fucking hospice or… I’m not… They… But I have people who love and support me. And they all really helped in this production, you know. My son… they all helped, they all jumped in. They all care about me. So I’m lucky. But I’m sure you miss the independence, nevertheless. Yeah, I miss that. I miss them not being around! [Laughs ] I miss that period of time that I’d have by myself, but people are always checking in on me and making sure I’m okay. Which is good. It’s nice. But I’ve lost the joy of “What’s next?” Because what’s next is not really a great thought. I’ve even thought of calling Chris and saying, “Let’s put it on again”. It’s something that the documentary captures well, I think, because you do see the absolute triumphs of the performance, but there is a lot of quite raw and difficult material there too, in terms of what it is to deal with Parkinson’s. Yeah. Yeah, I had some friends call me—I remember one person wrote me, and said, “Well, I can’t say that I loved it. I didn’t love it – but good work, I guess”. I’m like, “That’s a weird response”, and my wife said, “It’s lovely. It’s a lovely response. She said she liked it. She was affected

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by it”. I never thought of it that way; I never thought of the effect on the audience. All I thought about was: What am I saying here? Why am I saying it? What do I mean? What did Beckett mean? And that’s how the Parkinson’s would feed in. I said, “Well, it’ll feed in by the fact that we have Parkinson’s [laughs ] and we’re trying to do this play”. It’s as simple as that. We don’t have to act Parkinson’s. Although there were some things I asked to throw in. I do these taps with my hand [he taps jerkily and repetitively on the desk in front of him], and we put that in one section of the play, as a movement thing. That was just sort of a little hello to my Parkinson’s doctor—I knew he’d be out there. And it just seemed right for the moment—this is what the character does. I was sort of amazed, thinking back on it, at how the idea of performance brought the characters out, and brought us out. Brought our voices out. We weren’t too quiet, we weren’t mumbling, we weren’t talking under our breath. We knew how to perform. The muscles kick in. Awesome—you’re alive, you’re moving, you’re talking. I found that to hold true: when the audience did show up, we would be all right. I think a performance with people in an audience made me think, “Well, this is really going to test me”. Can we find something here or not? And I guess we found something. Do you think you could have played the role of Hamm as well when you were a younger actor? Or does it take a certain maturity as an actor to take on the part? I think it needs some age. I started a production years ago with Ruthie and another actor, and we rehearsed about five times and then dropped the ball. We didn’t know what was going on; we had no idea, really. I think it takes some age. I always thought… I always thought it would be the last part I would play. I thought, “Boy, if I could end on Endgame – how lucky would I be?” So I’m a lucky man! [Laughs ] Because that’s definitely about it from me. I don’t see me getting on stage anymore. I’m like a stiff rod. [Mock himself ] “Hel-lo. How-are-you”. How did you feel after the performance? Relieved. And sorry that we weren’t going to do it any more. We only scheduled a couple of performances. I wish that we had scheduled more, that we had more chances to find deeper meanings that were in the play, instead of just what we did—which was fine, but… That was always my

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complaint about rehearsals. We couldn’t do more than a couple of hours of rehearsal. I used to do six, seven, eight hours of rehearsals. I like to rehearse without a break: work six or seven hours straight and then go to dinner and go home. But the stage production came off better than even my own expectations. It pleased me beyond my expectations as it was completely done by close friends of mine who all agreed to work for no pay but because they felt the joy of the project. How it all came together, how we moved so many people both with and without Beckettian knowledge. I don’t consider myself an expert on Beckett. I am simply an actor, who has been fortunate enough to have made a living for forty-five years by bringing to life various characters, and finding something to say to an audience of strangers. I mean, it was a marvellous performance. Both you and Chris were extraordinary in it. It’s a really compelling production. Thank you. One of the nicest letters I got was from a friend of mine, Bill Irwin, who did the production in San Francisco just before we did, and said, “I totally didn’t get it. But you got it”.16 And he’s one of the clown gods of the world. So that was nice. We got some really nice feedback. There’s nothing like putting yourself on stage and trying to make something happen.

Chris Jones, actor Often credited professionally as John Christopher Jones, Chris Jones has a resumé of Broadway and off-Broadway theatrical performances that would make for an ambitious reading list. Shakespeare, Molière, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, Brian Friel: Chris knows and has played them all. He’s deeply interested in ongoing scholarly interpretations of his favourite dramatists, and our Endgame conversations often veer off into wider territory. He’s also an accomplished film and television actor, with credits in The Village (dir. M. Night 16 Bill Irwin is a Tony Award-winning American actor and comedian, particularly famed for his vaudeville and professional clown performances. He played Lucky alongside Steve Martin and Robin Williams in the 1988 Lincoln Center Waiting for Godot , and wrote and starred in the single-hander On Beckett (2018–2022).

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Shyamalan, 2004), The Sopranos (dir. Henry Bronchtein, 2000), Awakenings (dir. Penny Marshall, 1990), and Moonstruck (dir. Norman Jewison, 1987), among others. He’s pragmatically cheerful beside Dan’s darker humour, often speaking proudly of his three children and his work in Russian theatre translation. In this first interview reproduced here, Chris’s Parkinsons symptoms were making it difficult for him to speak with ease for any long period of time, and so he offered a written response to my questions, reprinted below. In our last conversation in 2021, reproduced here as the second interview, he was able to speak with more ease, but his health had degenerated noticeably over the previous years, and he was due to move into an assisted living facility the following week.

Interview, October 2017 Dan and I had shared a dressing room in a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, starring Helen Mirren. And he called me up and asked me what I thought about the two of us working on a production of Beckett’s Endgame. I had played Gogo in a production of Waiting for Godot in college and had seen a terrific Endgame around 1969, so I was intrigued by the idea of working on this great material. Dan and I met on and off over the next ten months or so. Sometimes he’d read Hamm and I’d do Clov and then we would switch parts. The more we worked on it, the more we grew to love it. Dan’s wife Ruthie had a connection to the Beckett estate, and she wrote them to ask for permission to allow Dan and me to mount a production of Endgame, and to film it for a documentary that chronicled our efforts. The Beckett estate wrote back with a list of stipulations: 1) We could only do one performance. 2) We could not charge admission. 3) We could only use twelve minutes of footage from our production of Endgame in the documentary. I frequently pointed out that there was a certain elegance to the thought that in our production of Endgame, two actors with diminishing physical abilities would be playing two characters with diminishing physical abilities, trying to get through the last stages of their lives. There is a

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theory that is taught in drama schools that supposes that the way an actor gives depth to a character is by having secrets that nobody else knows. And it is conceivable that the secrets for Hamm and Clov could be that they suffer from Parkinson’s. The argument that we would be better able to understand the characters we were playing because of our Parkinson’s is one that does not hold water, though. The only thing our production had over an able-bodied production was a certain tension derived from the fear that the whole thing was just going to implode. In my memory the Endgame Project lives as a high point in my career, because the Parkinson’s made it so difficult. We lived in constant fear that we would not be up to the task. As an actor, my body is my instrument. Before I was diagnosed, and before I showed any symptoms of my disease, I would respond to an impulse from another actor on stage. That impulse would be like a stone tossed into a pool of water. It would go “Kerplop”, and a wave would emanate outward from the spot where the stone landed in the pool. That pool is my body and the difficulty arises post-diagnosis, when the stone goes “Thud” instead of “Kerplop”… as if it had landed in sand rather than water. The performance was a triumph, though. The response was fantastic. Audience members commented that the play had never been clearer. It was also much funnier than they thought it would (or could) be. It was a huge affirmation that we still could do this acting thing. The Parkinson’s had not had the final word, not yet, at any rate. The conversation would continue. As for my hopes for the future, at the head of the list I would like them to find a cure for this disease. In terms of my work, I would like to keep performing. I think the word is out, though, that I am damaged goods.

Interview, May 2021 We last spoke formally about The Endgame Project nearly four years ago, Chris. How does it feel thinking back on the production now? I was surprised in viewing the documentary. I feel like I’ve slipped a lot in the last few years in terms of my abilities, my mental and physical abilities. And we’re looking at the documentary that was made nine years ago. Well, nine years ago, I thought I was in pretty bad shape there! But in the few scenes that they showed of me acting, I was physically pretty good in my comedy. So I was surprised.

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Were you worried at the time that you wouldn’t be able to pull off the production, that it wouldn’t work? I was worried. I was worried that I wouldn’t work. From the first reading we did with the cast, I felt I was terrible. I felt I was a black hole sucking all the energy of the rest of the play with me every time I spoke. And it’s not until my instinctive theatre muscle, acting muscle, took over that we got anywhere. For the longest period in rehearsal, I was very low energy and not doing anything, waiting for something to happen. And it was tiring. I could only rehearse about three hours a day. And then the lines have been a problem since I’ve had Parkinson’s. It’s a hard script to learn anyway, isn’t it? Yes, it is. Because of the near repetitions. Dan called it, “getting in the Beckett loop”. It’s easy to get in the wrong cycle. Like, “Is it time for my painkiller?” “No”. “Is it time for my painkiller?” “No”. “Is it time for my painkiller?” “Yes” – and there’s one more no. [Both laugh]. Was it always important for you and Dan to do a public performance? Yeah. I was very keen that we finish with that, because that would be the test of whether we were successful or not. We wanted to, we were interested in the material, passionate about the play and the resonance with our condition, which had so damaged our careers. Although I was diagnosed … about eighteen years ago, and for the first fifteen of those eighteen years I continued to work pretty steadily, doing at least a play a year in New York. And then I was commissioned to do some more [Russian to English] translation work—I’d done a translation twenty years earlier, of Three Sisters, and then I was commissioned to do a translation of The Cherry Orchard and got great reviews.17 And I thought, this is an answer to my Parkinson’s problem, of what do you do when you can’t do what you’ve always done. And so next I did a translation of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country; the principal effort for that had to do with getting a five hour play down to two hours.18 But I was overzealous: my first draft

17 The Cherry Orchard, Classic Stage Company, New York, December 2011. Directed by Andrei Belgrader, and featuring Dianne West, John Turturro and Alvin Epstein. 18 A Month in the Country, Classic Stage Company, New York, January–February 2015. Directed by Erica Schmidt, and featuring Peter Dinklage and Taylor Schilling.

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was ninety minutes. We could have called it A Weekend in the Country, or A Fortnight in the Country. [Laughs ] I think you could sell a lot of audiences on that, though—a 90-minute Turgenev. My father used to go to an Episcopal church in upstate New York, where the pastor was a devotee of the five-minute sermon. And had a lot of fans as a result, I’m sure. Get to coffee hour quicker. Going back to The Endgame Project —were you pleased by the audience response? Yes, I was very pleased. I was worried they wouldn’t laugh, but they laughed right from the start. And that started us off on a comic note. And squirting the powder on the critters in my pants, that went very well. Niall [Buggy] saw it—he’s in the documentary—and he comes backstage, and he says, “It’s the clearest I’ve ever seen. I think Beckett would have loved it”, he said.19 What do you think he meant by “clearest”? That’s quite a specific compliment. Well, you knew where you were. It seemed… natural. But still theatrical, I guess. And how far—whether for you personally, or within your production—did Endgame become a play about Parkinson’s? What was the connection? Well, we came to see it as… that we were doing the play, and the Parkinson’s was incidental to that. The question was, “Has the erosion of my talent reached a level, or a depth that is going to make it clear to me that I can’t do this anymore?” We took the chance, betting on the outcome being positive, but it could just as easily have been a “No, you can’t do this anymore. You’ve had it. That’s it. Good night”. 19 Niall Buggy is an Olivier Award-winning Irish actor whose stage work includes Krapp’s Last Tape (Leeds Playhouse, 2020), Trevor Nunn’s joint production of Eh Joe and The Old Tune (Jermyn Street Theatre, 2020), and Charles Garrard’s film version of That Time (2000).

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But there were other things, details, that kept coming up. Let me get the script. “Slowly I turn…” [As he moves across the room to find his script ] I’ve got one Parkinson’s joke. A snail is mugged by two caterpillars and goes to the police to report the crime. The policeman says, “Can you give us a description of the assailant?” And the snail says, “I don’t know. It all happened so fast!” Okay. Here it is. “One day you’ll be blind like me. You’ll be sitting here, a speck in the void, in the dark forever. One day you’ll say to yourself, I’m tired, I’ll sit down, and you’ll go and sit down. Then you’ll say, I’m hungry, I’ll get up and get something to eat, but you won’t get up. You’ll say, I shouldn’t have sat down. But since I have, I’ll sit down a little longer, then I’ll get up and get something to eat. But you won’t get up, and you won’t get anything to eat. You’ll look at the wall a while, then you’ll say, I’ll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep. After that, I’ll feel better. And you’ll close them. And when you open them again, there’ll be no wall anymore. Infinite emptiness will be all around you. All the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn’t fill it. And there you’ll be, like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe. Yes, one day, you’ll know what it is, you’ll be like me, except that you won’t have anyone, will you, because you won’t have had pity on anyone. And because there won’t be anyone left to have pity on you”. That was one of Dan’s lines. And I think he connected it to Parkinson’s, exclusively. It represented his condition. And do you think there’s something significant about Beckett’s familiarity with Parkinson’s itself? Well, I think the fact that Beckett’s mother and aunt had it, and then he wasn’t living with them then, would come back after a period of a year, a year and a half [to visit them in Ireland]. So he would be shocked; he probably noticed that the damage of the Parkinson’s on his mom more, because he was living in Paris at the time. And in terms of Hamm and Clov… I think they play these games every day, and they’re playing them as the situation is getting worse. It’s a question of committing to playing it. But I remember watching someone rehearse a dance piece, and she walked through it. She marked it. And then every now and then she’d do the full thing, just to break out of it. But then she’d go back to marking it. And I think there’s maybe a little bit of that that goes on in the play. They don’t do everything fully. They’ve just done it so many times that it can be a little boring. It’s like… I can see why people… cease to be interested in life. Because it’s the same

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old movie. It’s like watching Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music every day of your life. [Laughs ] “The hills are alive. Who gives a shit?” [Laughs ] They’re still alive, yup. And that was in the days before drugs, before l-DOPA. My grandfather was one of the first to have the l-DOPA, in fact, and he… They didn’t really know how much drug to give, and how often to give it. They were sort of flying blind. But before that, people would lose mobility, and they’d be confined to bed. They’d get bed sores and die of infection. So… we’re living in a great age, medically. So your grandfather had Parkinson’s as well? My grandfather had Parkinson’s, on my mother’s side. My grandmother on my father’s side had it. My two brothers have it; my two sisters don’t. One of my brothers just died due to his Parkinson’s. He was really depressed. But I haven’t gone there. I’ve got things to do, which has kept me going. I’m working on a memoir now—almost finished it. But I’m going to see my neurologist today, and then I’m going into assisted living facility next week, to see what it’s like. And how does that feel? Scary. Feels like the beginning of the end.

Works Cited Barry, Elizabeth. “The Ageing Body in Literature” in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman and Ulrika Maude, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 132–148. Bernfield, Jim, dir. Me to Play. 2021. Bixby, Patrick. “‘this… this… thing’: The Endgame Project, Corporeal Difference, and the Ethics of Witnessing”, Journal of Beckett Studies 27.1, 2018, 112-127. Blau, Herbert. Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011. Byron, Mark, ed. Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. Cantanzaro, Mary F. “Masking and the Social Construct of the Body in Beckett’s Endgame” in Byron 2007, 165–188. Carel, Havi. Phenomenology of Illness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

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‘Chris’s Story’, The Endgame Project, 2012, http://www.theendgameproject. com/trailer/ Coudal, Mary Beth. “Families with Parkinson’s Disease” in 100 Days of Poems and Pics, 31 August 2018, https://mbcoudal.com/tag/michael-j-fox/ Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. London: Flamingo, 1997. Crozier, Molly. “‘Aveugle comme le destin’: Blindness and its Inevitability in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre”, French Studies 75.4, 2021, 468-483. Culik, Hugh. “Raining and Midnight: The Limits of Representation”, Journal of Beckett Studies 17.1-2, 2008, 127-152. ———. “Neurological Disorder and the Evolution of Beckett’s Maternal Images”, Mosaic 22, 1989, 41–53. Dalvi, Arif, and Ryan Walsh. “Etiology of Parkinson’s Disease” in Simuni and Pahwa 2009, 51–62. ‘Dan’s Story’, The Endgame Project, 2012, http://www.theendgameproject. com/trailer/ Davis, Clive. “Endgame/Rough for Theatre II Review—Magnetic Lead is Beckett’s Main Attraction”, The Times, 6 February 2020, https://www.the times.co.uk/article/endgame-rough-for-theatre-ii-review-magnetic-lead-isbecketts-main-attraction-njzrzns8f DeVolder, Beth. “Overcoming the Overcoming Story: A Case of ‘Compulsory Heroism’”, Feminist Media Studies 13.4, 2013, 746–754. Driver, Jane A., Giancarlo Logroscino, J. Michael Gaziano, and Tobias Kurth. “Incidence and Remaining Lifetime Risk of Parkinson’s Disease in Old Age”, Neurology 72.5 2009, 432–438. Fifield, Peter. Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Bodies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Fox, Michael J. No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality. London: Headline Publishing, 2020. ———. Lucky Man: A Memoir. London: Ebury Press, 2003. ‘Fundraising Trailer’, The Endgame Project, 2012, http://www.theendgamepr oject.com/trailer/ Garner, Stanton B. Kinesthetic Spectatorship: Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Haller, Beth, and Jeffrey Preston. “Confirming Normalcy: ‘Inspiration Porn’ and the Construction of the Disabled Subject?” in Disability and Social Media: Global Perspectives, ed. Kate Ellis and Mike Kent. London: Routledge, 2017, 41–56. Isaacson, Stewart. “Approach to the Treatment of Early Parkinson’s Disease” in Simuni and Pahwa 2009, 63–69. Jones, Chris. Interview with Hannah Simpson. May 2021. ———. Interview with Hannah Simpson. October 2017.

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Kalb, Jonathan. “Rockaby and the Art of Inadvertent Interpretation”, Modern Drama 30.4, 1987, 466–479. Kalia, Lorraine V., and Anthony E. Lang. “Parkinson’s Disease”, The Lancet 386.9996, August–September 2015, 869–912. Kershaw, Baz. “Dramas of the Performative Society: Theatre at the End of its Tether”, New Theatre Quarterly 17.3, 2009, 203–211. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Knowlson, James, and Elizabeth Knowlson, eds. Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett: Uncollected Interviews with Samuel Beckett and Memories of Those who Knew Him. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. Levin, Yael. “Univocity, Exhaustion and Failing Better: Reading Beckett with Disability Studies”, Journal of Beckett Studies 27.2, 2018, 157–174. Longmore, Paul K. “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People in Television and Motion Pictures” in Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images, ed. Alan Gartner and Tom Joe. New York: Praeger, 1987, 65–78. Lyons, Kelly E., and Rajesh Pahwa. “Management of Motor Disability in Advanced Parkinson’s Disease” in Simuni and Pahwa 2009, 71–82. Martin, Jean. “Creating Godot ” in Beckett in Dublin, ed. S. E. Wilmer. Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1992, 25–32. Maude, Ulrika. Beckett, Technology, and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ———. “A Stirring Beyond Coming and Going: Beckett and Tourette’s”, Journal of Beckett Studies 17.1–2, 2008, 153–168. McKelvey, Patrick. “A Disabled Actor Prepares: Stanislavsky, Disability, and Work at the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped”, Theatre Journal 71.1, 2019, 69–89. McMullan, Anna. Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. New York: Routledge, 2012. McNaughton, James. Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Mercier, Vivian. Beckett/Beckett. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Moran, Dan. Interview with Hannah Simpson. June 2021. Nadeau, Maurice. “Beckett: La tragédie transposée en farce”, L’Avant-scène 156, 1957, 4–6. Noyce, Alastair J., Jonathan P. Bestwick, Laura Silveira-Moriyama, Christopher H. Hawkes, Gavin Giovannoni, Andrew J. Lees, and Anette Schrag. “Meta-Analysis of Early Non-Motor Features and Risk Factors for Parkinson Disease.” Annals of Neurology 72.6, 2012, 893–901.

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Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Purcell, Siobhán. “Buckled Discourses: Disability and Degeneration in Beckett’s More Pricks than Kicks ”, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 27, 2015, 29–41. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Rajput, Alex. “Spectrum of Clinical Manifestations” in Simuni and Pahwa 2009, 1–12. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, Signs 5.4, 1980, 631–660. Salisbury, Laura. “Jackson’s Parrot: Samuel Beckett, Aphasic Speech Automatisms, and Psychosomatic Language”, The Journal of Medical Humanities 37.2, 2016, 205–222. ———. Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. ———. “What is the Word: Beckett’s Aphasic Modernism”, Journal of Beckett Studies 17.1–2, 2008, 78–126. Schnabel, Jim. “Secrets of the Shaking Palsy”, Nature 466.7310, 2010, S2–S5. Shainberg, Lawrence. “Exorcising Beckett”, The Paris Review 104, Fall 1987, 100–136. Shenker, Israel. “An Interview with Beckett”, The New York Times, 5 May 1956, Section II, 1, 3. Reproduced in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Garver and Raymond Federman, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, 146–149. Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen. Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2006. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011. Simuni, Tanya, and Rajesh Pahwa, eds. Parkinson’s Disease. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ‘The Actors Discuss’, The Endgame Project, 2012, http://www.theendgamepr oject.com/trailer/ Thoelen, Thomas. “Crippling Crutches: Disability as ‘Narrative Prosthesis’ in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy”, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 32.3, 2020, 306–320. Toodayan, Nadeem. “James Parkinson’s Essay on the Shaking Palsy, 1817–2017”, Medical Journal of Australia 208.9, 2018, 384–386. Wade, Cheryl Marie. “It Ain’t Exactly Sexy” in The Ragged Edge: The Disability Experience from the Pages of the First Fifteen Years of the Disability Rag, ed. Barrett Shaw. Louisville, Kentucky: Advocado Press, 1994, 88–90. Whitelaw, Billie. Billie Whitelaw… Who He? New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995.

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Young, Stella. “We’re not here for your inspiration”, ABC News, 2 July 2012, https://www.abc.net.au/rampup/articles/2012/07/02/3537035.htm ———. “I’m not your inspiration, thank you very much”, TED, April 2014, https://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_t hank_you_very_much

CHAPTER 4

Not I : Touretteshero, 2017–2020

Not I: Compulsion and Creative Agency For any performer, the role of Not I ’s Mouth is a challenging one. The frenetic monologue, delivered by a seemingly disembodied mouth floating high above the stage, demands that the actor perform a complex text at high speed and with intense precision, while traditionally being held in place so that the mouth remains spotlit in otherwise complete darkness. Theatre critic Lyn Gardner has called the role “the theatre’s triple axel”, emphasising the joint mental and physical effort required (2017). Jess Thom’s Touretteshero performance of Mouth in Not I , staged at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017 and the Battersea Arts Centre in London in 2018, simultaneously seemed to threaten and yet consummately upheld the formal demands of Beckett’s play. Thom has Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological condition estimated to affect 1% of children and 0.1% of adults globally (Stern 2018, 262; Pringsheim et al. 2019, 908). Tourette’s syndrome is characterised by the long-term presence of compulsive motor and vocal tics—or, as Thom explains it, “I make involuntary noises and movements, and say things I can’t control, all the time”

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(2012, 7).1 Thom’s motor and verbal tics often make it difficult for her to access the theatre auditorium even as a spectator, since she cannot guarantee that her body will remain sufficiently still and quiet to satisfy the strict notions of acceptable audience etiquette which hold sway across much of the contemporary theatre industry. Her raucous self-penned debut theatre performance, Backstage in Biscuit Land (2014–2017), was conceived in part as a riposte to such ableist exclusion; performing on stage offered, she says, “the one seat in the house I knew I wouldn’t be asked to leave” (Simpson 2018a, 229). Co-developed with long-term collaborator Matthew Pountney,2 Not I represented a decidedly new challenge following the boisterous, off-the-cuff comedy of Backstage in Biscuit Land. Her verbal tics inevitably interrupted the scripted monologue, and her motor tics made it unsafe for her to be restrained onstage, adding an extra level of difficulty to the task of rendering Not I ’s exacting precision. Thom calls the play a “difficult second album” (interview, 2017). Yet the Touretteshero production of Not I was a critical and commercial triumph, garnering glowing reviews as “a brilliant piece of conceptual performance that throws down a challenge to theatre as a whole” (Trueman 2017) and “not only a pivotal production in the history of staging Not I ” but also “a performance that articulates an alternative future for Beckett’s theatrical aesthetics” (Heron 2018, 284). The production has since toured across the UK and the US, receiving plaudits from mainstream media outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Stage, and BBC Radio 4. Significantly, the production also received performance rights and ongoing creative support from the Beckett estate, which granted Pountney and Thom permission to adapt the play’s traditional mode of staging to accommodate Thom’s verbal and motor tics, her wheelchair, and the re-working of the scripted Auditor into a live British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter.

1 Common categories of tics include echolalia (the mimicking or repetition of words or sounds) and echopraxia (the mimicking or repetition of gesture). For further clinical description of the range of tics and tic severity across Tourette’s syndrome, see Cavanna and Serio (2013) and Leckman et al. (2013). 2 Matthew Pountney, Thom’s co-director and co-founder of Touretteshero, is a distant relation of noted Beckett scholar Rosemary Pountney—a fact he discovered only after he and Thom began work on Not I , when they consulted with Rosemary as part of the production’s development.

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This chapter explores how the Touretteshero Not I drew on the ethics of disability representation and access accommodation as the basis for a convincing new reading of Not I ’s scripted aesthetics. There are clear similarities between Not I ’s description of a body and voice operating beyond Mouth’s conscious command and the common experiences of the individual with Tourette’s syndrome. Beyond the specific parallels between Tourette’s symptomology and Mouth’s monologue, however, we find in Thom’s tic-inclined performance a broader correspondence of the complex relationship between compulsion and creative agency that echoes across Beckett’s body of work. Lastly, this chapter compares the aesthetic and politicised dimensions of the Touretteshero countercultural staging practice against Not I ’s performance history. Here, I pay particular attention to how far the introduction of access measures (including the onstage BSL interpreter and the “relaxed performance” staging) risked erasing the distressing affective charge that has characterised performances of Not I since its earliest staging—and how the Touretteshero production consummately avoided this risk. The Touretteshero Not I retained a suitably acute tension in performance, generated specifically by way of the company’s emphatic disability aesthetics.

Not I and Tourette’s Syndrome While the exacting precision of Not I ’s script might seem to render it a particularly difficult challenge to tackle as a disability performance, there are marked parallels between the text’s evocation of involuntary speech and movement and the symptom profile of Tourette’s syndrome. John Pilling has documented Beckett recording the terms “Coprolalia (mucktalk)” and “Echolalia (word & sound repetition)” in his “Dream Notebook” when he was composing the novel Dream of Fair to middling Women in the 1930s (1999, 91, 97); both words made it into the finished version of the novel (Beckett 2012, 7, 168). Each of these terms denote symptoms associated with Tourette’s tics, “using obscene or unacceptable language” and “repeating other people’s sounds or speech” respectively (Thom 2012, 191, 196). Ulrika Maude observes that Beckett took the terms from his reading of physician Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892), from a passage describing the French neurologist Gilles de la Tourette and his student Jacques Catrou’s study of a “disease of convulsive tics”, and has traced in detail Beckett’s awareness of Tourette’s syndrome from

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his early reading and the prominence with which Tourette-like symptoms appear in his subsequent work (2008). Drawing attention to the “Tourettic logorrhoea” of Not I , Maude links Beckett’s reading with the “Tourettic or convulsive aesthetic that is everywhere present” in his writing (2016, 201–202), and with his work’s recurrent questioning of “the very distinction between voluntary and involuntary forms of movement” and of language as any stable guarantee of agential subjectivity (2008, 156, 162). There is, then, scholarly precedent to suggest that Beckett’s academic engagement with writing on Tourette’s syndrome influenced his own literary aesthetics. However, Thom reaches beyond Maude’s tracing of the suggestive links between Beckett’s early reading and Not I ’s frenzied, Touretticinflected aesthetic, and explicitly reads Mouth herself as a disabled figure. “We’re claiming Mouth as a neurodivergent character and understanding her experience from that perspective”, she explains (interview, 2017). The Touretteshero production’s interpretative framework emphasised Mouth’s convulsive and compulsive traits not merely as an incidental element of the play’s textual aesthetics, but as a crucial indication of Mouth’s actual bodily circumstances. Thom points out the similarity between her own Tourette’s syndrome and Mouth “experiencing these extremes of language” and “not recognising that voice as her own” (interview, 2017). Many moments in the script offer evocations of involuntary or uncontrolled language that parallel verbal Tourette’s tics: a “mouth on fire… stream of words…” and “no stopping it”, for example (CDW , 380), or the description of how “words were coming… a voice she did not recognise” but “finally had to admit… could be none other… than her own…” (CDW , 379). Similarly, Thom quotes the line “stare at her uncomprehending” (CDW , 379) as echoing her own lived experience of Tourette’s—“My presence in a public space can elicit that ‘uncomprehending stare’ pretty quickly”, she notes (interview, 2020)—and recalls her shock at encountering the line “nearest lavatory… start pouring it out” on her first reading of the script (CDW , 382), since for years she had tried to restrict her Tourette’s tics in public until she could ‘let them out’ in the relative privacy of a toilet cubicle or bathroom (interview, 2020). This lived experience of involuntary speech and movement—and the social dynamics they entail—fit Thom particularly well to the task of performing Beckett’s script.

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Thom is not categorically diagnosing Mouth with Tourette’s, however. Mouth has been ‘diagnosed’ many times over the course of critical discussion of Not I : as someone with schizophrenia (Acheson 1997, 175) or working through an instance of clinical trauma (Tranter 2018, 118), as one undergoing dissociative depersonalisation (Nightingale 1973, 135), or as a recent stroke patient (Brater 1975a, 54). The issue of diagnosing literary characters is a contentious one, particularly since these ‘diagnoses’ are almost inevitably “heavily freighted with power-laden ideological assumptions which are socially constructed and culturally produced” (Lawrence 2018, 53) when the literary diagnostician is a non-disabled individual relying on received cultural ideas about a condition in order to make their judgement. Sonya Freeman Loftis notes that often “amateur diagnoses based on popular stereotypes foster a one-dimensional way of thinking” about certain disabilities (2014), diluting the lived reality of the condition in question. Within literary studies more specifically, we might also observe that such diagnostic practice runs counter to our understanding the character as a fictional construct, and the literary text itself as a discrete creation in its own right, rather than a direct mediation of some precise extratextual ‘reality’. Beckett himself was routinely dismissive of attempts to interpret his texts by attaching extra external frameworks to them. During rehearsals for the 1972 première of Not I , he rather scathingly dismissed director Alan Schneider’s request for further detail on Mouth’s situation in Not I , denouncing “the old business of an author’s privileged information […]. I no more knew where she is or why thus than she does. All I know is in the text” (Letters IV , 311). Such circumspection is particularly appropriate to a text as deliberately indeterminate as Not I . As Sandra Wynands observes: One problem with such interpretations is that the text does not provide sufficient information to support them. One cannot decide on the basis of a text that is barely seven pages long whether the character depicted in it is schizophrenic in any clinical or even merely meaningful sense without lapsing into speculation. […] Invariably, one will drag the text down to a level of specificity it had already transcended, and as a result the interpretation, even if applicable, will always explicate only a fraction of what the text itself comprises. (2007, 103)

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To ‘diagnose’ risks overdetermining the text’s potential multiplicity of meaning, and glossing over the extratextual reality of the condition or disability in question. Thom resists any such limited specificity of interpretation in relation to Not I , clarifying, “At no point am I saying that Beckett wrote this about Tourette’s. I don’t need to say that Beckett wrote this about Tourette’s, because that’s not what matters” (interview, 2020). Rather, she bases her interpretation on how recurrently the script itself describes Mouth’s bodily and social existence as being impacted by her atypical neuro-functioning: “Looking at what actually exists in the text, we’ve only shone a light on stuff that exists already within the writing. We haven’t added or layered up loads of stuff” (interview, 2020). To perform Mouth as a neurodivergent actor with comparable involuntary speech patterns, then, offers a new means of illuminating Not I ’s own textual concerns, and of actualising its scripted aesthetic in performance. Thom explains: There are elements of Mouth’s life that resonate so deeply with me that it felt right for her to be portrayed by a neurodivergent performer. Because there are elements of that lived experience that I don’t need to act. I don’t need to try to get in the headspace of what it’s like to live with a mouth that you can’t control, and a voice that you don’t recognise, because that’s part of my everyday lived experience. So I can concentrate on delivering the text in the best way possible, in a way that draws on my lived experience, and that honours the text and its context. It’s the benefit of authentic casting. (Interview, 2020)

Thom’s use of the word “right” in the statement “it felt right for [Mouth] to be portrayed by a neurodivergent performer” operates on two levels. It indicates both the aesthetic validity of Thom’s disability-led interpretation as an approach that aided a coherent performance, and the ethical appropriacy of this act of identity representation. This dual sense of legitimacy reflects how Thom’s vision of the ethics and aesthetics of her performance work as being “like two jigsaw pieces that are constantly shifting together”, inseparable and mutually reinforcing: “Embracing the ethics […] is also about making the aesthetics of what we create stronger. It enriches it” (interview, 2020). This balance between attention to the ethics of disability representation and to the aesthetics of Beckett’s own text is a crucial factor in the success of the Touretteshero production, safeguarding it from the risk of eliding the specifics of Beckett’s original

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text under a disability-centric re-reading. Beckett scholar Jonathan Kalb admitted his own anxiety prior to watching the production in 2020, based on his concerns that Thom might be ‘over-interpreting’ the character of Mouth, influenced by her own ethical agenda: [N]o objective observer would label Not I a realistic play. […] Thom’s insistence that Tourette syndrome was always the work’s true, heretofore neglected realistic underpinning—reported in numerous feature pieces and interviews over the years—had me worried. It made me expect a show rooted more in advocacy than art. How wrong I was. (Kalb 2020)

In Thom’s performance, Kalb recognised a legitimately enriching perspective on Beckett’s script. The Touretteshero production succeeds in illuminating the details of the original text by calling attention to its concern with matters of bodily agency and social isolation, rather than by imposing a restrictive or textually implausible ‘diagnosis’. As Kalb concluded, “If all this is advocacy, then so be it. It is in no sense at the cost of art. This production is one of the strongest and most resonant interpretations of Not I I’ve seen” (2020).

Restaging Compulsion in Not I To draw on the value of Thom as a performer with Tourette’s, however, means accepting the spontaneous irruption of her uncontrolled speech and movement into the staged performance. The involuntary, after all, cannot be scripted. Thom emphasises that her performance was a “rigorous presentation of the play, honouring that text and the stage directions” (interview, 2017), but that this textual rigour operated alongside the incursion of her spontaneous verbal and motor tics during the play. This calls a particularly Beckettian interrogation of the relationship between compulsion and creative agency into play. The compulsive element of Thom’s performance accentuated the play’s concern with precarious physical agency over the self, paralleling what Trish McTighe identifies as “an anxiety about the involuntariness of certain bodily functions” in Not I , where “the body itself poses a threat to the autonomy

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of its ‘owner’” (2013, 64).3 Illustrations and interrogations of bodily and linguistic compulsion recur across Beckett’s work, from the early probing of “no desire to express, along with the obligation to express” in Three Dialogues (Beckett 1984, 139), the “compulsively produced” narrations of the Trilogy and particularly the “book-length reflection on compulsion” The Unnamable (Sheehan 2002, 170, 174), right up to the obsessive search for the elusive referent in What Where (1983) and “What is the Word” (1988). Beckett’s theatre tends particularly to foreground repetitive patterns of movement and speech, as in Play (1964), Footfalls (1976), and Rockaby (1981). Indeed, David Pattie points out that Beckett’s stage plays often call attention to the theatre medium itself as a web of “systems of coercion and compulsion” which compel its onstage figures to act according to precise external direction (2018, 231). However, where Pattie argues that these theatrical frameworks of compulsion “serve to weaken and destroy the figures trapped within them” (2018, 231), Amanda Dennis and Laura Salisbury have each highlighted the seemingly counterintuitive coexistence of compulsion and creative agency generated by non-autonomous movement and speech in Beckett’s work. Dennis explores the possibility of creative agency that resides in the scripted movement in the television play Quad, where 3 The precise degree of conscious control that an individual with Tourette’s can maintain over their tics is often unpredictable, varying not only from individual to individual but also from moment to moment and situation to situation for any one person. Timothy Schroeder decries the overly generalised assumption that “Tourettic individuals are passive when they tic” or “are violated by external forces, jerked around like marionettes on a string”. Rather, he points out, many people with Tourette’s report that “they are able to suppress their tics in certain circumstances, at least for a time, especially if ticcing would be especially harmful or awkward”, or at other times might “autonomously, actively choose to tic”, since suppressing a tic “creates a build-up of tension, as the urge to shout, cough, touch, jerk etc. does not typically go away but rather intensifies, so they rationally choose to tic rather than to endure the unpleasant tension” (2005, 107; original emphasis). This is not to say that all individuals with Tourette’s can inhibit their tics in all circumstances, or for prolonged periods of time, if indeed at all. Alongside the unwanted misery caused by verbal tics deemed socially inappropriate or offensive, such as Thom’s own experience of being removed from a theatre auditorium when other patrons complained about her audible ticcing (Jays 2020), incidents of self-injurious motor tics warn against any broad assumption of every individual’s ability to repress their Tourette’s tics. See, for example, reports of self-induced retinal detachment in one man whose motor tics involved jabbing his fingers into his eye sockets (Lim et al. 2004), of the woman whose motor tic involved punching her abdomen hard enough to result in ovarian damage and retinal incontinence (Cheung et al. 2007, 1744), and of the compulsion to ingest poisonous substances such as bleach, lighter fluid, and insecticides (Cheung et al. 2007, 1745, 1747).

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human bodies appear evacuated of conscious intent so as to become mere movement, driven to perpetuate a pattern. This kind of compulsive movement, as well as a privileging of bodily sensation in Beckett’s work (often associated with passive undergoing), suggests alternative possibilities for agency […]. Rather than assimilating agency to conscious intention (which is the norm in certain branches of analytic philosophy), Beckett’s work – and Quad in particular – demonstrates how the compulsive repetition of bodily movement […] may harness a loss of individual control that demands a more capacious understanding of human action. (2018, 6)

The externally determined or even involuntary movement, Dennis explains, can “disturb the comfortable opposition between compulsion and creative invention” (2018, 6). In turn, Laura Salisbury and Chris Code range across Beckett’s writing and his psychology reading to demonstrate how “Beckett’s obsession both with repetition and forms of mechanical reproduction, with language loosened from the tightened intentionality of a rational mind” in fact rarely results in “completely mindless” or unconsciously willed forms of compulsive speech in his work, but rather sit precariously on the borderland “between the intention and the automaticity both in and of words” (2016, 206, 211). Salisbury and Code turn specifically to Not I as one particularly apt illustration of their argument: Mouth’s language is hardly synonymous with intention and volition, nor is it the precipitate of conation; nevertheless, the compulsive push and pull that produces words spilling over with subjective affect demonstrates that mind is far from absent from the scene. […] The compulsive is not an escape from the mind; rather, it remains contaminated with and indeed driven by feeling. What emerges compulsively constellates within an affective, affected subject that remains sufficiently conscious to act as its own sometimes amused, sometimes melancholy witness. (2016, 211, 213)

Where Salisbury and Code point to the potent balance of compulsion and consciousness in Mouth’s speech, so the Tourette’s tic—and particularly the Tourette’s tic as it encroaches into a theatre script focused on the very subject of compelled speech—enacts its own mode of unpredictable but often generative creative expression, both amplifying the script’s probing of compulsive expression, and introducing unexpected new facets into

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performance.4 Thom herself emphasises the creative inspiration she takes from her own verbal tics: she collects a range of her funniest and most surreal involuntary expressions on her website for public enjoyment and creative use, and frequently produces artwork based on particularly evocative tics, such as her 2018 play Lamppost, Light of my Life and her annual “festive tic” Christmas card.5 In a 2015 BBC interview with British comedian Russell Howard—which Thom prefaced with the proviso, “If I say something funny, you’re absolutely allowed to laugh”—she explained that her Tourette’s “gives me access to a spontaneous creativity that I probably wouldn’t be able to access [otherwise]. Things that would never normally sit next to each other get collided together and create incredible new concepts. [She tics: ‘I love peas!’] … That’s not really an incredible new concept”. As the audience responds enthusiastically to Thom’s infectious energy and surreal ticced images and interjections—“Hey Siri, butter my toast”—comedian Howard laments, “Your brain just naturally kinda puts images together and just creates sort of jokes without you even trying. So in many ways, it’s really annoying, because you’re kind of brilliantly funny, and you’re not even trying” (Howard 2015). Compulsion and creative agency work in tandem in both Beckett’s and Thom’s worlds. In fact, in the Touretteshero production of Not I , Thom’s verbal tics often subsided in frequency during the fast-paced monologue, perhaps as a result of the script’s relentless pacing. “What was happening was that the focus and tension of putting the monologue through my body had an effect of displacing some of my vocal tics temporarily”, Thom explains (interview, 2020). However, they were liable to burst out more strongly in the moments of scripted silence: “I often describe it as a bit like putting 4 Beckett’s exploration of aleatory modes of creative expression reached its peak in the composition of the prose piece Sans (1969) or Lessness (1970), in which he allegedly wrote sixty sentences on individual scraps of paper and then drew them out at random, twice in turn, in order to determine the final sequence of a 120-sentence prose piece. See Pountney (1988, 15–26) for a detailed discussion of Lessness and its aleatory structure. See also End/Lessness , a collaboration between Jonathan Heron and Rosemary Pountney, in which they recorded all sixty sentences which now play in an endless randomised loop online, released following Pountney’s death in 2016: http://www.end-lessness.co.uk/. 5 Thom’s searchable “tic catalogue” can be viewed here: https://www.touretteshero.

com/tics/. The 2021 “festive tic” Christmas card, “Shake up the world like a snow globe full of love”, is available here: https://www.touretteshero.com/2021/12/07/acard-for-us-all/. The full annual range is here: https://www.touretteshero.com/search/ christmas%20card. For further discussion of the link between Tourette’s syndrome and artistic creativity, see Steingo (2008), Sacks (2011), and Schleifer (2001).

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a stone into water: the monologue moved some of them out of the way, but as soon as there was a gap, they found their way through. So in those moments of silence, every ‘biscuit’ that would have been in that section rushed out at huge speed” (interview, 2020). For example, in the pause after each “What?.. Who?.. No?.. She!”, her primary tic “biscuit” re-surfaced in a quick-fire burst that often remained pleasingly consistent throughout each performance: a rapid four-beat “Biscuit-biscuit-biscuitbiscuit”, each word accompanied by Thom’s physical tic of a thump to her chest. Here, the self’s provisional agency over its voice is enacted directly on stage. As Derval Tubridy observes, Not I ’s textual evocation of involuntary expression is “rendered material” through Thom’s own embodied being as a performer on the stage, “creating for the audience a multilayered experience of Beckett’s script in which ideas integral to the play are enacted within the performance” (2018). By way of both its consciously controlled and consciously uncontrolled components, Thom’s performance effected a double work upon the stage, as she simultaneously acted Mouth’s scripted words and enacted her experience of involuntary speech. The inclusion of the Tourette’s tic in performance dramatically embodies Beckett’s extended interrogation of the link between compulsion and creative expression across his work. Alongside the question of linguistic compulsion, issues of bodily control in the Not I script and performance history were also foregrounded by the Touretteshero production. As well as welcoming the incursion of Thom’s verbal tics into performance, the production reworked the more common tight restriction of Mouth’s performer on stage in order to allow for Thom’s physical tics. Traditionally, the head and body of the performer in Not I are held rigidly in position, so that a single spotlight can be trained on the mouth while the rest of the stage is kept in darkness. In the 1972 premiere performance at the Forum Theatre in New York, for example, Jessica Tandy was installed in a narrow box onstage with an aperture for her mouth, “attached to a metal back brace to prevent any possible shift of position” (Brater 1975b, 200). In the 1973 Royal Court London performance, directed by Beckett himself, Billie Whitelaw’s face and body were covered in black cloth and her head held in place by two bug clamps in a large vice-like structure (Whitelaw 1995, 125), and in the recent 2009 performance and subsequent tour directed by Walter Asmus, Lisa Dwan’s head was strapped firmly to a plywood board and her arms held in place by a strong metal bar. Thom’s motor tics made it dangerous for her to be similarly restrained during a

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performance, so the Touretteshero production came up with new ways of staging the script’s directions. Instead of clamping Thom’s head in place to keep it within the bounds of a traditional stage spotlight, the production used a “wearable technology” jacket which had a hood lined with LED lights, so that the light would follow Thom’s own movements (see Fig. 4.1). In order to elevate Thom’s mouth to the eight feet above stage

Fig. 4.1 Jess Thom in performance, Battersea Arts Centre, London, 2018 (Photo credit James Lindsay)

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level required by Beckett’s script, the Touretteshero production used a mechanical platform made by a contemporary circus designer, which lifted Thom and her wheelchair into the air for the duration of the performance; the only physical restriction over Thom’s body was the safety belt that held her into her wheelchair while she was aloft (see Fig. 4.2 and Thom interview 2020 for further details). Although these methods of staging are unlike those traditionally employed in productions of Not I , the final visual effect on stage was strikingly effective in replicating the stage image as Beckett originally describes it (see Fig. 4.3). Moreover, returning to Beckett’s text reminds us that these traditional methods of staging have been dictated by prior theatrical practice, not by Beckett’s own script, where the directions read only “Stage in darkness but for MOUTH, upstage audience right, about 8 feet above stage level, faintly lit from closeup and below, rest of face in shadow. Invisible microphone” (CDW , 377). Beckett’s stage directions are concerned solely with the desired final effect in performance, not on the precise methods of achieving that effect;

Fig. 4.2 The Touretteshero stage platform, Battersea Arts Centre, London, 2018 (Photo credit James Lindsay)

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Fig. 4.3 Charmaine Wombwell and Jess Thom in performance at Battersea Arts Centre, London, 2018 (Photo credit James Lindsay)

as Phillip Zarrilli notes, “Nowhere does Beckett explicitly state or ‘dictate’ how the actress’s mouth is to be kept still for constant illumination. […] There are other ways of solving this problem that do not literally bind or constrain the actress” (2018, 101). Reiterating this, the Beckett estate recognised and supported the Touretteshero production’s staging mechanisms as according with the script’s original directions, resulting in a performance which “stayed faithful to Samuel Beckett’s intentions”, as Edward Beckett described it (interview, 2021, Chapter Six). Thom explains, “we honoured the stage directions, but we did so in a way that worked for my body” (interview, 2020). The Touretteshero set design offers not an evasion of Beckett’s stage directions, but an innovative new manner of fulfilling them. The Touretteshero stage setting also involved the politicised decision of refusing to restrict the performer. “It was important for us not to have Mouth strapped down”, Thom recalls (interview, 2020). Actors who have played Mouth have repeatedly testified to the physical suffering that the role entails, and even to “feelings of being used, misused, or even abused”

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by the script’s demands (Levy 2001, 142). Billie Whitelaw famously broke down during rehearsals with Beckett as a result of intense sensory deprivation occasioned by the production’s restraints on her body and head (1995, 124–125); she later spoke of the play as the “most painful” to perform of all Beckett’s texts (1992, 9), and revealed that she suffered a chronic injured spine and neck as a result of her repeated performances of the role (1995, 131). Actor Ruth Geller similarly found herself struggling to maintain consciousness in rehearsals as a result of the attempt “to deny oneself as an embodied subject in order to grant the text such autonomy”, recalling that at times, “I forgot to control my breathing. I began to doubt my sanity” (qtd. in Levy 2001, 145). Dwan’s performance in Walter Asmus’s 2009 production propelled what Tubridy has called the “abject fetishization of the female body in productions of Not I ” (2018) still further in the public imagination. Where previous performers’ suffering has remained more or less concealed onstage, the Asmus production circulated press images of Dwan clad in a black vest top with bare limbs shackled and her head strapped to her set board—and the images were reproduced so enthusiastically by media outlets that one would be forgiven for wondering if the play’s reputation as a performance that occasioned female physical suffering was being positioned as a titillating part of the play’s commercial appeal.6 The Touretteshero production refused to re-enact this extreme physical restriction of the female actor on stage. There is also a broader intersectional issue at play here in the refusal to stage not only a restricted woman, but a restricted disabled woman. “Thom is alert to the wider sociological implications of these directorial choices”, Tubridy reminds us (2018); here, to strap Mouth down would risk reproducing problematic tropes of the disabled body as itself inherently restricted, or of the disabled body as in need of restriction. Disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson forcefully underlines how “we have refused to see disability. Avowing disability as tragic or shameful, we have 6 To point to bodily restraint or suffering onstage, however, is not to imply a lack of agency on the part of the actors themselves, as Phillip Zarrilli rightly cautions against doing (2018, 97–98). As theatre scholar Carrie Preston also observes, “Beckett explores subjectivities that emerge as a working through of a submission to such constraints as a circumscribed posture […] [and] versions of agency may be achieved through a willing submission to a performance form and rigorous, even painful, bodily practices” (2012, 174). I have elsewhere explored how Whitelaw’s often physically punishing work with Beckett can be understood as an assertion of her own creative agency (Simpson 2015).

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hidden away disabled people in asylums, segregated schools, hospitals, and nursing homes. When we ourselves develop disabilities, we often hide them as well” (2009, 19). Legal and institutional powers impose further restrictions on disabled individuals in matters of sexuality and childbearing (McRuer and Mollow 2012), employment and labour (Siebers 2011, 180), social visibility (Garland-Thomson 2009), and even—via measures such as sterilisation and prenatal screening—existence itself (Knittel 2014; Rapp and Ginsburg 2009). In direct contrast to this history of disability constraint, the Touretteshero production returned a significant degree of physical agency to Mouth by according her a new freedom of movement in performance, even to the point of giving Thom control over the LED lights in her hood in place of the more typical externally controlled spotlight; as Thom puts it, “We gave that control back to Mouth” (interview, 2020). This attention to the implications of Mouth’s relationship with her stage environment is consistent with Thom’s championing of the social model of disability, which distinguishes physical impairment as a bodily fact from disability as a product of social exclusion. The social model of disability understands physical or neurological impairment as a fact of bodily existence, and “disability” itself as occasioned only by poor adaptation and response at a systemic social level.7 Thom explains, “diversity of bodies and minds is totally normal. And so it’s not our bodies that disable us; what disables people is a failure to consider that difference in how we set up and structure society” (interview, 2020). The Touretteshero production of Not I presents a microcosm of the social model’s working: changes in the conventional set-up of the social environment transforms the individual’s role in that setting, and here changes to Not I ’s conventional stage setting transform Thom’s potential on the stage. Moreover, by re-working our expectations of the body’s staging, the new production of Not I recreated the original shock of Beckett’s play: that of the unexpectedly materialised body in performance. In its early guises, Not I was striking in part for the challenge it offered to traditional ways of encountering the human body on stage as a fragmented, almost spectral mouth, hovering on the edge of invisibility yet refusing complete erasure, an insecure embodiment disconcertingly bodied forth on the stage before the spectator’s eyes. Even within the experimental 7 See Chapter One for fuller discussion of the medical, social, and complex embodiment models of disability.

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context of modern Western theatre, and following Beckett’s own gradual elision of the body from the stage across Happy Days , Play, and Breath, Not I radically defamiliarised how the human body ‘should’ or ‘might’ look on stage. The Touretteshero reinterpretation of how Beckett’s directions for staging Mouth could be achieved, in conjunction with Thom’s perceptibly disabled presence, offered a similar destabilising of audience expectations of bodily presentation—and particularly the expectations of the complacent ‘informed’ spectator, accustomed to Beckett’s work and so less readily affected by Not I ’s traditional mode of staging. Helpful here is artist Giles Perring’s use of the terms “normalising” and “countercultural” to distinguish between two possible artistic approaches to disability performance: “normalising” aims to fit the disabled practitioner to mainstream production values and aesthetic criteria, “present[ing] difference in ways that do not challenge mainstream aesthetic discourse, perhaps in an attempt to minimise ‘otherness’”, in contrast to the “countercultural” objective of challenging mainstream aesthetic precepts by emphasising “the value of transgressive and non-normative qualities” in disability performance (2005, 186). If we have long understood Beckett’s plays as pivotal countercultural moments in performance history, disability performance and associated innovations in staging the body affords a deftly fitting continuation of Beckett’s theatrical legacy. The Touretteshero Not I challenges social and cultural codes that govern not only our understanding of Mouth and how she ‘should’ be performed, but also our perception of the disabled body itself—and particularly the disabled body as consummate, creatively agential performer.

Auditor and Auditorium: Access and Affect This chapter has focused thus far on how the Touretteshero production of Not I enabled Thom’s own access to a canonical modern theatre text, and the ways in which her disability performance resonated with concepts and concerns already implicit in Beckett’s work. However, the Touretteshero Not I also reimagined audience access in significant ways: firstly by recasting the script’s Auditor figure as a BSL interpreter, and secondly by staging the production as a “relaxed performance” which expanded the range of audience behaviour permitted in the auditorium. Thom highlights the crucial importance of accessibility to both the ethics and aesthetics of her work, explaining that at Touretteshero, “it’s about access being considered and deeply embedded right from the very start

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of the process”, and that when making Not I , access “was never an afterthought; it was a core part of our aesthetic, and of the aesthetic decisions that we were making” (interview, 2020). In many respects, the Touretteshero Not I access measures were innovatively appropriate to elements of Beckett’s original script—particularly the emphatic separation of bodily gesture and verbal speech accentuated by the inclusion of the BSL Auditor. Simultaneously, though, these access measures radically altered the play’s affective functioning, particularly in terms of the relationship between Mouth and the Auditor onstage and between onstage figures and the spectators in the auditorium. Productions of Not I have traditionally sought to establish an intensely disturbing or even outrightly distressing emotional and kinaesthetic charge. Beckett famously told director Alan Schneider that the play should be addressed “less to the understanding than to the nerves of the audience which should in a sense share her bewilderment” (Letters IV , 311, original emphasis), and theatre critic Benedict Nightingale testified to the play’s impact in this regard, recording that watching Whitelaw’s performance as Mouth at the Royal Court in 1973 was “unusually painful – tearing into you like a grappling iron and dragging you after it, with or without your leave” (1973, 135). Where the disability performances of Endgame examined in the previous two chapters worked to heighten the playscript’s original unsettling affect—particularly as it coalesced around the non-normative body—the Touretteshero Not I instead emphasised “communal wellbeing and inclusion” (Heron 2018, 287). There is a potential paradox in staging a relaxed and accessible performance of a play that is meant to work agonisingly on the nerves of the spectator, “a play that is so intense and so dark in many moments” as Thom herself observes (interview, 2020), and critics queried if the Touretteshero’s staging might diminish the blistering impact of influential previous productions of Not I . The remainder of this chapter will examine the access measures that the Touretteshero production introduced and their relation to the Not I script and performance history, interrogating this counterbalancing of inclusion versus the play’s necessarily fraught affect. The Touretteshero production of Not I re-worked the Auditor as a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter, performed by Charmaine

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Wombwell.8 Wombwell’s role operated most obviously as an audience access measure, part of the Touretteshero project of “taking one of the most intense and obtuse pieces of modern theatre and making that accessible at every level” (interview, 2017). The move followed the company’s extensive previous experience of providing similar embedded access for their show Backstage in Biscuit Land, and the precedent of other modern theatre companies that have incorporated BSL or closed captioning directly into their plays’ core aesthetic design, such as Graeae Theatre’s productions of Martin Sherman’s Bent (2004), Sarah Kane’s Blasted (2019), and Shahid Iqbal Khan’s Ten Nights (2021), and Deafinitely Theatre’s stagings of George Brant’s Grounded (2013), Mike Bartlett’s Contractions (2017), and Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2018). Thom has explained the importance of the Not I production’s accessibility both in relation to theatre industry ethics more broadly—“By not engaging with access, by not thinking about disabled bodies and minds, you are trying to control who does and doesn’t get to see a piece of work” (interview, 2020)—and as a corollary of Beckett’s text more specifically. “It was really important, in a play in which Mouth faces lots of barriers, that we created as barrier-free an environment as possible for our audience”, she reflects (interview, 2020). Rendering the Auditor as BSL interpreter offered one neatly integrated access measure. However, the recasting of the Auditor as BSL interpreter worked to artistic ends as well as pragmatic access purposes in the Touretteshero Not I , intensifying rather than distracting from the overall aesthetic impact. As Thom declares, “there’s this assumption that to make something accessible is to compromise on other areas of the artistic or aesthetic rigour, and I think that that’s bullshit” (interview, 2020). Here, the interplay between Thom’s spoken monologue and Wombwell’s signed accompaniment generated a new version of the unsettling sense of disembodied fragmentation that pervades Beckett’s text. With Thom elevated in her wheelchair on an eight-foot-high platform on stage left and Wombwell standing at ground level on stage right, the spectator was forced to continuously choose between watching Thom or watching Wombwell’s signing, fragmenting any sense of a definite or discrete speaking identity (see Fig. 4.3). In earlier productions of Not I , the concealment of the 8 Wombwell played the role of Auditor in all UK performances. American Sign Language interpreter Lyndsey Snyder played the role when the production toured to the US in early 2020.

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performer’s body and the more total darkness of the auditorium created the illusion of a disembodied, floating mouth, and the consequent sense of a disembodied form of speech fragmented from any cohesive bodily identity. This illusion chimes with broader related concerns across Beckett’s work: his early interest in René Descartes’s and Arnold Geulincx’s seventeenth-century philosophies of mind–body dualism developed into an extended interrogation of variously spliced manifestations of the self in his later literary writing, which frequently explores the post-Cartesian struggle between bodily and verbalised identity. Here, the Touretteshero production ‘split’ two versions of Mouth’s monologue across the stage, separating a primarily verbal language from a primarily bodily language between its two performers, in a new rendition of a post-Cartesian subjectivity. Where Tourette’s tics already exemplify an apparent disconnect between body and mind or between mind and voice, the Touretteshero Not I pushed the depiction of this split bodily identity still further, by staging the Auditor not simply as a listening figure, but as an embodied incarnation of Mouth’s voice. Indeed, while the adaption of the Auditor as a BSL interpreter was perhaps the production’s starkest alteration of Not I ’s stage directions— and required extensive negotiation and creative consultation with the Beckett estate (Thom interview, 2020)—the very fact of reinstating the Auditor figure restored to the stage a constituent part of Beckett’s original script that has often been excluded from modern performances of the play. In the published text of Not I , the stage directions specify the “tall standing figure” of the Auditor “enveloped from head to foot in loose black djellaba, with hood” and standing on an “invisible podium” downstage audience left, “dead still throughout but for four brief movements indicated” (CDW , 376). The first two Anglophone productions at the Forum Theatre and Royal Court staged the Auditor as per the script’s instructions, played by Henderson Forsythe and Brian Miller respectively. However, Beckett eliminated the role of the Auditor when he directed the French première production of Pas moi at the Théâtre d’Orsay in 1975, after experiencing “technical difficulties” in staging the figure to his satisfaction (Knowlson 1997, 617) and he did not include the role in the 1975 BBC recording of Whitelaw’s rendition. In November 1986 he advised the young directors David Hunsberger and Linda Kendall “simply to omit the Auditor” in their own production of the play at the Performance Network Theatre in Ann Arbor, commenting that the figure “is very

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difficult to stage” (Letters IV 2016, 680). Numerous subsequent productions have followed the precedent of these two instances and eliminated the Auditor from their stage. Yet in this same 1986 letter to Hunsberger and Kendall when he suggested that they cut the Auditor figure, Beckett offered the seemingly self-contradictory remark, “For me the play needs him but can do without him” (Letters IV 2016, 680), suggesting a preference for retaining the Auditor in the stage production if possible—and when he directed the 1978 revival of Pas moi at the Théâtre d’Orsay, Beckett not only reinstated the Auditor but in fact enlarged the role. The Auditor’s “gesture of helpless compassion” in the English text (CDW , 376) is intensified into “un mouvement fait de blâme et de pitié impuissainte” in the play’s French translation (“a gesture of disapproval and helpless pity”; Beckett 2014, 95). In this 1978 staging, Beckett also re-directed the final instantiation of the Auditor’s responsive gesture. Now, the Auditor’s final onstage movement was to cover his head with his hands, “in a gesture of increased helplessness and despair, as if unable to bear any longer the torrent of sound” (Knowlson and Pilling 1979, 198). While the Touretteshero’s casting of a BSL interpreter may represent a striking new adaptation of the Auditor’s scripted movement, the performance history of Not I and Pas moi reveals Beckett’s own frequent re-working of these gestural responses, offering extended precedent for variability in approaches to staging of the unstable Auditor. However, the Touretteshero adaptation of the Auditor also significantly re-works the figure’s intersubjective response to Mouth’s crisis at an affective level. The Auditor’s reactions to Mouth in earlier versions of the play move between resignation and outright rejection: from a despairing inability to help Mouth in the English text, to the gesture of “disapproval” in the French text”, to the active recoil in Beckett’s 1978 revival production. All hope of any intersubjective understanding or connection between Mouth and Auditor is emphatically denied in all three versions. By contrast, in the Touretteshero production, Wombwell’s translation of Thom’s speech radically re-shaped the dynamics of Mouth and Auditor’s embodied relationship. Here, Wombwell’s interpretation of Mouth’s monologue (and of Thom’s tics) aligned Mouth’s language and the Auditor’s response in a very literal “gesture of translation, communication and correspondence” (Tubridy 2018), drawing the two figures into a supportive accord with each other, as they shared the now-mutual responsibility of communication. The act of translating Mouth’s monologue into sign language offered an embodied gesture of accommodation, “invit[ing] us in to the possibility of a new, communal

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form of understanding, rather than pushing us away” (Sidi 2018). This recasting complements Thom’s insistence that the act of exclusion is antithetical to a text centrally concerned with a socially isolated individual. She justifies the production’s staging choice by explaining that “to me, the role of the Auditor is about bearing witness to Mouth, and the BSL interpreter bore witness to Mouth, and therefore honoured that element of the text” (interview, 2020). Yet the witnessing that Wombwell’s Auditor performs is of a very different nature to that of previous Not I Auditors. Earlier instantiations of the role emphasised the difficulty—even futility—of the attempt to bear witness to another’s suffering; this witnessing figure endures the act of listening as “an inexhaustible and terrible pensum, an activity that is by definition inadequate” (Barry 2008, 128). Wombwell’s witnessing, by contrast, establishes a new framework of successful intersubjective communication—a distinct contrast to the mistrustful pessimism of Beckett’s original scripting and direction. This newly accommodating dynamic extends to the Touretteshero auditorium, and to the re-worked relationship between spectator and stage. All Touretteshero productions are staged as relaxed performances as part of their access policy, motivated in part by Thom’s own difficulty in accessing the theatre as a spectator with noticeable tics; she has in the past been asked to leave auditoriums when other patrons complained about her presence, and notes “I wouldn’t have felt comfortable going to see any of the productions that have been done of Not I to date” (interview, 2017). The relaxed performance model does not demand silence and stillness from its audience, since such audience etiquette can present a sometimes insurmountable challenge to the neurodivergent spectator, whose cognitive or physical functioning may mean that they cannot guarantee that their body will remain quiet during the length of a performance. Relaxed performances aim to render audience spaces more accessible to all spectators, via measures such as allowing exit out of and re-entry into the auditorium throughout the performance, leaving the house lights on dimly, and preparing front-of-house staff and actors to accept higher levels of audience noise (Simpson 2018a, 229). As Megan Johnson puts it, “By cripping the performance space through relaxed performance protocols”, the Touretteshero production “draws attention to the ideological framings of ableism that are made manifest through the material, spatial, and sonic configurations of theatre spaces” (2020, 71). Relaxed performances have been gradually gaining in popularity across UK and US theatre in recent decades, but their provision is

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often limited across various genres, more typically available for children’s shows and long-running commercial musicals than for more canonical or avant-garde ‘high art’ performances (Simpson 2018a, 229–230). Thom observed “this cultural curation that was happening around what work was and wasn’t being made available to disabled people, that was being largely curated by non-disabled people’s assumptions, and meant that disabled people weren’t having access to Beckett’s work” (interview, 2020). Beckett’s Not I was a draw for the company in part, she says, because: There is a preconception, a misconception that relaxed performance can only work for certain types of plays. I think it’s a mistake to shut down what type of work can be a relaxed performance. […] I want to show how you can have a relaxed performance of an intense theatrical piece of work, without decreasing that intensity, but while creating a space where people are safe to see it. (Interview, 2017)

The Touretteshero relaxed performance of Not I offered a particularly stark contrast to previous stagings of the play, which demanded complete darkness and spectator entrapment. In early productions, Beckett instructed that all possible sources of illumination, other than the spotlight on Mouth and the faint light half-illuminating the Auditor, should be extinguished during performances of Not I . Whitelaw recalls that, for the 1973 Royal Court staging: Sam wanted all the lights taken out of the theatre, including the exits, the lavatories, and the aisles. There was to be no spillage of light anywhere. Jack’s lighting box was covered. Heavy curtains were drawn over the doors at the back of the theatre. For the short duration of the play, there was to be no escape from Mouth for the audience. (1995, 123; original emphasis)

Whitelaw’s account underlines the combination of sensory deprivation and sensory overload that results from this intense darkness. The extreme darkness of the auditorium plays painfully on the nervous system, often provoking an acute sense of corporeal vulnerability in the audience member who is simultaneously deprived of and bombarded with sensory stimuli—and who has, moreover, lost the very literal means of escape from the auditorium, since the darkness of Not I ’s staging makes leaving

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one’s seat difficult to the point of impossibility. As lighting technician and Beckett scholar Andrew Lennon observes, “The displacement of physical surroundings makes every action potentially fraught, destabilising the potential of one’s own agency, as you cannot approximate any sense of distance with which to undertake an action with certainty” (2018, 60). As a result, audience members in various productions of Not I have reported experiencing intense physical anxiety and shock when immersed in the play’s staging conditions, including hyperventilation and injuries sustained in attempted rushed exits from the auditorium; incidents of panic attacks and fainting were a regular feature of Asmus’s 2009 production tour.9 The contrast between Wombwell’s accommodating Auditor and Beckett’s 1978 recoiling Auditor can thus also be aligned with a contrast in the broader forms of audience listening response that each model: the comparative audience freedom of the Touretteshero production replaced the panicked recoil and the entrapment in the dark auditorium that typified earlier productions of Not I . Taken out of context, this attention to access and accommodation might seem to risk diminishing the disturbing affective impact that characterises Beckett’s most viscerally distressing play. Spectatorial tension is a crucial constitutive factor of Not I in performance, and consequently any reduction in that tension might conceivably be read as a failure of the play’s intended action. Yet the Touretteshero production generates its own acute tension from the unpredictability of the Tourette’s body in live performance. Although some of Thom’s tics are more predictable than others—the word “biscuit” and her striking of her chest, for example—the majority are unpredictable, lending her public performances a necessarily spontaneous and consequently somewhat precarious edge; as Thom puts it, “Much of what I’m about to say will be a surprise to everyone, including me” (Howard 2015).10 Still more strikingly, the 9 Such incidents are recorded in Lennon (2018), Nonemaker (2016), Finlay (2015), Hemming (2015), and Lane (2014). 10 When reviewing the 2018 Battersea production, I also noted my own personal sense of nervous agitation when Thom ended the performance by asking the audience “to make some noise ‘in solidarity with Mouth’ – and if we feel self-conscious doing this as a group, she tells us, ‘imagine what it’s like when yours is the only voice in the room’. As a committed non-actor, for me this challenge immediately instils the sense of entrapment that more typically marks performances of Not I ”—as did the earlier request that we all turned to our neighbouring spectator and speak about our experience of the production for a few minutes (Simpson 2018b). Reviewer Zoë Rose Kriegler-Wenk also remarked on a

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potential breakdown of Thom’s voluntary control over her performing body—that is, a more extreme breakdown of control beyond that of her usual verbal and motor tics—provokes an acute nervous tension during live performance. At the beginning of every show, Thom explains to her audience that if she experiences a “ticcing fit”, she will pause the production and begin again if and when she is able to do so. A ticcing fit is an extended period of constant and uncontrollable tics which “can last from ten minutes to a few hours and are so overwhelming that it’s hard to do or say anything else while they’re flying out”, Thom explains. “During these fits any part of my body may move, shake, contort or lock into painful positions […] and without someone being with me I’m very likely to injure myself” (2012, 48, 195). For an audience already engaged by the ongoing tussle between Thom’s voluntary speech and her involuntary interruptions onstage, the added threat of her total bodily disruption further heightens the tension inherent in the live performance. There’s a parallel here with the added emotional strain “derived from the fear that the whole thing was just going to implode” that similarly threatened Chris Jones’s and Dan Moran’s performances in The Endgame Project production discussed in the previous chapter. The struggle with an uneasy bodily contingency that Beckett’s texts trace was rendered immediate, material, on the Touretteshero stage. The audience participated vicariously in this experience of depending upon a body that is “an unreliable partner in life”, as Thom describes both the experience of Tourette’s syndrome and the mode of being scripted in Not I (interview, 2020).

Conclusion The Touretteshero’s Not I achieved a level of critical and commercial success unprecedented in the history of disability performances of Beckett’s work. Its triumph underlines the acuity and ingenuity of Thom’s production in terms of both Beckettian aesthetics and access ethics, and of what Thom describes as the Beckett estate’s “very creative” similar dynamic during this section of the performance: “A sizable portion of the audience appears self-conscious. Thom and Wombwell have curated a safe space, and yet traces of Mouth’s anxieties linger in the room: am I too loud? Too noticeable? If I open my mouth too far, will I be able to close it again?” (2017). Audience discomfort faced with the demanding conditions of Not I ’s live performance remains for many spectators in the Touretteshero auditorium, but in an altered manner that does not necessarily disadvantage neurodivergent audience members specifically.

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and “extremely positive and extremely supportive” engagement with the company’s work (interview, 2020). As Leah Sidi observes, the Touretteshero production did not “transform” Not I but rather “rediscovered it”, re-training the spectator’s eye onto new social and ontological implications “even as it uses the same words the play has always used” (2018). In this context, Thom’s presence onstage in the role of Mouth, alongside the spontaneous irruption of her tics in performance, establishes a crucial re-interpretative framework for our understanding of Beckett’s text and for the potential of disability performance more broadly. The recasting of the Auditor figure as a BSL interpreter similarly entwined a pragmatics of access and inclusion with an aesthetically innovative rendering of the Cartesian splitting of the self on Beckett’s stage. Likewise, beyond the specific similarities between Tourette’s symptomology and Mouth’s experience, the inclusion of Thom’s motor and verbal tics in performance echoed the broader probing of compulsion and creative agency across Beckett’s work—and also generated a heightened dramatic tension that counteracted the possibility of any attenuated affective impact in relaxed performance. Indeed, even in its broader challenge to the theatre industry as to “who gets to perform what, and how” (Trueman 2017), the Touretteshero production demonstrates its close alignment with the details of Beckett’s script. Lyn Gardner describes Not I as being centrally concerned with “a woman who has been largely voiceless but suddenly speaks” (2017); for this text to be performed by a disabled woman with severely restricted access to the theatre auditorium herself is startlingly apt. The Touretteshero Not I was a revelatory exploration of the struggles associated with bodily autonomy and social inclusion, enacted at an embodied level in performance. Rooting itself firmly in Beckett’s original text, but unconstrained by extratextual traditions introduced by previous productions of the play, the success of the Touretteshero Not I bespeaks Thom’s determination to make Tourette’s “my power, not my problem” (Thom 2012, 185).

Interviews: Jess Thom, Touretteshero Jess Thom is an artist, performer, playworker, and the co-founder of Touretteshero, a production company that defines its mission as celebrating the humour and creativity of Tourette’s syndrome. Thom herself has Tourette’s syndrome, which for her manifests in vocal and

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motor tics. Her most common verbal tic is “biscuit”, which occasioned the title of her debut show, Backstage in Biscuit Land (2014–2017) and her autobiography, Welcome to Biscuit Land: A Year in the Life of Touretteshero (2012). She is also one of the ten per cent of people with Tourette’s who exhibit coprolalia or ‘obscene language’ tics. Her most common motor tic is a hard thump to her chest with her left hand; she wears protective fingerless gloves to protect the skin of her knuckles from the repeated impact, and uses a wheelchair to aid her mobility. Thom is a vivid, magnetic presence. Her charismatic articulacy testifies to her years of work in disability advocacy alongside theatre and performance; she speaks in paragraphs rather than sentences, and her laughter punctuates both her wry explanations and her flights of enthusiasm. This volume contains two interviews with Thom: one from April 2017, when she was first beginning work on the Touretteshero production of Not I , and one from April 2020, just after the Covid-19 pandemic had cut short her final tour of the show. Thom’s verbal tics are not included in these transcriptions.

Interview, April 2017 Your theatre work to date has been particularly focused on the concept of the “relaxed performance”. Can you tell me more about this? A relaxed performance takes a relaxed approach to sound and movement coming from the audience. It understands that focus and attention can look different to different types of bodies, and doesn’t make assumptions about how an audience might ‘be’ or watch a piece. It’s really broad in who it welcomes: disabled people or people with impairments, people who have young children, babies, people who just want to experience being in an inclusive audience in a slightly different way. It’s about slightly reframing what people expect, because that preconception of old-school stillness and silence doesn’t work for lots of different types of people. I’m at the more extreme end of that because I don’t have a choice—I physically don’t have the ability to follow that rule—but it’s not working on a subtle level for lots of people, and those people’s response to that will just be not to go to the theatre, to think “This isn’t a place for me”. I think sometimes people read “relaxed performance” as a threat, because they feel that that is somehow going to compromise the artistic

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value of the work, the creativity of work, the freedom of directors and performers, or the concentration of performers. As a performer myself, I just think it makes you up your game. Because what attracts me to theatre is that it’s a live experience; it has that really human sense of the people who are facilitating that experience. And I don’t think that there are particular types of work that are suitable for relaxed performance and certain types of work that aren’t—but there is a preconception, a misconception that relaxed performance can only work for certain types of plays. I think it’s a mistake to shut down what type of work can be a relaxed performance. The next big creative project we’re working on addresses this very issue: we’re doing a neurodiverse presentation of Samuel Beckett’s short play Not I . We’re claiming Mouth as a disabled character, and understanding her experience from that perspective. Not I has been a reference for me and my colleague Matthew for a very long time,11 and there’s loads of stuff within that text that resonates with me deeply from a lived experience point of view: not only Mouth experiencing these extremes of language, but also not recognising that voice as her own. And we also like the idea of taking one of the most intense and obtuse pieces of modern theatre and making that accessible at every level—for performer and for audience—and challenging this idea of what a relaxed performance might be. I want to show how you can have a relaxed performance of an intense theatrical piece of work without decreasing that intensity, but while creating a space where people are safe to see it. And I’m really keen that new people get to experience this text, because I certainly wouldn’t have felt comfortable going to see any of the productions that have been done of Not I to date. That would have felt like a massive personal risk for me. There’s a big different between taking a creative risk and seeing something that you might not like, versus taking a risk with your identity that means that you are at risk. I don’t think people should feel like they are putting elements of themselves at risk in order to take part in our culture and participate in our cultural life. We want to create a space wherein Not I can be seen by a really broad range of people—who might

11 Matthew Pountney is the co-founder of Touretteshero company, and co-director of the Touretteshero Not I production.

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not like it or might not connect with it!—but it’s a safe and accessible space for them. How have you found working on Not I so far? I’m absolutely committed to not talking about how hard it is, I think that there’s been so much said about that that I don’t really want to add, and some of that is problematic to me—but it is bloody hard! [Laughs ] It’s frustrating! And it does interesting things to my tics, speaking it with urgency and pace. I was really interested in the idea of whether I was at a neurological advantage with a text like Not I because I have such experience of automation anyway. It’s taken me a while, but I really care about Mouth. As a disabled performer, it’s claiming back disabled characters. There are these characters hiding within plain sight, and rather than waiting for people to write parts for disabled performer, we’re going to find them. It’s not a straightforward step on from Biscuit Land. We’re thinking about it as a difficult second album… it’s not an obvious choice. Superficially it looks very different, but actually it extends lots of the themes of Biscuit Land in a really interesting way. We’re understanding Mouth in the context of neurodiversity, understanding her in the context of the social model.12 At a time when disabled people are facing increasing barriers, it feels like the play has a lot to say. Not I is often understood as a really depressing play, but actually, I felt very strongly that we’re joining Mouth at a point in her life where she is suffering less than she has ever suffered before. And for me that gave it a lightness. She’s not in pain at the moment. And as someone who experiences chronic pain, “not being in pain at the moment”—fucking brilliant! [Laughs ] So there are those moments to really celebrate, little sequences of words that give you a glimpse into something else. In terms of disability performance specifically, or of relaxed performances more broadly, do you think there are benefits for nondisabled spectators, as well as for disabled audience members? Totally. Seeing difference—recognised and supported and visible, within your life and within your community—is absolutely vital, particularly as people encounter challenges or impairments or differences within their own lives. The thing with disability is that it’s something that, as a society, we’re really bad at talking about, or talking about in any real context. We 12 The social model of disability distinguishes physical impairment as a bodily fact from disability as a product of social exclusion. See Chapter One for further detail.

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have such restricted, limited narratives that it’s permitted to sit within. And the people who are most at risk of damage from that are people who are currently non-disabled people—and then if your life or circumstances change unexpectedly, all you have to reach for are those limited narratives, and you can be left sort of rudderless. If their bodies or minds or experiences change, they have nothing but those dominant portrayals of difference to fall back on. And most people get through that, but it’s a tougher process than it needs to be. If you’ve had opportunities to be part of inclusive communities and conversations, then I feel like it gives you more to hold onto in those moments where your life and circumstances might feel quite shaky. These performances are a beautiful way of allowing people to become aware of each other, sharing a space and an experience. Visibility really matters. And that doesn’t have to be, really shouldn’t just be people on stage or people on television; it has to be more visible than that. It has to be knowing people being vocal and equal in their communities. There’s a real joy in being part of a diverse audience, knowing that you’re with people you’re not exactly the same as. It doesn’t have to feel challenging. It rarely does. But I do think that within arts and culture, there’s a sort of hidden exclusion that allows people to say things like, “Oh, I don’t want to hold a relaxed performance so we won’t”. There’s something liberating about naming that and making that visible. And if you say to people, “Ok, you don’t want to hold a relaxed performance. Can you write me a list of all the people who your work is not for?” it starts to get pretty uncomfortable. Yes—is that actually the decision that you want to make? Because here it is, in black and white. Exactly. Often the exclusion of disabled people is presented as the natural order, as the natural conclusion of their bodies being faulty or broken— and actually it’s not the natural order, it’s a decision we’re all consciously making, the idea that a normative way of doing things takes precedence over anyone else’s experience of requirements. It’s very easy to go along with the quiet exclusion of disabled people, justifying it as natural. There’s something important about pointing out, “That is a set of decisions that we are making”. Whether we’re consciously making them or not, we’re still making them—and we can choose to do things in a different way. There’s the incredible feeling that can happen with both strangers and people you know when your physical bodily requirements are just so well

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understood and naturally provided for, and the incredible freedom and amazing connectivity and intimacy that those moments provide. That’s something that just feels so fucking great.

Interview, April 2020 Jess, it’s wonderful to speak with you about Not I again. The first time I talked to you about it was back in April 2017, when I was interviewing you about your work in relaxed performance and I had no idea that you were working on the play. You just dropped it during our conversation, “Oh, our next project is Not I ”…! Yes! When we were touring Backstage in Biscuit Land, lots of venues were saying things to us like, “Oh, you know, we’re really interested in relaxed performance and we’d love to make our work more accessible to disabled people – we just haven’t had the right type of show yet”. So we were aware of this cultural curation that was happening around what work was and wasn’t being made accessible to disabled people, that was largely been curated by non-disabled people’s assumptions, and meant that disabled people weren’t having access to Beckett’s work, and to a really broad range of theatre experiences. There was an element of challenging that cultural curation—like, it can’t just be The Lion King. But we knew that just by doing it, that that would happen. If we do Not I as a relaxed performance, you can’t really say shit to us about relaxed performance being only for a certain type of work, if we can then go, “Yeah, but we have done Beckett …!” And it did work, and it was great. It’s lovely to have an opportunity to talk about it again. And do you think that Beckett’s work more broadly lends itself to that sort of disability production, or is it something about Not I specifically? There was something specific about Not I for me that related to my lived experience so profoundly. I think when I first encountered it, I had this fear that, “I am not going to get this”, like, “It’s going to be complicated in a way that I don’t relate to”. But as soon as I read it… it blew my mind. This is something there that I deeply understand, in a way that other people won’t. The idea of people looking at you, staring in public. “Stare at her uncomprehending”—I know what that looks like. Being in a public space, my presence in a public space can elicit that “uncomprehending stare” pretty quickly. Or lines like “incapable of deceit”: there’s a big

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element of Tourette’s that’s about revealing information. Like, I revealed that my sister was pregnant to an audience of three hundred people in Australia before she’d told my mum [laughs ]. Or things like “going to the nearest lavatory to pour it out”. That one felt a bit like [makes a shocked face] “How did he know that?” Because that was a tactic that I used for years as a way of trying to manage the uncomfortable sensations in my body. That felt a bit like someone was looking at your knickers. Like, how can a non-disabled man have known this? That can only have come, I think, through Beckett’s really close observation of the world around him. Or “whole body like gone”—in four words Beckett has summed up the experience of having a neurological condition like Tourette’s that does make your body into an unreliable partner in life. I know exactly what that means! Beckett gave me something, in those ways, because I don’t think I could have ever communicated that. So there are those elements where Not I felt really personal. And at no point am I saying that Beckett wrote this about Tourette’s. I don’t need to say that Beckett wrote this about Tourette’s, because that’s not what matters. But Beckett definitely likes to impair his characters. I think that’s really interesting in the context of disability and particularly the social model of disability: the idea that it’s normal for our bodies and minds to work in different ways, and for some people to have impairments and for other people not to have impairments. Those are the facts about our bodies and their bodily differences, and that diversity of bodies and minds is totally normal. And so it’s not our bodies that disable us; what disables people is a failure to consider that difference in how we set up and structure society. I was really interested in that particularly in relation to Not I . What if we understand Mouth through that lens, and understand her as a disabled person? Of course, Mouth is someone who frequently encounters barriers throughout her life because of how her body and mind work. But there are also really incredibly beautiful moments for me of connectivity and a sense of community—and sometimes they’re in places that actually historically have maybe been pointed at as examples of isolation. So the scene where she goes shopping, people might go, “Oh, look at how she goes shopping, she doesn’t talk to anyone, she just hands in a list”—like, that’s a weird way of doing your shopping.13 But for me, 13 Jess refers here to the following lines of the play: “how she survived!… even shopping… out shopping… busy shopping centre… supermart… just hand in the list… with the bag… old black shopping bag… and then stand there waiting… any length of time…

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when I read that, I thought, “Oh, that’s amazing – her community is supporting her to get what she needs. Someone is doing her shopping for her”. So rather than feeling like that was about isolation, for me that felt optimistic—and also speaks to the idea that just because a disabled person does something in a different way, that doesn’t make it less valid. And I think that also underpins the whole idea of us doing that production. We were sticking with doing a rigorous production where we honoured the stage directions, but we did so in a way that worked for my body. We didn’t look or think about how other bodies had performed that role; we knew that wasn’t going to work for me. We had to find a way that I could achieve those stage directions. That’s the opportunity of disability creativity. It feels like that message sits within the text. Can you tell me more about your approach to staging, those issues of stage set and body position? So we knew that historically people had been held still in order to focus the light on the mouth. So one of the very early conversations we had with Derval [Tubridy, a Beckett scholar who advised on the Touretteshero production] was, “Well, there’s nothing in the stage directions that Mouth has to be still”. So if the light moves with Mouth, that’s totally fine. For us, it was much more about understanding why those stage directions exist in the way that they do, what matters about them. Derval got really excited that I had control over the light—I turn the light on, and I turn the light off, and it moves with me inside my hood— because there’s lots of stuff within the reading of Beckett’s work about light as being a form of control, and we actually gave that control back to Mouth. What I don’t think [laughs ] we had quite realised immediately, though… It took us a while to go, “Oh shit, she has to be eight feet off the floor”. [Laughs ] And that is quite high! Edward Beckett [Samuel Beckett’s nephew and current executor of the Beckett estate] said to us, “It needs to be an unnatural angle – but I won’t come with a tape measure”, and it was like [makes a nervous face, nods slowly] “Great…” [laughs ]. It wasn’t going to physically work for me if my body was held still, but the challenge of that is, as a wheelchair user with impulse control issues, if I am eight foot in the air and have an opportunity to not be, middle of the throng… motionless… staring into space… mouth half open as usual… till it was back in her hand… the bag back in her hand… then pay and go…” (CDW , 379).

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I will very quickly not be. It would be a very short performance—and not repeatable! But it was important for us to not have Mouth strapped down. I think we were very aware of the legacy of some of how it had been performed historically, and that felt problematic to us in terms of performers, and particularly female performers, being strapped up in order to perform something in a very stylised way. We experimented with some aerial stuff, but it was also important for us that I stayed in my chair. And it would have been read totally differently, particularly by a non-disabled audience, if I’d been lifted out of my chair. The chair is part of my body and so needed to be part of the performance. So we drew up a list of what we needed from the platform: it needed to be quiet; it needed to be quick; it needed to get me and my chair up to the right level; I needed to be able to get down very quickly because I have seizure-like episodes and there needed to be a contingency that if that happened during performance I could be taken down safely and quickly. And we gave that list to a contemporary circus designer, and he made us what was I think the perfect model for that. I’m free to move, but there’s a belt on my wheelchair that is essential—like, all the other safety stuff is meaningless if the belt on my wheelchair isn’t the right one, because that’s the one I can’t undo myself. Staging Not I with a disabled performer—does it add something to the text that a non-disabled performance is going to lack? I think so. I think that historically people perhaps haven’t understood that Mouth is a disabled character, and so haven’t thought to cast a disabled person in that role. Because the assumption is, if it doesn’t mention it overtly in the text, then it must be a non-disabled character, right? And I think Mouth has always been disabled. Looking at what actually exists in the text, we’ve only shone a light on stuff that exists already within the writing. We haven’t added or layered up loads of stuff. And there are elements of Mouth’s life that resonate so deeply with me that it felt right for her to be portrayed by a neurodivergent performer. Because there are elements of that lived experience that I don’t need to act. I don’t need to try and get in the headspace of what it’s like to live with a mouth that you can’t control, and a voice that you don’t recognise, because that’s part of my everyday lived experience. So I can concentrate on delivering the text in the best way possible, in the way that draws on my lived experience, and that honours the text and its context. It’s the benefit of authentic casting: if you have a non-disabled person

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playing a disabled role, they focus on the impairment. They focus on mimicking the physical characteristics of a condition, rather than understanding disability as the barriers and challenges that people face in their life, and the emotional impact that that has on you and who you are. So if you only ever cast non-disabled people playing disabled characters, then what you get is a superficial presentation of disability that focuses on mimicry of bodies, rather than on a reflection of authentic experiences. And it also makes it much more likely for unhelpful stereotypes to be reinforced. Yes—and that related question of who gets to perform that text? Yes! There was an element of us deciding to do Not I that was also about challenging that sort of cultural curation that we could see happening, both in terms of what was available to audiences but also what was available to artists. And some of it was also about demonstrating and modelling how you could take an intense theatrical production and make it accessible at every level without reducing the intensity. Sometimes I feel like there’s this assumption that to make something accessible is to compromise on other areas of the artistic or aesthetic rigour, and I think that that’s bullshit. One of the things that comes about a lot around relaxed performance is the idea from artists that somehow it compromises the aesthetics of what they make. And yes, as artists we absolutely get to control the decisions that we make about the work that we make—but we don’t get to control who gets to see it. By not engaging with access, by not thinking about disabled bodies and minds, you are trying to control who does and doesn’t get to see a piece of work. But for a work to be strong and relevant, it has to reach out to a really wide audience or be relevant to people with different perspectives. If it’s only relevant to one group in one context, then it probably doesn’t have a dynamic life and relevance. And actually, that’s not at all like Beckett’s work, which absolutely is born of real life. So, for me, that’s why it was really important, in a play in which Mouth faces lots of barriers, that we created as barrier-free an environment as possible for our audience, and for me as a performer. For us, it’s about access being considered and deeply embedded right from the very start of the process. It was never an afterthought; it was a core part of our aesthetic, and of the aesthetic decisions that we were making. And we didn’t need to do anything to the text itself to make it accessible. For example, we didn’t need to do any extra audio description,

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because the stage directions in Not I are beautiful audio description— ready-made! So sometimes it’s about recognising what’s already there, but which might historically not have been made present in performance. So there were moments like that, things like that that felt really simple. We did a very early preview where we got some feedback from the non-disabled artistic director of another company, and some of it was quite challenging but actually really useful, because immediately after that we realised was that this wasn’t a production that was for non-disabled people first. If you have a lived experience of barriers, you are going to get more out of this than a non-disabled audience. That didn’t mean that non-disabled people weren’t going to get stuff out of it, or that it wasn’t for them, but it wasn’t for them first. And I think that often plays that talk about disability have a very educative context? Even Biscuit Land definitely had an element of teaching non-disabled people about an element of our lives. With our production of Not I , it felt like that shifted. It wasn’t about us educating non-disabled people. It was about making visible and giving voice to a particular set of our own experiences; it was something that you would experience differently depending on your own lived experience. So yeah, that was a really critical point in our understanding of what we were making. And similarly, we had integrated British Sign Language, and we had agreed together beforehand that if someone asked a question about BSL in the discussion section that followed every performance, then Charmaine would answer first in BSL and then in English. And I would explain why that would happen, so that it worked culturally—it was important for us that we were prioritising BSL rather than spoken language in the first instance, if that was the question. And one of the first times we did that, our production manager overheard someone who’d come to see it saying, “Oh my God, why isn’t she talking in English first?!” And, wow… If you have always had your language and your experience prioritised, it must be a very surreal experience to suddenly have that flipped. But that’s what theatre can do. That’s the opportunity that theatrical spaces allow us, and why I think it matters to have disability culture driving some of that decision-making. Do you remember when or how that decision to have the Auditor as BSL interpreter came from? It was present from our very earliest discussions. By the time we came to making Not I , we’d done lots of BSL-interpreted productions of Biscuit

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Land and other work that we’d made, and we’d seen embedded access done beautifully by lots of other companies, so we knew that was something that we wanted to happen, and it was important to us to ensure that as many people could access the work as possible. And we never really explicitly said, “This is the Auditor”. But to me the role of the Auditor is about bearing witness to Mouth, and the BSL interpreter bore witness to Mouth, and therefore honoured that element of the text. It was interesting, actually, when we met with the Beckett estate—I think by the time we came to meet with them, they were totally on board with the idea of someone with Tourette’s performing that piece, and I think no-one had asked them about integrated British Sign Language before, so… it was just something that they had never considered. They needed a bit more time and support to see how that would work. And we were very aware that if we got that ask wrong, we could potentially fuck things up for other companies further done the line, but if we got that ask right, that we could open them up to thinking about integrated sign language for other Beckett pieces. So no pressure, then! Yeah, it did feel like a big thing! And actually Edward Beckett moved a long way with that, and came and saw some productions and then loved the BSL, loved Charmaine’s performance of the text, to the point where he was then suggesting that she did her own version. And essentially forgot about me! What was it that you think in the end that made that bid to the estate successful? As an estate that has shut down or refused performance permissions in the past—what was it about the Touretteshero production that made it successful? At the very beginning, if I’m honest, there was a part of me that was like, “Right, if the Beckett estate say no, then we just put a question mark at the end, and we do Why Not I?” But actually, I lost interest in that very quickly, as soon as I realised, “I know this character, I care about her and I recognise her”. There was an opportunity here to do something way better than grumble about not being able to do something—to realise the importance of incorporating authentic perspectives into some of the understanding of these texts. So by the time we asked the estate, we knew that we really wanted to do it. Which was very nerve-wracking! But we were very well supported by Derval and Jonny

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[Jonathan Heron, a Beckett scholar who advised on the Touretteshero production] and others in thinking things through, shaping our approach, understanding the things that would matter. Edward’s response was that his sole concern is Samuel Beckett’s work being performed in the way that Beckett intended, and that if we were happy that we could honour that, he was happy for us to proceed. And a hilarious personal victory for me was seeing the contract amended where it said, “The text will not be changed” to acknowledge that there would be “biscuits” and “hedgehogs”!14 [Laughs ] That felt like an incredible thing. And I know about the reputation of the Beckett estate from the questions that we get asked, but our experience of working with them was extremely positive and extremely supportive—and actually very creative in terms of their involvement. They were involved in the rehearsal room from the get-go. There was an open dialogue, and when we did hit issues, there was room for us to say, “We will experiment creatively and see where we get to”. And I think it must be a really challenging thing … I don’t envy them at all for those decisions. How do you create a legacy, and how do you allow these works to continue to live and be relevant? Because I think that Not I has loads to say about the world that we’re living in now, but it’s also about how you have the flexibility to differentiate. And did you find that your own thinking about the text, or your own perception of your relationship to it, changed as you went through the process of staging? Particularly with that focus on the creative experimentation as part of the process? The process of learning it was very interesting, because you have to get it into a part of your brain, and you have to trust yourself. You can’t be complacent with it, ever. It has no space for that. And I was really curious from the outset about whether I was actually at a neurological advantage performing that text, because I had experience of automatic speech and understood that on a deep level. The idea of letting stuff just tumble out of my mouth is, you know, is straightforward. I suppose the thing that I didn’t know and didn’t expect was actually the impact that that text would have on my own involuntary language. It was only when I ran it all the way through for the first time that we realised that in those moments of silence that Beckett had built into the

14 Thom refers here to two of her most common verbal tics.

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text, that actually what was happening was that the focus and tension of putting the monologue through my body had an effect of displacing some of my vocal tics temporarily. I often describe it as a bit like putting a stone into water: the monologue moved some of them out of the way, but as soon as there was a gap, they found their way through. So in those moments of silence, every “biscuit” that would have been in that section rushed out at huge speed! And initially that really shocked me. I didn’t know that was going to happen. And Not I is such an incredible piece of writing. It’s so beautifully crafted, and its rhythms are beautiful. It was actually quite a joy—and I don’t think you’re meant to say this—but I actually enjoy doing it really quickly. And there’s something incredible about Beckett creating this amazing piece of writing and then seeming to throw it away by having it delivered at that speed. How did you find that audiences responded? Did they respond as you expected them to? We’ve had really incredible warm responses from audience members. At Touretteshero, we often talk about “the feeling in the room”, and about wanting to create that feeling in the room with whatever we make. It’s a feeling of warmth, of connectivity, of being able to be yourself. You know whether a show has worked or not, if that feeling exists in the room afterwards. But I genuinely didn’t know if we could create that feeling, if that feeling could come from a play that is so intense and so dark in many moments. But it became very clear very quickly that it was totally possible, and that it was being articulated back to us by audience members. If you make work with love and care and consideration for your audience, they are a core part of that experience. It’s not something that we are doing to people. And we felt very conscious of the fact that we didn’t want to give people this really intense experience and then chuck them out into the world without that care. So audience care, and understanding them as part of the dynamic of that environment, was a really central part of how we were thinking about it from the beginning. There was a sense of wanting it to be a shared thing, a group of people sharing a live experience. And that liveness is what is so special about performing. You know, Not I feels like a piece of live performance art to me in many ways more than it does a piece of theatre straightforwardly.

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One of the things that I really liked about Not I was the urgency of Mouth—that was something that felt very relatable, and very, very significant to us at a point when we were ten years into austerity. The survival of disabled people—you know, “how she survived”—the survival of disabled people then and now is on a knife edge for many people. And that means that as a disabled performer and as a disabled-led company, I am really aware of that vulnerability, and how quickly all of my life and work could be turned off by the decisions of other people. There feels like there is an urgent need to communicate and to give voice to that experience, and that urgent need to tell her story, that Mouth is experiencing at that moment where we join her, also feels very relevant to the political situation that many disabled people are in now, and that urgent need to tell. I’m interested in this broader question of where or how you see the relationship between aesthetics and ethics within your own performance of this text. Are they two separate issues? Or do they overlap more than that? For me, they’re like two jigsaw pieces that are constantly shifting together. Because all of my work as an artist is driven by a desire to make things that look and feel a particular way—but that is informed by my lived experience and my ethical standpoint. For us, embracing the ethics, embracing disability culture, embracing the inclusivity of what we want to create, is also about making the aesthetics of what we create stronger. It enriches it, because you have to understand the decisions you’re making and why. If we are using lighting in a particular way then we need to understand that, because we need to be able to communicate it to our blind and partially sighted audience members. If we are choosing to make something a sonic experience in a particular way, then we need to think about how it is communicated visually for deaf or hard-of-hearing audiences. And I think that actually the stage directions in Beckett’s plays work in a similar way: those creative constraints are things that help hold you in place, give you an anchor point. If we are making something that is about the life of a neurodivergent person, it seems totally unethical to me to create a space that would not allow them to be in the room. Shared cultural experiences are powerful, but they are meaningless for me if you exclude the people who they’re about. There was a moment where we were performing Biscuit Land at the Barbican, while we were preparing for Not I , and someone quite

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senior within the Barbican theatre team asked if we’d seen their production of Not I while it was running there. And I was like, “Well… no!” Because I wouldn’t have felt that I could go and see a Beckett play at the Barbican… and I probably still wouldn’t feel that way. Or, I would need do a lot of things in order to feel safe to do that. And we want to take that labour away from disabled people. Yes, I think that’s partly why it was so magical that it was Not I specifically as a relaxed performance, because if you’ve got a potentially very exclusionary performance space somewhere anyway, and then put Not I in there… I mean, there’s no more silent and disembodied audience than a traditional Not I audience! It’s the other end of that spectrum. And what’s hilarious is how far that is from the experience that Mouth is talking about! And actually, the most incredible and electric performances of Not I , by far, were the ones where other people with Tourette’s were in the audience. With relaxed performances, as a performer you have to focus more, and you have to put a certain type of a tension and energy into that environment. So those people that came to those shows got way more from me! Like, I know that I smashed it out of the park— like, “Right, I’ve got to put my money where my mouth is!” [Laughs ] But again, that set everything on fire in a new way. If it’s not just on stage, but it is also around you, it does something electric to the room, in my experience. If it’s a mixed audience, it’s not simply about putting disabled bodies on stage; it’s also about feeling that you’re watching it with a diverse community of people. And leaving aside your tics specifically, how did your body respond to the production? It’s an incredibly intense performance piece. [Laughs ] It’s absolutely fucking terrifying. In some respects! And really exhilarating in others. It took about a year to learn it. And yeah, my pain and energy levels did really change in that time. There were moments where it was really hard for other people in the company. Where we took it to Edinburgh, Matthew, as the director, was like, “It feels a bit wrong to be putting you on stage, making you do the thing, and then putting you to bed for the rest of the day…” So that balance for us was really difficult. But lots of that was to do with the fact that my body was changing, rather than because I was doing this play. And in many respects, actually, doing this play at a point where my body was changing was a real relief.

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We join Mouth when she is probably experiencing some sort of massive brain event, and she’s trying to make sense of that and understand her position in the world in relation to that, and that’s certainly what I was having to do at the same time. So I think that that probably added to the production—but also, that gave me something. It gave me something when my physical reality was changing. And I feel very lucky to have had that opportunity to think and talk about those changes in a creative way, and have a creative space to think about that. Is that what has been most important for about the Not I text, or about the process of producing the performance? Or has it been something else? I think for me the most important thing is that disability culture is shared culture. And that disability culture is mainstream culture. I think that taking something that is so canonised and so established within our shared cultural heritage, and then very clearly being able to demonstrate— without it feeling like a push at all—being able to say, “This is a disabled character. And she’s been here the whole time, but she’s never really been understood in that way”. I hope that we were able to reveal something in this production about Mouth that lots of people hadn’t seen before, and what it says about us as a society. Disabled people exist within our society and world, and they exist within our cultural life, but they should be able to exist as themselves, exactly as they are, without any coating or masking or palatability. We don’t need to change. We shouldn’t need to change disabled people’s bodies or minds or perspectives in order to make them visible and palatable in the public realm. And, you know, there’s something incredible about taking a play that is so central to modern theatrical identity and then being able to go, “Yeah”, [nods conspiratorially] “yeah, she’s definitely disabled” [laughs ].

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Beckett, Samuel. Three Dialogues, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn. New York: Grove Press, 1984, 138– 145. ———. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 2006. ———. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2012. ———. Oh les beaux jours, suivi de Pas moi. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2014. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. IV: 1966–1989, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Brater, Enoch. “Dada, Surrealism, and the Genesis of Not I ”, Modern Drama 18.1, 1975a, 49–59. ———. “The ‘Absurd’ Actor in the Theatre of Samuel Becket”, Educational Theatre Journal 27.2, 1975b, 197–207. Cavanna, Andrea E., and Stefano Serio. “Tourette’s Syndrome”, British Medical Journal 347.7922, 2013, n.p. Cheung, Min-Yuen Cynthia, Joohi Shahed, and Joseph Jankovic. “Malignant Tourette Syndrome”, Movement Disorders 22.12, 2007, 1743–1750. Dennis, Amanda. “Compulsive Bodies, Creative Agency: Beckett and Agency in the Twenty-First Century”, Journal of Beckett Studies 27.1, 2018, 5–21. Finlay, Victoria. “Interview: Actress Lisa Dwan on Performing Samuel Beckett’s Monologue Not I ”, South China Morning Post, 17 February 2015, https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/1711836/interv iew-actress-lisa-dwan-performing-samuel-beckett Gardner, Lyn. “Not I Review—Jess Thom Gives Beckett’s Motormouth Extra Bite”, The Guardian, 24 August 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/cul ture/2017/aug/24/not-i-review-beckett-tourette-syndrome-jess-thom-ple asance-grand-edinburgh Garland, Rosemarie-Thomson. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hemming, Sarah. “Interview: Lisa Dwan”, The Financial Times, 15 May 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/f0e27a1e-f8b9-11e4-be00-00144feab7de Heron, Jonathan. “Review: Not I . Battersea Arts Centre, London, 28 February– 17 March 2018”, Journal of Beckett Studies 27.2, 2018, 284–289. Howard, Russell. “Russell Speaks to Real Life Hero Jess Thom”, YouTube, uploaded by Russell Howard, 30 October 2015, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=i8gOcbneQRQ Jays, David. “‘I Can Hear Them Three Floors Away!’ The Theatres Where You Don’t Have to Behave”, The Guardian, 26 February 2020, https://www.the guardian.com/stage/2020/feb/26/relaxed-performances-theatre-families-dis ability Johnson, Megan. “Sounding a Crip Aesthetic: Transforming the Sonic in Samuel Beckett’s Not I ”, Performance Matters 6.2, 2020, 67–84.

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Kalb, Jonathan. “Static Electricity: Beckett at Under the Radar”, The Theatre Times, 6 February 2020, https://thetheatretimes.com/static-electricity-bec kett-at-under-the-radar/ Knittel, Susanne C. The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Historical Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Knowlson, James, and John Pilling. Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett. London: John Calder, 1979. Kriegler-Wenk, Zoë Rose. “Jess Thom’s Not I and the Accessibility of Silence”, European Stages 10, 2017, https://europeanstages.org/2017/10/28/jessthoms-not-i-the-accessibility-of-silence/ Lane, Anthony. “Chatterbox”, The New Yorker, 29 September 2014, https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/chatterbox Lawrence, Louise J. Bible and Bedlam: Madness, Sanism, and New Testament Interpretation. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Leckman, James F., Michael H. Bloch, Denis G. Sukhodolsky, Lawrence Scahill, and Robert A. King. “Phenomenology of Tics and Sensory Urges: The Self Under Siege”, in Tourette Syndrome, ed. Davide Martino and James F. Leckman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 3–25. Lennon, Andrew. “Beckett and Darkness: The Drive to and the Flight from…”, Contemporary Theatre Review 28.1, 2018, 54–67. Levy, Shimon. “Six She’s, One Not I : Proxies of Beckettian Selves”, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 11, 2001, 140–148. Lim, Sue, Kourous A. Rezai, Gary W. Abram, and Dean Eliott. “Self-Induced, Bilateral Retinal Detachment in Tourette Syndrome”, Archives of Opthalmology 122.6, 2004, 930–931. Loftis, Sonya Freeman. “The Autistic Detective: Sherlock Holmes and his Legacy”, Disability Quarterly Studies 34.4, 2014, n.p., https://dsq-sds.org/ article/view/3728/3791 Maude, Ulrika. “A Stirring Beyond Coming and Going: Beckett and Tourette’s”, Journal of Beckett Studies 17.1–2, 2008, 153–168. ———. “Chronic Conditions: Beckett, Bergson and Samuel Johnson”, Journal of Medical Humanities 37.2, 2016, 193–204. McRuer, Robert, and Anna Mollow, eds. Sex and Disability. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. McTighe, Trish. The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Nightingale, Benedict. “Review: Not I ”, New Statesman, 26 January 1973, 135– 136.

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Nonemaker, Elizabeth. “Lisa Dwan: The ‘Privilege’ and the ‘Trauma’ of Performing Works by Samuel Beckett”, The Frame, 28 March 2016, https:// www.scpr.org/programs/the-frame/2016/03/28/47582/lisa-dwan-the-pri vilege-and-trauma-of-performing-w/ Pattie, David. “At Me Too Someone Is Looking…: Coercive Systems in Beckett’s Theatre”, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 30.1, 2018, 227–238. Perring, Giles. “The Facilitation of Learning-Disabled Artists: A Cultural Perspective”, in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, 175–189. Pilling, John. Beckett’s Dream Notebook. Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999. Pountney, Rosemary. Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama 1956–76. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988. Preston, Carrie. “Taking Direction from Beckett: Noh/No, Footfalls /Pas ”, in Back to the Beckett Text, ed. Tomasz Wisniewski. Gdansk: University of Gdansk Press, 2012, 155–178. Pringsheim, Tamara, et al. “Comprehensive Systematic Review Summary: Treatment of Tics in People with Tourette Syndrome and Chronic Tic Disorders”, Neurology 92.19, 2019, 907–915. Rapp, Rayna, and Faye Ginsburg. “Enlarging Reproduction, Screening Disability”, in Reproductive Disruptions: Gender, Technology, and Biopolitics in the New Millenium, ed. Marcia Claire Inhorn. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009, 98–121. Sacks, Oliver. “Witty Ticcy Ray”, in The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. London: Picador, 2011, 97–107. Salisbury, Laura, and Chris Code. “Jackson’s Parrot: Samuel Beckett, Aphasic Speech Automatisms, and Psychosomatic Language”, The Journal of Medical Humanities 37.2, 2016, 205–222. Schleifer, Ronald. “The Poetics of Tourette Syndrome: Language, Neurobiology, and Poetry”, New Literary History 32.3, 2001, 563–584. Schroeder, Timothy. “Moral Responsibility and Tourette Syndrome”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71.1, 2005, 106–123. Sheehan, Paul. Modernism, Narrative and Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Sidi, Leah. “A Hand on the Arm: Gesture, Neurodiversity and Performance”, The Polyphony, 19 September 2018, https://thepolyphony.org/2018/09/19/ahand-on-the-arm-gesture-neurodiversity-and-performance/ Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011.

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Simpson, Hannah. “‘Now Keep Out of the Way, Whitelaw’: Self-Expression, Agency, and Directorial Control in W. B. Yeats’s and Samuel Beckett’s Theatre”, Comparative Drama 49.4, 2015, 399–418. ———. “Tics in the Theatre: The Quiet Audience, the Relaxed Performance, and the Neurodivergent Spectator”, Theatre Topics 28.3, 2018a, 227–238. ———. “Review: Not I , Battersea Arts Centre, London England”, The Beckett Circle, Autumn 2018b, https://thebeckettcircle.org/2018/12/11/not-i-bat tersea-arts-centre-london-england/ Steingo, Gavin. “Robert Ashley and the Tourettic Voice”, The Review of Disability Studies 4.1, 2008, 30–33. Stern, Jeremy S. “Tourette’s Syndrome and its Borderland”, Practical Neurology 18, 2018, 262–270. Thom, Jess. Welcome to Biscuit Land: A Year in the Life of Touretteshero. London: Souvenir Press, 2012. ———. Interview with Hannah Simpson. April 2017. ———. Interview with Hannah Simpson. April 2020. Tranter, Rhys. Beckett’s Late Stage: Trauma, Language, and Subjectivity. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2018. Trueman, Matt. “Edinburgh Review: Not I (Pleasance Courtyard)”, What’s On Stage, 25 August 2017, https://www.whatsonstage.com/edinburgh-theatre/ reviews/not-i-pleasance-courtyard-jess-thom-tourettes_44466.html Tubridy, Derval. “Incommensurable Corporealities? Touretteshero’s Not I ”, Contemporary Theatre Review, Interventions, 28.1, 2018, https://www.con temporarytheatrereview.org/2018/touretteshero-not-i/ Whitelaw, Billie. “Interview by Linda Ben-Zvi”, in Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992, 3–10. ———. Billie Whitelaw… Who He? New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995. Wynands, Sandra. Iconic Spaces: The Dark Theology of Samuel Beckett’s Drama. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Zarrilli, Phillip. “Meditations on Loss: Beyond Discourses of Pain and Torture in the Work of the Beckett Actor”, Contemporary Theatre Review 28.1, 2018, 95–113.

CHAPTER 5

Waiting for Godot: Culture Device and Hackney Showroom, 2018

Waiting for Godot: The Struggle to Be In the summer of 2018, Hackney Showroom in London joined forces with the performance company Culture Device to produce an abridged multimedia staging of Waiting for Godot , performed by a cast of professional actors with Down syndrome. Hackney Showroom’s co-artistic director Sam Curtis Lindsay and Culture Device’s artistic director Daniel Vais (who do not have Down syndrome) co-directed Tommy Jessop (Vladimir), Otto Baxter (Estragon), Sam Barnard (Pozzo) and the aptly named Rishard Beckett (Lucky) in a series of rehearsals leading up to a single public performance (see Fig. 5.1). Placing a radical fusion of vulnerability and endurance on stage, this production of Waiting for Godot quickened the playtext’s exploration of a ‘struggle to be’ as regards both bodily existence and the social categorisation of certain bodies. The production magnified the dialectic of autonomy and interdependency between the onstage couples, and interrogated the associated politics of acting in and directing disability performance. The Culture Device performance exemplified how alternative embodiments can provide distinctive advantages in Beckettian performance: how “disability can be something beneficial”, as Daniel Vais puts it (interview, 2020). The production emphasised and at times reconceptualised the ‘struggle to be’ evoked in Beckett’s original script, without requiring any alteration © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Simpson, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04133-4_5

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Fig. 5.1 Tommy Jessop (Vladimir), Otto Baxter (Estragon), Rishard Beckett (Lucky) and Sam Barnard (Pozzo), Hackney Showroom, London, 2018 (Photo credit Hackney Showroom)

of scripted dialogue or stage direction. In his celebrated early analysis of Waiting for Godot , Alain Robbe-Grillet argued that Beckett’s play was at heart concerned with the very condition of “being” and of “being there”: The condition of man, says Heidegger, is to be there. The theatre probably reproduces this situation more naturally than any of the other ways of representing reality. The essential thing about a character in a play is that he is ‘on the scene’: there. […] We suddenly realise, as we look at [Vladimir and Estragon], the main function of theatre, which is to show what the fact of being there consists in. (1965, 108, 113; original emphasis)

In the case of the Culture Device production of Waiting for Godot, the visibly disabled body draws new attention to the onstage body’s condition of being, and to the socialised as well as the embodied factors that determine bodily existence and endurance. The Culture Device performers

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illuminated the play’s interrogation of how one’s being is externally categorised, and how the material conditions of one’s being are shaped, by the very particular “there” of the context in which one exists. This performance translated the text of Waiting for Godot into an assertion of the actors’ own ‘right to be’—both on the stage, and in an unfettered existence more broadly. Culture Device is a performance company of artists with Down syndrome, perhaps most widely known for their 2019 dance residency at the Covent Garden Royal Opera House and their globally touring drag collective Drag Syndrome. Down syndrome is a congenital disorder caused by trisomy or ‘third copy’ of chromosome 21. It occurs in approximately one in 700 live births worldwide, making it one of the most common congenital syndromes on record. First described by Dr John Langdon Down in 1866, it presents via a wide range of variable indicators, with as many as 120 visible and non-visible symptoms associated with the condition. The only feature present in all individuals with Down syndrome is some degree of intellectual impairment (Selikowitz 2008, 28–29)—although the spectrum of this impairment is itself a wide one.1 Although Culture Device is one of the few performance companies to work exclusively with artists with Down syndrome, several other contemporary theatre companies currently represent artists with learning disabilities more broadly, including Mind the Gap, Blue Apple, Shyster, Open Theatre, Dark Horse, and Hijinx Theatre in Britain, the Swiss company Theater Hora, the Polish company Teatr 21, and the Australian company Back to Back. As a professional performance company, Culture Device consciously distinguishes itself from amateur or therapy-focused drama work, emphasising the aesthetic quality of their performances and the professional skill of the company’s artists. As theatre scholar and practitioner Matt Hargrave writes, “The notion that the work of such artists [with learning disabilities] is ‘good considering’ does not allow for the critical appraisal of the work as art; rather it becomes an extension of an ‘aura’ of social benevolence in which the

1 Richard Newton records that around 40% of individuals with Down syndrome have

IQs in the range of 50–70 (mild learning disability), 35% between 30 and 50 (moderate learning disability), and around 25% below 30 (severe learning disability). We should note here Newton’s caution as to the limited significance of these figures: “We need to be mindful that an IQ measure is never more than an approximation of an individual’s strengths and weaknesses; it says little about an individual” (2015, 239).

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aesthetic affects are secondary”, curbing the “necessary corrective to a socially harmful perception of learning disabled citizens as economically or culturally unproductive” (2015, 10, 14). Culture Device is not “an after-school club”, artistic director Daniel Vais stresses (Maitland 2021): it is a company of professional artists, producing professional work. Vais, who originated the idea of Culture Device’s production of Waiting for Godot , cites his own neurofunctioning as part of the reason for his attraction to Beckett’s text: “Waiting for Godot is one of my favourite plays of all time. I’m super dyslexic, so this kind of writing makes sense to me—it’s nonsense-sense. […] It’s between the surreal and the very literal, and you have to jump between two worlds” (interview, 2020). As the project developed, however, his drive to ensure his actors’ access to canonical dramatic texts in the face of societal and industry scepticism became more urgent. Vais is fiercely proud of his actors, reeling off their considerable accomplishments while lamenting that “people don’t know the level, the artistic level, of what they’re capable of” (interview, 2020).2 He rails against the doubt or condescension that disability performance projects frequently encounter: When I started talking about [this production], people said, “This is not possible”, or “This is too ambitious”, or “They can’t do it”. And, you know, this is how society sees people with learning disabilities. They would never say, “Wow, this is ambitious!”, or “Wow, this is very exciting! Let’s try it and see what happens”. They’re always putting a dampener on it. They never look at it as an exciting opportunity. And a lot of people with learning disabilities have great ideas for art pieces or performances, and people don’t take them seriously. It’s all, “Oh, it’s so sweet what you said! Ah, it’s so sweet!” And they put a downer on it, because they don’t think they can handle it or that the idea is valid; they think it’s just too big. (Interview, 2020)

Vais highlights the frequent infantilising of adults with Down syndrome, and the typically narrow social expectations regarding possible artistic achievement from individuals with intellectual disabilities. Despite several high-profile success stories—including Tommy Jessop’s own fan-favourite performance as Terry Boyle in seasons five and six of the BBC series

2 See the introduction to each actor’s interview for fuller details of their industry achievements.

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Line of Duty (2019–2021)3 —such attitudes have hindered more mainstream acceptance of creative practitioners with Down syndrome. From this perspective, Culture Device’s decision to stage Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is consistent with the company’s selection of other canonical performance texts, such as Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring . Beckett’s plays have become globally recognised exemplars of artistic ‘greatness’, and it is to precisely such pre-eminent texts that Culture Device demands fair access. As actor Sam Barnard puts it, “Disabled people deserve to be seen, be heard, and belong, and disabled actors can make that happen” (interview, 2020).

Disability Resonances in Waiting for Godot Staging Waiting for Godot with a cast of actors with Down syndrome accentuated elements in Beckett’s playtext which resonate with disability experience. However, the company did not claim to have uncovered either Down syndrome specifically or developmental disability more broadly as a hidden ‘theme’ of Beckett’s playtext. Co-director Sam Curtis Lindsay emphasises, “I wasn’t looking at [the play] going, ‘How does this relate to actors with Down syndrome?’ I wasn’t thinking, like, ‘What does this mean?’ I just felt like in some way it chimed with the experience, the potential of these artists” (interview, 2020). Co-director Vais agrees, pointing out that the actors found an illuminating personal connection with the script’s broader resonances, rather than imposing a literal or categorical interpretation of the text as entirely disability-centric: “They made

3 See the introduction to his interview for further details of Jessop’s career. Other recent mainstream theatre, film and television performances by actors with Down syndrome include Zack Gottsagen’s starring role in 2019 film The Peanut Butter Falcon alongside Shia LaBeouf and Dakota Johnson (and his subsequent appearance as the first actor with Down syndrome to present an Oscar at the 2020 Academy Awards), George Webster’s 2021 casting as a permanent presenter on CBBC’s CBeebies House, and Sarah Gordy’s critically acclaimed performances in mainstream theatre productions including Crocodile (Manchester Royal Exchange, 2014) and Jellyfish (Bush Theatre, 2018, and National Theatre, 2019), her recurring roles in BBC drama series Upstairs Downstairs (2010– 2012) and The A Word (2020), and her starring role in the recently announced Ralph and Katie, a spin-off series from The A Word. Also notable are the smaller but nevertheless significant appearances of Kassie Mundhenk as Moira Ross in HBO’s Mare of Easttown (2021), Lauren Potter as cheerleader Becky Jackson in all six seasons of the Fox television series Glee (2009–2015), and Jamie Brewer’s appearances in seasons one, three, four, seven and eight of FX television series American Horror Story (2011–2018).

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it personal, without being literal, without saying, ‘Oh, we have special needs, so we have to do this work about us with special needs’. It was just a personal interpretation that they clicked with, and that was very, very eye-opening” (interview, 2020). Both directors point to Waiting for Godot ’s particular capacity for evoking new and varied reactions from audiences over the course of its performance history as grounds for their own approach, with Vais reflecting that “Waiting for Godot is so fluid; it’s valid on almost every subject in life, every transition that you have to make. The play is changing all the time. It’s an ever-evolving, neverending masterpiece” (interview, 2020). Curtis Lindsay similarly remarks that in regard to the Culture Device production, “you can’t help but draw your own parallels in some ways. […] But I wasn’t trying to create any specific parallel—I wasn’t trying to create a parallel between Down syndrome and Waiting for Godot , ability and disability. I think people can make their own, if they want to” (interview, 2020). Each emphasises the play’s ability to accommodate a multiplicity of ideas within the broad boundaries of its carefully non-determined ‘meaning’, and their approach chimes with Beckett’s own defence of “a play which was striving all the time to avoid definition” (qtd. in Graver and Federman 2005, 9). Nevertheless, there are several elements in playscript and performance history of Waiting for Godot that make it a generative choice for disability performance—and which can at moments introduce a certain discomfort to disability-informed engagement. Roger Blin, director of the première production of En attendant Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone in 1953, emphasised the significance of the characters’ embodied existences in the play, suggesting that their “physical peculiarities” are not only a source of misery, but also potentially a signal of a “wicked”, even “evil” nature: I started from their sickness, their physical peculiarities. Estragon’s feet hurt and keep him from sleeping. […] Vladimir, who has trouble with his prostate, who wants to pee all the time, moves around a lot. He can’t stand still. Pozzo is fat, with a swollen heart. His heart is too big, he’s breathless, and he’s dragged around by his stomach. Lucky represents a kind of wicked senility. He is the most evil. (1994, 313)

Blin’s conceptualising of the characters’ impairments as signalling at best miserable peculiarity and at worst outright malevolence echoes the persistent association of disability with deviance and aberration in common

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cultural perceptions of physical impairment. Blin’s description of Lucky as “the most evil”, and later as a “kind of scapegoat, who’s taking revenge”, recalls literary critic Leonard Kriegel’s influential categorising of stereotypes of disability in Western culture, in which he recorded the figure of the “Demonic Cripple” as one recurrent trope. Kriegel writes, “The Demonic Cripple burns with his need for vengeance. Because of this, he frightens the ‘normals’. […] He threatens to unleash a rage so powerful that it will bring everything down in its wake” (1987, 35). Much of the unsettling power of Lucky’s tirade in Act I, spurring Vladimir and Estragon’s desperate struggle to silence him, arises from a similar framework of feeling. Intellectual disability is as ideologically loaded as other forms of disability in this respect, and within Beckett’s script we find an array of derogatory terms denoting intellectual impairment, casually employed but rendered startlingly unsettling when articulated by and aimed at actors with Down syndrome in the Culture Device production: “imbecile” (CDW , 15), “cretin” (26, 70), “half-wit” (26), “moron” (70), and “weak in the head” (75). The terms “cretin” and “half-wit” have both been in use since at least the late eighteenth century to denote intellectual disability (“cretin, n. 1” and “half-wit, n. 2”, Oxford English Dictionary). “Moron” and “imbecile” have a still more discomforting history: in 1911, US psychologist Henry H. Goddard introduced gradations into the category of the “feeble-minded” (as individuals with intellectual disabilities had previously been collectively termed), coining the term “moron” for an IQ range of 50–70, “imbecile” for the range 26–50, and “idiot” for the range 0–25 (Goddard 1911, 505; Trent Jr. 2017, 157). Individuals falling into the category of “moron”, according to Goddard’s eugenicist model of thought, should be removed from society via institutionalisation and reproductive sterilisation (Goddard 1911, 263, 268). Goddard’s nomenclature remained in standard use in Anglophone society throughout much of the twentieth century,4 and it was only in the Mental Health Act of 1959—that is, subsequent to the publication of Waiting for 4 See, for example, the “Mental Deficiency Act” of 1913 in England, shaped by the advice of the Royal Commission for the Care and Control of the Feeble Minded, which legislated for the institutionalisation of people with learning disabilities in asylums (by coercion or force if necessary); the infamous Buck v. Bell court case legitimising nonconsensual sterilisations in the US in 1927 (Rowlands and Amy 2019, 234); and disability writer Eli Clare’s memories of taking an updated version of Goddard’s IQ test in 1966 at an institution in Oregon, US, which regularly sterilised patients up to 1983 (2017, 39).

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Godot —that these terms were abolished from medical and legal usage. There is a very literal ‘struggle to be’ concealed at the heart of such disability resonances in Beckett’s playscript. Still more explicitly, Waiting for Godot articulates one element of the ‘struggle to be’ that has a distinct resonance for disabled practitioners and spectators: the sin of being born. VLADIMIR: Suppose we repented. ESTRAGON: Repented what? VLADIMIR: Oh... [He reflects.] We wouldn’t have to go into the details. ESTRAGON: Our being born? [VLADIMIR breaks into a hearty laugh which he immediately stifles, his hand pressed to his pubis, his face contorted.] (CDW , 13)

Estragon’s idea of the sin of “being born” is a concept that appears across Beckett’s work. Its most explicit early articulation appears in his 1931 critical study “Proust”: The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin, of the original and eternal sin of him and all his ‘socii malorum’, the sin of having been born. “Pues el delito mayor Del hombre es haber nacido.” (1999, 67)

Beckett here quotes Spanish writer Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s seventeenth-century play La vida es sueño, roughly translating as “For man’s greatest crime is having been born”. Nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, much admired by Beckett from his early reading in 1930 onwards (Knowlson 1997, 188), repeats the idea that birth is man’s original sin,5 and Mark Nixon cites Beckett’s reading Otto Rank’s 1929 study The Trauma of Birth, with its epigraph “Optimum no nasci, aut cito mori” or “The best is not to be born, but to die quickly”

5 Schopenhauer declares in the first volume of The World as Will and Representation (1818) that “what the hero atones for is not his own particular sins, but original sin, in other words, the guilt of existence itself” (1969, 428), and refers in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) to the human being as “whose life is the atonement for the guilt of his birth” (2000, 30).

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from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621); Nixon records that Beckett copied the line into his Whoroscope notebook in 1931 (2012, 31). The phrase acquires new weight in the Culture Device production: advances in genetic research and prenatal screening frequently result in the discarding of embryos and abortion of foetuses diagnosed with chromosome 21 trisomy, and it is estimated that more foetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome in utero are aborted than are carried to term.6 An expression of regret over having been born thus echoes hauntingly in the mouth of an actor with Down syndrome. (In our interview, actor Sam Barnard calls attention to his appearance in Richard Vergette’s 2019 play Hunt the Tiger, which imagines the fate of “the last man in the world with Down syndrome, because of screening”; interview, 2020.) The play’s insult “abortion”, included in the invectives that Estragon and Vladimir hurl at each other in Act II (CDW , 70), becomes newly ominous in the Culture Device production, as do the continued references throughout the play to the selective destruction of life: of “creatures” like Lucky, Pozzo declares, “The best thing would be to kill them” (CDW , 32). “The best thing would be to kill me”, Estragon repeats shortly after, “Like billions of others” (CDW , 58), echoing what Thomas Thoelen identifies as the “brutality under the moral and ethical guise of putting [disabled] individuals out of their misery while purging society of its impurities in the process” (2020, 312). There is an uncanny foreshadowing here of the recent legal debate over “the right not to be born”, fought in a series of 2000 and 2001 “wrongful life” suits in France’s Supreme Court (la Cour de cassation), which initially ruled that children with Down syndrome have the legal right never to have been born, categorising their existence as a compensable injury (Marzano-Parisoli 2001). As disability scholar Tobin Siebers summarises, “At the heart of wrongful life suits is the idea that plaintiff rights are violated by being born, that people have the right to be terminated before birth to avoid a life pronounced painful and miserable” (2010, 186–187). The idea of birth condemning the individual to an unnecessary “painful and miserable” life is a recurring one across Beckett’s work, and in the context of a disability performance,

6 At the time of writing, it is estimated that 90% of foetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted in the UK (Bruce et al. 2013, 15), 75% in France (Goujard 2004, 498), and 67% in the US (Natoli et al. 2012). For further detail on preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) in relation to disability, see Parens and Asch (2007) and Franklin and Roberts (2006).

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the suggestion exerts a intensely specific affective impact that resonates beyond the theatre auditorium walls. A crucial caveat here, however, is that the elimination of the embryo or foetus following a Down syndrome diagnosis presumes a specific judgement over the quality of disabled versus non-disabled life. By contrast, Beckett’s writing pronounces all human existence “painful and miserable”—without any hierarchising of which human existences might be more or less “painful and miserable” than others. The regret over having “been born” is affirmed by an array of impaired and non-disabled characters across Beckett’s work. In Murphy, for example, Wylie seeks “the next best thing to never being born” (2011, 28); “I shall never get born […] and a good job too” Malone declares (2009, 219); the Unnameable laments being “given a pensum, at birth perhaps, as a punishment for having been born perhaps” (2009, 304). Similarly, Seán Kennedy’s work (2010) on what he terms Beckett’s “antinatalist” stance traces Beckett’s characters’ propensity to advise abortion in the case of any conception, not merely in cases of diagnosed disability: “Abort, abort”, the narrator of First Love commands his mistress, without any knowledge of the foetus’s health or genetic predisposition (1995, 44). By contrast, contemporary ableism hierarchises specific human bodies according to their perceived value. Waiting for Godot mocks precisely this type of identity-based hierarchising. It does so most explicitly through the character of Pozzo, who categorises himself as innately superior to abject “creatures” such as Lucky and to men such as Vladimir and Estragon. Initially delighted to meet fellow “human beings”, he will shortly thereafter retract his sympathies, on the basis of their “imperfect” likeness to him: POZZO: You are human beings none the less. [He puts on his glasses.] As far as one can see. [He takes off his glasses.] Of the same species as myself. [He bursts into an enormous laugh.] Of the same species as Pozzo! Made in God’s image! […] Yes, gentlemen, I cannot go for long without the society of my likes [He puts on his glasses and looks at the two likes ] even when the likeness is an imperfect one. (CDW , 24–25)

Authority here is exercised by way of “classificatory systems that have material effects on bodies. Pozzo invokes a hierarchy of beings based on distinctions of likeness or difference”, as Beckett scholar and director Herbert Blau puts it (2007, 36). Pozzo’s invocation of being made in “God’s image” suggests the literal interpretation of imago Dei in Genesis Chapter 1 Verse 26, in which “God said, Let us make man in our image,

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after our likeness”, sometimes interpreted by Biblical scholars as indicating a physical resemblance between human beings and God, which in turn allows human beings to exercise dominion over the rest of creation. This doctrine has historically been used to justify “a theology that is biased towards able-bodiedness and perfection” (Deland 1999, 48), one which interprets physical disability as “a distortion of the divine image” (Eiesland 2005, 584) and intellectual disability as a lack of the divinely accorded “rationality” necessary to rule over other creatures.7 Similarly, Pozzo’s hierarchical system of “likeness” determines the value and the treatment accorded to the bodies therein. Those bodies which Pozzo recognises as looking and functioning most like his own are judged most valuable, most deserving of respect. The bodies that look and function least like his own—such as the abject Lucky’s—are judged to be inferior or defective, and are consequently accorded worse treatment, including whipping, painful restraint, and starvation. The categorising of bodies according to socially determined ideology has real material consequences, which are swiftly enacted on those bodies. Pozzo’s ranking of perfect and “imperfect” bodily likenesses echoes ableist systematising of the human body as a potential perfect or perfectible entity: an ideal which Beckett’s writings consistently undermine. Echoing Pozzo’s language of perfect and imperfect examples of his own species—and returning us to the sin of “being born” in relation to prenatal genetic screening—disability scholar Lennard J. Davis criticises the medicalised concept of “the ‘correct’ or ‘real’ genome being one without errors”, “the platonic human genome […] sequenced in the right order without mistakes”. Davis points out that this concept is “based on a pre-postmodern definition of human subject as whole, complete, perfect, self-sustaining”, a concept which reduces disabilities to “defects” marring “an otherwise perfect and whole human subject” (2013, 269). Neither Waiting for Godot nor any of Beckett’s other works suggest any comparable vision of a platonic and ideally functioning human subject. The sudden onset of Pozzo’s blindness and Lucky’s muteness in Act II emphasise the certain imminence of bodily vulnerability for all human individuals. If Pozzo initially draws a clear distinguishing line 7 For further discussion of the doctrine of imago Dei as an indication of physical resemblance, in contrast to substantialist or relational interpretations, see Middleton (2005). For an extensive exploration of historic and contemporary ableism in Christianity, see Haslam (2012) and Eiesland (1994).

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between himself and Vladimir, Estragon and Lucky—“Do I look like a man who can be made to suffer?”, he demands, carefully delineating himself from their abject condition (CDW , 34)—he soon realises that he too “shall suffer, no doubt about that” in Beckett’s universally afflicted world (CDW , 38–39). Although we should be wary of making any automatic correlation between disability and suffering, the destruction of Pozzo’s neat hierarchising of human experience reiterates a recognition of universal corporeal vulnerability. The individual whose body is not yet classified as disabled is nevertheless beset by the constant possibility of impairment as they move through the world, the sudden or gradual event that will transmute them from one identity state to another. Echoing the terms of Pozzo’s account of how he “woke up one day as blind as Fortune” (CDW , 80), Siebers emphasises that able-bodiedness is an inevitably temporary identity: “I know as a white man that I will not wake up in the morning as a black woman, but I could wake up as a quadriplegic” (2011, 5). In Act II, Pozzo’s furious response to Vladimir’s questions about the onset of his blindness re-emphasises the inevitability of this process: “When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day like any other, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we will die” (CDW , 83). Of course, Down syndrome is a congenital rather than an acquired disability; no individual will suddenly wake up one day with Down syndrome. Nevertheless, Waiting for Godot ’s emphasis on disability as an ultimately (if asynchronously) shared identity provides a crucial grounding for Culture Device’s approach. It is significant that the cast of the Culture Device Waiting for Godot were all actors with Down syndrome, rather than a mix of non-disabled and disabled actors: their onstage presence neatly reflected Beckett’s vision of a universally disabled world, and particularly Waiting for Godot ’s emphasis on disability as an ultimately universal identity.

Autonomy and Interdependency This shared or universal condition of impairment is particularly relevant to the issue of interdependency in Waiting for Godot , to the Beckettian model of the “pseduo-couple”, and to the Culture Device production and disability performance more broadly. As Michael Davidson observes, “Persons with disabilities depend on others in ways that challenge postEnlightenment ideals of autonomy and independence, and it is here that Beckett’s work offers an important challenge to ideas of embodied

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normalcy” (2016, 113). Beckett’s writing repeatedly rejects the liberal humanist ideology of unmitigated personal autonomy, instead resituating human existence as “built on the condition of ‘need’ [and] vulnerability” (McMullan 2012, 142). Much recent disability theory offers a re-worked understanding of interdependency as a fundamental component of human civilisation, rather than an exceptional state of failure or lack. While certain ‘disability devices’ like wheelchairs, dialysis machines and domestic carers are often conceptualised as indicators of dependency, our ubiquitous reliance on other prosthetic extensions of the self—such as sight-correcting glasses, weather-resistant clothing, painkillers, Google maps, or the entire network of agricultural works and food transport—are equally part of a far broader and more universal system of human interdependency. Using disability as “a critical concept that reveals the structure of dependence inherent to all human societies”, we might thus more accurately conceptualise ourselves “not as a collection of autonomous beings, some of whom will lose their independence, but as a community of dependent frail bodies that rely on others for survival” in various fluid and situational-specific ways (Siebers 2011, 3, 182).8 If all beings are dependent on others to varying degrees, as recent disability theorising and Waiting for Godot both suggest, then the relative ‘dependency’ of the disabled individual is simply one instance on this broader spectrum of human need. The Culture Device production accentuated the significance of this line of thinking in Waiting for Godot . The play is populated by a series of pseudo-couples, including Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky, the Boy and his offstage brother, the thief saved and the thief damned, Cain and Abel, and even such formal elements as the text’s carefully balanced two-act structure; dual interdependency is the dominant relational structure in the play. Beckett himself would explicitly reiterate the centrality of the necessarily reciprocal relationship in Waiting for Godot , explaining that Vladimir and Estragon “are interdependent; one needs the other” to Jack MacGowran in 1964 (qtd. in McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, 62), and telling Peter Woodthorpe, who questioned Beckett as to the meaning of the play when he performed as Estragon

8 See also Tajiri (2007) and Armstrong (1998) on the modern “prosthetic body”; both explore how the concept of the discrete ‘natural’ human body has been blurred by our deep-rooted reliance on cyber networks and medical and information technologies. See Thoelen (2020) and Bates (2017, 115–161) for readings of prosthetic devices in Beckett’s Molloy (1955) and Beckett’s broader body of work respectively.

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in Peter Hall’s 1955 London première at the Arts Theatre Club, “It’s all symbiosis, Peter; it’s symbiosis” (Knowlson 1997, 417). There are certainly examples of distressing or disturbing forms of interdependency throughout Waiting for Godot , perhaps most obviously the violence of the oft-remarked Hegelian master-slave dialectic that shackles Pozzo and Lucky together, and in the emotionally ambivalent dynamics of Vladimir and Estragon’s own relationship, which sees them bound together despite their frequent attempts to leave: ESTRAGON: [Sadly] You see, you piss better when I’m not there. VLADIMIR: I missed you… and at the same time I was happy. Isn’t it a queer thing? ESTRAGON: [Shocked] Happy? […] You see, you feel worse when I’m with you. I feel better alone, too. VLADIMIR: [Vexed] Then why do you always come crawling back? ESTRAGON: I don’t know. (CDW , 55)

Here, the couple’s compulsive need for each other, despite disadvantages incurred, suggests a particularly bleak version of interdependency. However, Beckett’s use of the somewhat unusual word “symbiosis” to describe the dynamics of Waiting for Godot also indicates the potential for a more optimistic interpretation of interdependency as a potentially beneficent component of human relationships, rather than an abject condition to be avoided at all costs. “Symbiosis” is a biological term referring to an association of two different organisms “which live attached to each other […] and contribute to each other’s support” (“symbiosis, n.”, Oxford English Dictionary), and is commonly used to denote a relationship that is to the advantage of both parties. In a play more typically characterised by fractious feeling or despair, the moments of demonstrative compassion between Vladimir and Estragon provide some of the key enduring instances of tender affect: Vladimir singing a lullaby to Estragon and attempting to help him with his aching feet and leg wound; Estragon periodically embracing his companion and encouraging continued conversation to stave off boredom; the unexpected lyricism of Vladimir’s meditation on how “with my friend Estragon, at this place until the fall of night, I waited for Godot” (CDW , 84). Stranded together in mutual dereliction, Vladimir and Estragon attend to each other’s needs with more affection than animosity, framing mutual reliance as a potential basis for a deeply felt kinship.

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This warmer affective quality has characterised several other major productions of the play. Theatre critic Kenneth Tynan remarked on the “moving interdependence” between Vladimir and Estragon which permitted the couple’s survival in Peter Hall’s 1955 Arts Theatre production (1957, 15), for example. Sos Eltis records how the “essential tenderness of the central relationship” and a “compassionate sense of mutual human dependency” were the core qualities of Hall’s revived 2005 production at the Barbican Theatre, London (2016, 101) and, reviewing Sean Mathias’s 2013 production at the Cort Theater, New York, Marilyn Stasio observed, “The only thing that keeps Vladimir and Estragon from slipping into the same state of moral anarchy [as Pozzo and Lucky] is their mutually supportive (and mutually dependent) friendship” (Variety 2013). The Culture Device production laid a similar accent on the affective weight of Vladimir and Estragon’s reciprocal relationship as one of the key structuring lines of the play. Echoing director Alan Schneider’s recollection of Beckett’s insistence that his characters were to be played as “individual personalities operating in a given set of circumstances. They were not to be considering as abstractions or symbols” (1967, 47), Hackney Showroom co-director Sam Curtis Lindsay emphasises the importance of the onstage dynamic between Vladimir and Estragon in any production of Waiting for Godot , given the play’s central reliance on the couple’s relationship: When we started playing with the relationships, and having [Jessop and Baxter] improvise with each other and just be there together in the space, it was like, “Of course they hang out with each other all the time, and deeply love each other, and deeply irritate each other, and find each other hilarious, but enraging.” That relationship feels central to the text, obviously, and it was just a natural given between those two. And in some productions I’ve seen, I feel like sometimes we forget that relationship, and forget that they’re meant to be human beings? They’re not some sort of abstract idea of a person. (Interview, 2020)

Curtis Lindsay reveals that his favourite element of the production was the final tableau, which saw Jessop and Baxter sitting in single low spotlight on the darkened stage. The pair leant against each other, speaking into hand-held microphones like a weary comedy duo at the end of their final run, a picture-perfect combination of drained abjection and boyish sleepiness. When the final lines were spoken, the centre spotlight held on the pair for a long moment before fading. Curtis Lindsay recalls:

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For me, it just summed up the reason why we wanted to do it in the first place, which was their relationship—between them as actors, and between their characters. The tragicomedy poignancy of that image of them both sitting there waiting, and then Tommy just putting his hand on Otto’s head and stroking it: that, to me, was one of those perfect, perfect sequential images. It’s one of the true beats of Beckett, and also the true beats of friendship. When you magnify that and put it under a light, it’s just so special. (Interview, 2020)

Waiting for Godot depicts mutual reliance as not only the norm in human relationships, but also a foundation for meaningful kinship, in contrast to the unrequited dependency on Godot or to Pozzo and Lucky’s literal binding together, which more closely illustrates Davidson’s description of a “dystopic version of dependency” found elsewhere Beckett’s work (2016, 125). Enacting Vladimir and Estragon’s intimate interdependency as visibly disabled men, Jessop and Baxter drew new attention to the treatment of relational contingency and need in Beckett’s play, and simultaneously to the parity of their own bodies in this context. The Culture Device production of Waiting for Godot undercuts the idea of either disability or interdependency more generally as exceptional conditions of weakness or inadequacy. While not erasing the weight of the couple’s abject dependency on the absent Godot, Vladimir and Estragon’s symbiotic relationship affirms the disability theorising of interdependency as a potential source of reciprocal gain and valuable fellow-feeling, rather than a necessarily pitiable condition of lack (Fig. 5.2).

The Dynamics of Performance As a theatre performance facilitated in part by non-disabled practitioners, these dialectics between dependency and autonomy, being and performing, were tightly interwoven in the Culture Device production. On one hand, the fact of professional performance accorded the company’s actors the opportunity to exercise a public form of agency, both as skilled performers in plays which “are extraordinarily reliant on the actor” (McMullan 2012, 1) and in embodying expressive, fully individuated characters. In contrast to many other disabled roles in literary and theatrical culture, in which “representation tends to objectify disabled characters by denying them any opportunity for subjectivity or agency” (Garland-Thomson 1997, 11), the Culture Device performers frequently

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Fig. 5.2 Tommy Jessop (Vladimir) and Otto Baxter (Estragon) in performance, Hackney Showroom, London, 2018 (Photo credit Hackney Showroom)

highlighted the scope for confident, self-directed behaviour in their analysis of their characters: Jessop emphasised that Vladimir “likes to take charge. And he sticks up for Lucky” (interview, 2020); Barnard observed that Pozzo is “quite bossy, and quite up himself. I loved playing him because I’m not like him at all in real life. I love being loud and bossy onstage” (interview, 2020). Beyond the specific self-assertive characteristics of the individual stage characters, however, acting itself also functions as a meaningful form of highly skilled labour, indicated here by Barnard’s underlining of how he is not like Pozzo in his offstage life: the process of playing the character on stage is one of legitimate professional endeavour. Or, as Baxter more succinctly puts it, “Theatre is very important, because you can show what you can do” (interview, 2020). This demonstration of agential prowess is particularly critical for actors with Down syndrome in a theatre industry that is often even less welcoming to actors with intellectual disabilities than it is to actors with physical disabilities. Jessop emphasises the value of the public-facing theatre display, reflecting that

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disability performance can “send a powerful message saying that people with learning disabilities can act, show their talents and how they might feel on stage”, and reiterating his own self-directed discipline as a professional actor with Down syndrome: “I work hard. And it’s all worth it […] I always like a challenge in life. Because you can always rise up to a challenge, no matter how easy or how hard it is” (interview, 2020). The ‘struggle to be’ here entails not only the professional labour of acting, but also the personal labour involved in demonstrating one’s worth as a disabled individual to an industry and broader public. Acting becomes a crucial form of action, both political and performative, for the Culture Device company, as they present the facticity and value of their own embodied existences on the theatre stage. In this respect, it is notable that all the Culture Device performers I interviewed rejected my questions about the relative difficulty of performing Beckett’s work. In an industry—and indeed a wider society— in which the capabilities of individuals with intellectual disabilities are frequently underestimated, the Culture Device actors’ refusal to dwell on the difficulty of performing Beckett’s work serves as a careful reiteration of their own professional competence. This attitude sits at stark variance to the cult of ‘Beckettian difficulty’ which currently reigns among modern actors: Patrick Stewart, for example, called performing as Vladimir in Sean Mathias’s 2009 production of Waiting for Godot “the hardest thing I have ever done”, and his co-actor Ian McKellen agreed that it was “the most difficult play in the world” (qtd. in Stourton 2019, 315– 316); Peter Bull, who played Pozzo in Hall’s 1955 production, recorded wryly that “the rehearsals were the most gruelling that I’ve ever experienced in all my puff” and that his performance was quickly “reduced to a question of survival without having heart failure” (1959, 169, 172). By contrast, when I asked Jessop if he found any element of rehearsing particularly challenging, he answered readily, “Not really. It was a fun part” (interview, 2020). Both Baxter and Barnard made similar replies. “Learning lines is far too easy for me”, Baxter asserted (and indeed, throughout our interview, conducted two years after the Hackney Showroom R&D, Baxter demonstrated an extraordinarily precise memory of the play, quoting his own and others’ lines along with their accompanying choreographed gestures). Barnard likewise downplayed the script’s demands: “I had to learn my lines before we went to rehearsals, but I learned them quite easily, practising with my dad. I’ve got a really good memory—it just comes out” (interview, 2020). The Culture Device

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actors’ focus on the issue of memorising dialogue is particularly resonant here. With its looping structure and miniscule alterations in near-repeated lines of dialogue, Waiting for Godot is a notoriously difficult script to learn by heart.9 A short-term memory deficit is one cognitive dysfunction sometimes associated with Down syndrome (Roberts and Richmond 2018; Lanfranchi et al. 2012), and consequently actors with Down syndrome can suffer from industry prejudice as to their ability to memorise longer scripts. Vais and Curtis Lindsay were prepared to work with in-ear prompting and autocue technology to help the actors with the script in performance (Curtis Lindsay interview, 2020), but both directors stressed that their precautionary measures turned out to be unnecessary for the actors, and no technological prompting tools in fact needed to be used: “They learned the text fantastically”, Vais recalls (interview, 2020). The Culture Device actors’ resistance to narratives of the difficulty in the theatrical undertaking—even as regards Beckett’s famously demanding scripts—offers a spirited assertion of their ability to work proficiently within a professional theatre context. On the other hand, although the professional theatre performance offers a valuable space for self-assertive agency, it is not a medium that accords complete self-directed command to the performer. The modern Western stage actor is typically positioned in an interdependent relationship with the other elements of the production, co-operating with or even subordinated to the competing demands of the rest of the staging team. This is particularly the case within theatre cultures which privilege the creative influence of director or scripted text over the actor’s improvisatory or introspective potential. Beckett’s own directorial practice, and subsequent Beckett-influenced directorial practice, is noted for demanding an intense degree of control over individual actors, who must typically surrender the contemporary ideal of self-expressive, self-motivated performance onstage in order to follow the precise directional detail of the scripted text (Simpson 2015). The issue of agency in disability performance is already a contentious one in wider popular opinion, particularly when a cast of disabled actors is headed by a nondisabled director or directors, raising the spectre of earlier “freak show” 9 Patrick Stewart admitted, for example, “It was hard, initially, to memorise it, to learn it. His repetitions, which are almost repetitions but not quite; the change of rhythms; the non sequiturs; the sudden intrusion of a brand-new subject out of nowhere” (qtd. in Stourton 2019, 315).

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displays and other ethically dubious forms of voyeurism.10 These anxieties are heightened when the actors have learning disabilities and are assumed to lack the capacity to make informed decisions for themselves, as Culture Device knows from personal experience. The company’s drag troupe, Drag Syndrome (see Fig. 5.3), regularly faces accusations of exploitation and abuse on social media, based on the performers’ perceived inability to comprehend or consent to their involvement in the company’s work, alongside a pervasive homophobia and anti-drag sentiment: “This is horrible. Taking advantage of these sweet adults to support your perversion is awful” (@johngacinski, 2019), “Looks to me like he is taking advantage of them!” (@just_cents, 2019), “Absolutely disgusting exploitation” (@Daddio_7, 2019). Medical practitioners and disability activists have warned against treating adults with intellectual disabilities with unnecessary or inappropriate levels of “protective” paternalism (Walmsley 1993, 129; Nash 2005, 192), and even a brief selection of these comments demonstrates the recurrent infantilisation and even dehumanisation of individuals with Down syndrome: “this borders on abuse and pedastry [sic]. I know what it’s like to deal with people suffering [sic] from downsyndrome [sic]. They are manipulated incredibly easily and it’s clear they are being used as pawns here” (@basedcabaret, 2019), “I can’t put my finger on why this feels wrong but it is. Perhaps because sometimes these beautiful souls need assistance in making even small decisions and to do simply [sic] tasks this seems like a decision they cannot make themselves” (@RayClarkCrawford, 2019), “Like a vegan cat, we all know who is making the decision [here]” (@ats5375, 2019). In August 2019, Republican politician and venue owner Peter Meijer shut down a planned Drag Syndrome performance in Michigan, on the grounds that “the involvement of individuals whose ability to act of their own volition is unclear raises serious ethical concerns. […] The differently abled [sic] are among the most special souls in our community, and I believe they, like children and other vulnerable populations, should be protected” (qtd. in Smith 2019). Such repeated assertions of the performers’ assumed inability to determine their own professional behaviour bespeak a widespread derogation of the agential capacity of adults with learning disabilities.

10 For the long history of the ‘freak show’ and disability performance, see ShepherdBarr (2015) and Gerber (1997).

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Fig. 5.3 Otto Baxter in his drag persona, Horrora Shebang, as part of Culture Device’s Drag Syndrome at VFD, Dalston, 2018 (Photo credit Damien Frost)

Such anxieties are defied by the enthusiastic volition of the Culture Device performers, clearly evident in rehearsal and public performance

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and reiterated here in their interviews.11 Undercutting claims of exploitation, Jessop speaks of performing as a chance to “be free” (interview, 2020), and Baxter explains: “I’m happiest when I’m filming or performing. […] I like to get alllll attention on me” (interview, 2020). Both the improvisatory, self-expressive medium of drag performance and the more self-restrained, interdependent discipline of Beckettian performance affords the Culture Device actors an opportunity for creative agency. Although specific care mechanisms—such as group mealtimes and guardian escorts at the end of rehearsals—were in place to support individual needs, the company’s emphasis remained on focused on the actors’ capabilities as part of the creative team. Vais stresses how, as co-director, he drew directly from the performers’ own interpretation of the play: “They understood the text so well—a little bit more than I do, I must say. Their insight was so inspiring, speaking as a director” (interview, 2020). Curtis Lindsay speaks frankly about his own effort to remain alert to the actors’ creative competency: I was just trying to be in the room with those actors and work with them. And that was the challenge, I think: my preconceptions. As much as we like to pretend that we’re all incredibly woke, we do have those things that are engrained in us, whether we like them or not. As for me, I was constantly trying to shed that skin of preconception. When I found myself thinking, “Oh, this might be too difficult” or “Can I have a conversation about what this text is about in its true depth now?”, I would have to then think, “Yes, absolutely – I should and I can and I will.” That was a conscious part of the process. (Interview, 2020)12

The Hackney Showroom and Culture Device rehearsal period was a collaborative process—a “symbiotic” one, to return to Beckett’s language—and offers an echo of what Duška Radosavljevi´c terms “heterarchical directorship” (2020, 147), based on the organisational concept 11 See Simpson (2018) for a fuller description of the rehearsal room dynamic when preparing Waiting for Godot at Hackney Showroom—particularly Curtis Lindsay’s and Vais’s frequent struggle to retain any illusion of authority over Baxter. 12 Curtis Lindsay also expressed his sense of the limits of his own role in relation to the broader politics of the production during our interview: “I think that it’s problematic for me to speak as some kind of gate-keeper, and as a practitioner who isn’t disabled. I don’t represent or speak on behalf of that community” (interview, 2020).

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of the “heterarchy” in which constitutive elements are not fixed in any specific hierarchical relationship, and can instead combine in various shifting ways depending on the prevailing needs of the moment. Barnard attests to the collective nature of the Culture Device production, recalling that “I really loved the teamwork on Waiting for Godot . The director Sam and the actors all worked really well together” (interview, 2020). The Culture Device production of Waiting for Godot offers a compelling instance of exactly how shared creative agency can operate in contemporary Beckett performance—particularly since Waiting for Godot offers a particularly appropriate text through which to play out issues of agency and interdependency. As Curtis Lindsay summarises, the play itself stages marginalised characters who appear to be “at the whim of something that’s bigger than them, that ultimately has control over their choice—or does it?” (interview, 2020). We might well query which attitude is more damaging to disabled actors: to negotiate a directorial role that guides performance, or to presuppose that the disabled individual is unable to engage meaningfully, and of their own creative volition, in the production of a canonical Beckett stage text?

Conclusion The Culture Device production of Waiting for Godot was limited to one abridged public performance. In a final example of the ‘struggle to be’ highlighted by the production, the company has found it difficult to make contact with the Beckett estate in order to obtain further performance rights. “Even if they say no, I want to do it anyway”, Vais declares. “So sue me. Put me in prison! It’s politically important to do this. These men have been told ‘no’ over and over again in their lives: I’m not going to have them be told that they can’t do this, either. I’m not going to be one more person saying ‘no’ to them” (qtd. in Simpson 2018).13 Following the success of the public performance of the abridged production, he emphasises the degree of professional labour that has typified the company’s engagement with Beckett’s script: “We’re willing to do the work.

13 At the time of writing, Hackney Showroom have confirmed that they are not willing to continue work on Waiting for Godot without estate permission. Later conversation with Edward Beckett revealed that literary agency Curtis Brown had mislaid Hackney Showroom’s attempts at contact (email correspondence with Edward Beckett, 27 April 2021–15 May 2021).

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We will work really hard to show them that this is a high-end production of the text. The delivery of it, the set, the sound, everything. […] I’m very happy for them [the Becket estate] to come and veto it if it’s not good enough” (interview, 2020). Curtis Lindsay is likewise determined to direct a production that stands on its own high merit: “I don’t want to do something that’s seen as lesser. My intention is to do something of quality, not a community project”, he says (qtd. in Simpson 2018), reiterating the team’s work to produce an exacting performance that honoured Beckett’s script, “word for word and beat for beat” (interview, 2020). For the Culture Device production, the ‘struggle to be’ also entails the very particular labour of proving aesthetic worth. Similarly, both directors speak specifically to the challenge of overcoming their potential audience’s assumptions about the production. Vais complains: Everybody comes with preconceptions, instead of just saying, “Ok, I’m going to see a play”. […] Openly, they say, “Oh, I’m coming sceptically”. This is ableism […] because how do they know? How do they know what the artist is going to do? You’ve never seen a cast with Down syndrome doing Beckett. So how can you come with preconceptions? You’ve never seen it before! So you don’t know what you’re going to see! Come with an open mind, come with excitement, and then decide. (Interview, 2020)

Continuing this attention to socialised reactions to their bodily existence, the actors themselves are particularly focused on the tramps’ ill-treatment in the play, which strikes a personal chord with them. Jessop cites one of his favourite lines from the play as “People are bloody ignorant apes”, explaining, “Because that’s actually true. […] I think I might have met people like that—teasing, winding people up. I think some people are ignorant” (interview, 2020); Barnard recalls how, after his appearance in The Oxford Murders in 2008, people complained online about the “retard” in the film (Simpson 2018). “We are men”, Vladimir declares (CDW , 76); just as Waiting for Godot probes the simultaneously socialised and embodied ‘struggle to be’, so too the Culture Device production sceptically interrogates “the contours of a canonical body that garners the prerogatives and privileges of a supposedly stable, universalized normalcy” (Garland-Thomson 1997, 136), emphatically reasserting the validity of their actors’ existence, both on the mainstream theatre

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stage and in the wider world. Beckett’s scrutiny of bodily norms and revised forms of agency is sharpened here into a disability-specific lens, but the play’s radical mix of vulnerability and endurance remains. What are the tramps waiting for, I ask Jessop? “Hope”, he replies (Simpson 2018).

Interviews: Daniel Vais, Creative Director, Culture Device, April 2020 Daniel Vais is the creative director of Culture Device, a dance and performance company for professional artists with Down syndrome, and co-director of the 2018 Hackney Showroom production of Waiting for Godot . He works extensively with artists with Down syndrome. In recent years, he’s founded and directed the Radical Beauty Project, a highconcept, high-fashion photography project featuring models with Down syndrome, directed a Culture Device dance residency at the Covent Garden Royal Opera House on a production of Stravinsky and Nijinsky’s classical ballet The Rite of Spring , and founded Drag Syndrome, a troupe of drag queens and kings with Down syndrome who have performed at RuPaul’s Drag Con UK and the Southbank Centre, and who tour globally (https://www.dragsyndrome.com/). As even this brief resumé indicates, Daniel is a man of apparently boundless energy. Theatre programme managers, opera house residency directors, drag show emcees: all have yielded in the face of Daniel’s determination to properly showcase his artists’ talents. Can you tell me a little bit about how the Culture Device production of Waiting for Godot originally came about? So, Waiting for Godot is one of my favourite plays of all time. I’m super dyslexic, so this kind of writing makes sense to me—it’s nonsense-sense. And for many years I’d had the idea of making a version of it for people with learning disabilities, so I asked my artists if they would like to try it. And we had worked with Hackney Showrooms before, so I asked Sam [Curtis Lindsay], the co-director of Hackney Showrooms, “Would you like to direct Waiting for Godot with my guys?” And his response was

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gold. He said, “Yes! Let’s do it… Shit! This is scary!” And then I said, “You are the right man for this job!” [Laughs ] He gets it! And what sort of preparation work did you do with the artists? First they read the text, and we gathered together and they gave their interpretation. They understood the text so well—a little bit more than I do, I must say. Their insight was so inspiring, speaking as a director. They looked at Godot as something like society. One spoke about “waiting for so long for society to accept us as people, and accept us as whole human beings with fully formed spirits.” And then there is some abuse in the play, and they took it personally; they said, “This is how people treat us, as dogs, as people that don’t really understand things.” So suddenly the meaning became… they made it personal, without being literal, without saying, “Oh, we have special needs, so we have to do this work about us with special needs.” It was just a personal interpretation that they clicked with, and that was very, very eye-opening. And Waiting for Godot is so fluid; it’s valid on almost every subject in life, every transition that you have to make. The play is changing all the time. It’s an ever-evolving, never-ending masterpiece. And we did a movement workshop with Complicité,14 a collaboration on how to embody the text. The physicality was a bit heavier than it is usually, and our performers took time between words and sentences to allow the words themselves to become physical. One of my artists said, “You know that I have a stammer?” And I said, “Brilliant! Bring it on! We’re waiting for Godot – we have a lot of time!” [Laughs ] And actually his occasional stammer really added something to the text and made it that little bit richer, so it worked really well. There was this moment where he said, “We’re waiting for…G… G… G…”—that was magic! And it was natural, not forced. It shows you how to wait. That sums up the whole play, and it shows that disability can be something beneficial—his disability was an advantage. And now, if I see a production of Waiting for Godot with someone without a stammer, I think, “Oh, they’re missing the point! They can’t really deliver the text properly!” [Laughs ]

14 Complicité is an international devised theatre company, led by artistic director Simon McBurney. They specialise in the innovative use of technology in performance and extreme movement and choreography.

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Is this Tommy Jessop ? He’s a phenomenal stage performer. Oh, my god, he’s so good. The people that came to see the R&D were so impressed. First of all, people didn’t expect it to be good and to be professional. They say, “Oh, yeah, they’re doing Beckett, you know, people with learning disabilities doing Beckett, bless them.” And then they saw them actually taking it to another level. So that was a great opportunity to show what society misses by not allowing people with different neurodiversity to tap into contemporary culture. They’re adding another level to it that will allow society and culture to evolve. And that was very important for me to show the world that they are very valid in the way they see culture—contemporary culture and classic texts, the works of genius writers. Society really devalues people with learning disabilities. They make assumptions that they can’t learn texts by heart, which is not the case. We were surprised how they learned the text so fantastically well. We applied for funding from the Arts Council to do an R&D, research and development, and when we got to our studio we realised how fast they were learning it. We did this R&D so quickly. Well, I was not surprised, because my artists are incredible, they are master artists. They really understood the text and the essence of the play—and then there’s this extra layer, they’re opening up the text to territory that has never been explored. And did you have contact with the Beckett estate at any point? Well, we wrote to them, but we didn’t get a reply. I know that they don’t often give permission to the public to do the full version of the play, and Hackney Showroom said that if we don’t have permission, we can’t do a full production. I said, “I need to do this. I can’t wait for permission for the world to advance. And I will take responsibility legally.” I can go to jail, no problem—but it’s so important for me to open this door, and I know I will have to fight for it. I don’t mind [he mimics air quotes ] “breaking the law”—because then, what will happen? People will realise that this rule not allowing them to do a full production is not valid. But this is an opportunity for everyone. And if we do the full production, I’m very happy for them to come and veto it if it’s not good enough. When I had this idea that I was going to do Waiting for Godot with my artists, when I started talking about it, people said, “This is not possible”, or “This is too ambitious”, or “They can’t do it.” And, you know, this is how society sees people with learning disabilities. They would never say, “Wow, this is ambitious!”, or “Wow, this is very exciting! Let’s try it and

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see what happens.” They’re always putting a dampener on it. They never look at it as an exciting opportunity. And a lot of people with learning disabilities have great ideas for art pieces or performances, and people don’t take them seriously. It’s all, “Oh, it’s so sweet what you said! Ah, it’s so sweet!” And they put a downer on it, because they don’t think they can handle it or that the idea is valid; they think it’s just too big. And I want to show society how much we miss out on if we don’t give people the opportunity to explore. Everybody comes with preconceptions, instead of just saying, “Ok, I’m going to see a play.” It’s like if you go to see a play with actors that you don’t know, well, you go to see that play and see that actor and then you give your opinion. You don’t come in, like, [grimaces exaggeratedly] “Urgh, I’m sceptical, I don’t know, I don’t know this actor, he’s got black skin, I don’t know if it’s going to work.” Here, openly, people say, “Oh, I’m coming sceptically.” This is ableism—because how do they know? How do they know what the artist is going to do? You’ve never seen a cast with Down syndrome doing Beckett. So how can you come with preconceptions? You’ve never seen it before! So you don’t know what you’re going to see! Come with an open mind, come with excitement— and then decide. This is why I’m so anxious to do Waiting for Godot , and I’m really praying that we find a solution to get permission to do it. We’re willing to do the work. We will work really hard to show them that this is a high-end production of the text. The delivery of it, the set, the sound, everything. And also, don’t take failure away from these performers. Every artist in the world has failed. This is how you grow. Even Dame Judi Dench— her film Cats is a complete failure! She’s allowed to fail and learn and grow—but artists with learning disabilities don’t get this opportunity. So by overprotecting them, you’re taking away their opportunity to develop. And looking back on the work that you’ve already done, do you have a best memory of the production so far? Is there a moment that stands out? I think when they performed it, and they nailed it. And the audience understood that this is professional, and this is a new dawn for the theatre world. That was the best moment. The art expanded, the experience expanded. But really, everything about it was memorable. The whole thing was so easy and smooth. Sam [Curtis Lindsay] said, “I didn’t expect it to be this easy!” And I was like, [mimics flicking hair back] “Yep! Baby,

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that’s what they do!” That’s why I offered it; I knew that they could handle it really well. But we were all were so impressed at how amazing and professional they are. My job is to pave the way, and to show people that it’s not only possible—it’s fantastic.

Sam Curtis Lindsay, Co-Artistic Director, Hackney Showroom, April 2020 Sam Curtis Lindsay is the co-artistic director of Hackney Showroom, London, and co-director of the 2018 Waiting for Godot production, a calm, good-humoured foil to Vais’s high-energy dynamism. He’s worked with a vast array of theatre venues and companies across London (Paines Plough’s Roundabout, the Southbank Centre, Leicester Square Theatre, Soho Theatre, the Royal Opera House, and the National Youth Theatre, among others), has produced a notable array of queer and LGBTQinflected theatre productions including Travis Alabanza’s award-winning Burgerz (2018), and is an honorary research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. For all his industry success, however, Sam still has to battle for authority in the Waiting for Godot studio. The first time that I sit in on rehearsals, the day begins with Sam and actor Otto Baxter arguing about whether or not Otto needs to put on his shoes before getting onstage. (Otto wins the argument.) At the end of a successful first scene, Baxter proclaims, “Drop the mike!” and gestures for a moment as if he intends to do so—just long enough for Sam to start up out of his director’s seat, ready to catch his expensive equipment. Baxter cackles and walks away to hang the mike up properly; Lindsay sinks back down into his seat, rubbing his temples, and I realise that, co-director or not, he’s been the butt of a lot of practical joking during the course of the production. Could you tell me a little bit more about how the Culture Device production of Waiting for Godot came about with Hackney Showrooms? What actually got this project moving between Culture Device and Hackney Showrooms? First was a slow process of getting to know Daniel and the Culture Device artists. We got talking to Daniel about the work he was doing in dance with various artists with Down syndrome, and we were blown away by the creativity of their work, and just how bonkers and brilliant it was. And so we developed a relationship over a long period of time, and we’d

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book them in for events like Disco Loco, which is our big family arts programme. And then Daniel phoned me up one day and said, “Waiting for Godot ! It’s a great idea. It just makes complete sense.” And I asked, “Why?”, and he said, “It just does.” So I read it again, and thought, “… Actually, it does make sense.” [Laughs.] Were there particular resonances that you saw there for the artists in that performance? Or was it more a sense that this simply had the potential to be a strong production in its own right? I wasn’t looking at it going, “How does this relate to actors with Down syndrome?” I wasn’t thinking, like, “What does this mean?” I just felt like in some way it chimed with the experience, the potential of these artists. I knew Tommy [Jessop, who played Vladimir] and Otto [Baxter, who played Estragon] quite well. Tommy had performed the “To be or not to be” monologue from Hamlet at Hackney Showroom, and he had a real intensity to him, and a seriousness, but at the same time is very playful— wild in lots of ways, but a little bit restricted. So I saw lots of traits in him that I read in text. And then with Otto I just saw, like, complete freedom. He has a sort of knowing innocence—he’s not innocent at all [laughs ] but he plays with it. As a performer, he’s got this natural, clownlike quality which is so unfiltered and brilliant. So together, I thought, “Ok, these two have got something!” Then when we started playing with the relationships, and having them improvise with each other and just be there together in the space, it was like, “Of course they hang out with each other all the time, and deeply love each other, and deeply irritate each other, and find each other hilarious, but enraging.” That relationship feels central to the text, obviously, and it was just a natural given between those two. And in some productions I’ve seen, I feel like sometimes we forget that relationship, and forget that they’re meant to be human beings? They’re not some sort of abstract idea of a person. And how important was that fact that this was a professional cast of actors with Down syndrome to your concept of the production? Or was it incidental? Well, it’s tricky, isn’t it? Because I think the honest answer is that I didn’t have a vision for it, a vision of a production of Waiting for Godot with artists with Down syndrome. Obviously, I think you can’t help but draw your own parallels in some ways, or find an urgent reason to tell the story with those actors. But I wasn’t trying to create any specific parallel—I

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wasn’t trying to create a parallel between Down syndrome and Waiting for Godot , ability and disability. I think people can make their own, if they want to. But at the same time, you can’t ignore it. It’s not like we’re pretending that doesn’t exist and that isn’t a challenge, in terms of people’s perceptions and how you work with the actors. Because lots of people go, “Oooh”, you know—and Daniel will say this probably in a much more brutally honest way that I will [laughs ]—“People with disabilities, how cute! How sweet ! How important ! And how special !” And I think that all of us, whether we like to admit it or not, we all have preconceptions about people with disabilities, and when we see them do something which to us is probably ordinary, we view it as extraordinary, and it moves us in some way, doesn’t it? And that’s not cynical; I think that’s just a truth that exists that we have to acknowledge. And then working with the actors, there are technical things, such as memory and capacity to remember and convey lots of text. We researched using an autocue for the actors and in-ear prompting technology, ideas of how we were going to be truthful… well, not truthful, but exacting, about the text. Because we never heard back from the Beckett estate when we tried to contact them—we tried to ask for permission, and we invited them down to come and see it, and we never really heard back from them—but what we were trying to do is take the idea that if you do Beckett you have to do it in its entirety and honour every beat. So we were like, “Ok, if you’re not going to reply… Fine!” [Laughs ] You know, a bit of a “Fuck you”, like, “Well, we’ll do it exactly how it’s written then, and we’ll do it word for word, beat for beat.” In the section of the text that we chose to share, we did do it word for word and beat for beat, I think, to the best of our knowledge. And obviously the text itself is vast and hard enough anyway without any sort of learning difficulty being involved. But in lots of ways I was massively surprised. We didn’t need to use those technology prompts. How did the actors respond to the text itself? They loved it! They absolutely loved it. And brought real ideas with them about who they are, and what they wanted. Tommy in particular has a really fierce intellect—and is also very feeling, he’s a very feeling actor, he really understands and leans into a text. As an actor, he’s very good at playing and being in the moment and playing, but he’s also a thinker, so he would bring his thoughts to the room. Whereas Otto thinks on his

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feet, and, like any good comedian, he uses things that he knows will make people laugh. But I think they also enjoyed it because it was really fun: we had a lot of fun and we had a lot of laughter. And also they loved to take the piss out of me [laughs ] so I just got absolutely ripped by Otto for over a month. Did you find your own perception of the play changing over this process? Yeah, I think what I realised is that it’s all there. It’s all there, written down—so actually, you just need to say it. And in lots of ways, it tells you how to play it. At first, with anything like Beckett, I think you go, “Oh, I studied that at school, I should be afraid of it”, and “I’m not allowed to do that, because I’m not clever”, or whatever. So I think my fear of it dissipated, because I realised that actually the simplicity of it is just in the trusting of delivering what is written, because it’s written in such a way that just tells you how to think and feel. A bit like Shakespeare? I feel really safe when I just read the text. I feel like the words do all the work. So that felt very… easy, in a way. And how did you feel about the audience response? Well, there was a mixture between ‘pleasantly surprised’, people who were generally upbeat and seemed to enjoy it, and people that were just very moved by it. The Arts Council representatives who came were like, “This is the sort of work we should be funding”, so they were really positive about it. But then I’ll always remember a director friend of mine was like, “It shouldn’t be any longer, should it?” [Laughs ] You always remember the critics, don’t you? I think a lot of Beckett productions might get the same note, to be honest. [Laughs ] Yes. “It’s just about the right length – I wouldn’t do any more.” “Just that is fine, thanks.” And, a little more broadly, is there something that you think a disability performance of Waiting for Godot can do or can add that a non-disabled performance cannot? What is the advantage of doing a disability performance? I think there’s one really obvious advantage, which is that it creates work for disabled actors, so that they get to play in the classical canon. And

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I think that in itself is a huge advantage—and hopefully also a perception buster. I think that’s one very obvious advantage of doing it. And then… I mean, I can only talk more specifically about Waiting for Godot , but ultimately it talks about characters that are marginalised in some way, down on their luck, and it appears that they’re at the whim of something that’s bigger than them, that ultimately has control over their choice—or does it? [Laughs ] So I think there’s something complex and interesting in that, when a non-disabled audience is watching disabled performers, you might suddenly get to think about who holds power. And I think there’s a really interesting shift in power dynamic there, between the watcher and the watched; if you see that played out, it questions current dynamics, I think. It’s a question, though—it doesn’t give you answers. And it doesn’t feel to me that by us doing this production we’re driving a disability agenda, in the same way that we’re not trying to educate people. Obviously, though, there are by-products of it. But also I think that it’s problematic for me to speak as some kind of gate-keeper, and as a practitioner who isn’t disabled. I don’t represent or speak on behalf of that community. I was just trying to be in the room with those actors and work with them. And that was the challenge, I think: my preconceptions. As much as we like to pretend that we’re all incredibly woke, we do have those things that are engrained in us, whether we like them or not. As for me, I was constantly trying to shed that skin of preconception. When I found myself thinking, “Oh, this might be too difficult” or “Can I have a conversation about what this text is about in its true depth now?”, I would have to then think, “Yes, absolutely – I should and I can and I will.” That was a conscious part of the process. And now, I’m just conscious that I don’t want to… say too much about my point of view of what the performance means from a disability point of view. But I suppose at the same time I’m conscious that there’s just not enough work for those actors—so it is good to have a conversation about it. Do you think there is still a taboo around disability performance, or about disability participation in the arts more generally? I mean, I think we’re miles away from where we need to be. You can see it reflected in some people’s programmes that they’ve begun to think about it and address it in their programmes, and you can see the occasional disabled practitioner doing more and more work. So I think it’s shifting. You’d probably have to ask disabled artists about that, really. But from my

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point of view, I think there’s a grinding shift—but it’s slow. And often, I think it can be a bit tokenistic, “We’ve done that now”, you know? [Adopts exaggerated upper-class English accent ] “Now on to our all-male, all white…!” It would be a disservice not to mention artists that are doing lots of great work, companies like Graeae and Jenny Sealey and Jess Thom and Francesca Martinez and Sarah Gordy.15 But there’s still that practice of casting marginalised groups with non-marginalised artists. Like they’ve just announced Breakfast at Pluto at the Donmar Warehouse,16 where the main character is trans and is going to be played by a cis person, and it’s like, “Just work a bit harder.” Or, don’t do it! You know, don’t do the play if you can’t find that actor. You wouldn’t dream of doing Shakespeare’s Othello now without a lead black actor, would you? Because there’s absolutely no excuse for it. So why is there an excuse for this? Why do you want to tell that story if you’re not somehow giving the people that it represents a voice? And that means casting an actor or a performer that lives with that given set of circumstances. And what’s your best memory of the production? I just loved the final image at the end, which was Tommy [Jessop, playing Vladimir] and Otto [Baxter, playing Estragon] sitting in a circle of light against the wall. For me, it just summed up the reason why we wanted to do it in the first place, which was their relationship—between them as 15 Graeae Theatre Company is composed of D/deaf and disabled actors and theatre makers, co-founded in 1980 by Nabil Shaban; see Chapter Two for an interview with Shaban. Jenny Sealey MBE is an actor, director, and the current CEO and artistic director of Graeae Theatre Company. Jess Thom is an artist, performer, and co-founder of Touretteshero production company; see Chapter Four for two interviews with Thom. Francesca Martinez is a comedian, writer, and actor with cerebral palsy; she appears regularly on BBC, ITV and RTE comedy shows, and her debut play, All of Us, is scheduled to run at the National Theatre in Summer 2022. Sarah Gordy MBE is a British actor with Down syndrome, who collaborates frequently on dance and performance pieces with Culture Device. She has appeared in television and film projects including Call the Midwife, Upstairs Downstairs, Strike: The Silkworm and The A Word, and has performed at Manchester Royal Exchange, the New Vic, the Orange Tree Theatre, the Bush Theatre, and the National Theatre. 16 At the time of our conversation, the Donmar Warehouse were planning to stage a musical version of Frank McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto starring cis actor Fra Fee in role of transgender woman Pussy Branden. At the time of writing, the production has been indefinitely delayed because of the Covid-19 pandemic. See Craig (2020) for further discussion.

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actors, and between their characters. The tragicomedy poignancy of that image of them both sitting there waiting, and then Tommy just putting his hand on Otto’s head and stroking it: that, to me, was one of those perfect, perfect sequential images. It’s one of the true beats of Beckett, and also the true beats of friendship. When you magnify that and put it under a light, it’s just so special.

Tommy Jessop, actor, April 2020 Tommy Jessop is a professional actor with Down syndrome, who played Vladimir in the Culture Device Waiting for Godot . He’s a thoughtful presence in the rehearsal room, quick to respond to the directors’ questions about his character’s motivation or the script’s possible subtext. Somewhat shyer offstage than his gregarious thespian colleagues, onstage his nonchalant gravitas commands immediate attention. He weighs his words carefully, pensively, precisely, and they reverberate in the space around him. Tommy was the first actor with Down syndrome to play Hamlet professionally, with Blue Apple Theatre in 2012, and to star in a primetime BBC drama, the BAFTA-nominated Coming Down the Mountain (2007), written by Mark Haddon and co-starring Nicholas Hoult. He was elected to the BAFTA Elevate programme in 2019, received an honorary Doctorate of Arts from the University of Winchester in 2021, and has won various Best Actor awards at UK film festivals. He has an extensive background in dance and theatre performance: he’s a founding member of the integrated theatre company Blue Apple Theatre, has played a cameo at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, and is a frequent collaborator in Culture Device’s dance performances, including their 2019 residency at the Covent Garden Royal Opera House. He’s also had roles in multiple mainstream film media productions, including in seasons five and six of the BBC’s Line of Duty (2019, 2021) and Radio 4’s The Archers in 2013, has played lead and guest lead in two BBC Radio 4 plays The Climb (2010) and Dead Fishes (2009), and has starred in a number of independent short films including Innocence (2019), Little Shit (2018), Fighter (2017) Down and Out (2017), and Angel (2008).

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Tommy, can you tell me a little bit about how you got involved in the production? Daniel [Vais] came up with the idea. I know Daniel through dancing with him [in the Culture Device dance company], and Daniel also knew I was a thespian, because I had the voice to play Shakespeare. I played Hamlet and I played Bottom [in A Midsummer Night’s Dream], Prospero [in The Tempest ], and Don Pedro [in Much Ado about Nothing ]. And what did you think of Waiting for Godot when you first read it? It was quite interesting, and fun. Some bits were quite hilarious. And did you have a favourite moment, or a favourite line? I’ve got a few. “Pull up your trousers!” Brilliant. And, “People are bloody ignorant apes.” Because that’s actually true. Some people can be quite bloody. And some people are quite ignorant, and they behave like apes. I think I might have met people like that—teasing, winding people up. I think some people are ignorant about Down syndrome. They’re ignorant about how you live your life with it. Do you think people are confused about what it means to have Down syndrome? What does it mean for you? Yep. It means you’re extra special at life. [Laughs ] And my third favourite line is, “Your worship wishes to assert his prerogatives?” [Laughs ] Why do you like that line? Because it’s quite a sarcastic line. And I can also be a bit sarcastic as well, in life. But I do like to play people that I’m not like, to see how it feels. It’s fun to let the emotions flow out. It’s fun to play a character that’s full of powerful emotions, to see how they might feel. And what did you think of the character of Vladimir? I think he was a bit like me. He seemed to think things through, and he can also be a bit philosophical, and thoughtful. And he also asks questions, as well. He likes to take charge. And he sticks up for Lucky. And how did you find rehearsing the production? Was there anything that was particularly difficult about rehearsing? Not really. It was a fun part.

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What are your best memories? Working with Sam and Daniel, and with the other cast members. They were quite colourful characters, to say the least. [Laughs.] There was a lot of laughing. Lots of work on moving around the stage. And when you did your final performance, were you pleased by the audience’s reaction? Yes, I was. Most people watching it liked it. In fact, we had a standing ovation. You’re a professional actor, and you do a lot of acting. What does it mean to you to be able to act? It’s my entire life to act, really. It’s my passion. Absolutely everything. You can be free. And I like having a conversation on stage, a bit like a tennis match. Like in the play, “Come on, Gogo – return the ball.” Why do you think you have been so successful in your acting career? I’m not sure, really. Probably because I love it. And I work hard. And it’s all worth it, in the end, watching it play out on the stage. And do you think it’s important that we stage more plays and performances with disabled actors than we currently do? Yes, I think so. Because it will send a powerful message saying that people with learning disabilities can act, can show their talents and how they might feel on stage as well. Do you think it’s harder sometimes to be an actor with a disability ? Are people prejudiced about what you can do? Some people are. Most people find it quite hard. But for me, I always like a challenge in life. Because you can always rise up to a challenge, no matter how easy or how hard it is.

Sam Barnard, actor, May 2020 Sam Barnard is a professional actor with Down syndrome, who played Pozzo in the Culture Device Waiting for Godot . Offstage, he’s a gentle presence, appreciative of but not participating in Tommy and Otto’s

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teasing of their directors and each other, and keen to ensure that everyone in the room—myself included—is happy and well looked after. If Tommy is the thinker and Otto is the clown in the Hackney Showroom cast, then Sam is the soft-hearted parent. Yet onstage he can turn out a forceful, booming diction and a magnificently modulated projection that emphasises Pozzo’s jagged syntax. Sam has performed in a number of popular television programmes, including the BBC’s Silent Witness (2018) and Casualty (2017), ITV’s Grantchester (2017) and The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2013), and E4’s The Inbetweeners (2008), and has featured regularly on the Channel 4 series The Undateables. He appeared in the feature film The Oxford Murders (2008) alongside John Hurt and Elijah Wood, in the BBC radio drama series First World Problems (2018), and has accrued co-directing credits for projects including Rocky and the Native’s music single “Oyster Girl” (2012) and the short ITV film Crime Report (2009). What did you think of Waiting for Godot when you started working on it? I liked it. It was really good—it was all about the characters. I liked it because it was quite moving in parts. And it was also very funny; Vladimir and Estragon were like Laurel and Hardy. I liked the line, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” And my favourite line as Pozzo was “Up, pig!”—when I say that to Lucky and he has to move. [Laughs ] So you like having that authority? Yeah! What was your sense of the character of Pozzo? He’s quite bossy, and quite up himself. I loved playing him because I’m not like him at all in real life. I love being loud and bossy onstage. How did you prepare for the performance? During rehearsals, we did warm-ups, and worked on the movements and clowning and timing. I had to learn my lines before we went to rehearsals, but I learned them quite easily, practising with my dad. I’ve got a really good memory—it just comes out. And we had to get the movements right—I really liked working on pulling Lucky along with the rope. We were excited to perform it in front of an audience. Were you pleased with how the audience responded to you?

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Yes, I really liked the audience! They gave us a great round of applause, and it was good to talk with them afterwards in the bar. And, speaking a little more broadly, what does acting mean to you? What does it mean to you to be able to act? I like having the chance to be a different character, and to learn different lines, and to entertain people. I really loved the teamwork on Waiting for Godot . The director Sam and the actors all worked really well together, and it was good fun. Do you think it’s important for us to stage more performances with disabled actors than we do now? Yes, it is very important in theatre work—and also in radio, tv, and films. Disabled people deserve to be seen, be heard, and belong, just like anybody else, and disabled actors can help in making that happen. I was working last on a play called Hunt the Tiger [by Richard Vergette, staged at Cast Theatre, Doncaster], about the last man in the world with Down syndrome, because of screening, which has three actors with Down syndrome cast in it. It’s another important story told through theatre.

Otto Baxter, actor, May 2020 Otto Baxter is a professional actor with Down syndrome and Tourette’s syndrome, who played Estragon in the Culture Device Waiting for Godot . He’s an infectiously joyful performer to watch, and a natural comic. During rehearsals he teased director Sam Curtis Lindsay mercilessly, and was constantly being reprimanded in rehearsals for ad-libbing for comic effect—but his physical clowning was crucial in developing the production’s comedy. He’s also an incorrigible flirt, and I’ve become used to his regular parting salute: “Bye, sexy!” Otto worked more regularly in film and television prior to the Hackney Showroom production, and successfully so: one recent film project, Samuel-613 (2015), a drama about Hasidic Jews in modern East London, was shortlisted for a BAFTA in the Best British Short Film category, and he won Best Actor for his role in Ups & Downs (2013) at the Cannes Entr’2 Marches Film Festival in 2014. Yet he’s clearly at home in front of a live audience, and over the last few years has been putting his dance experience with Culture Device to new use as a member of Drag Syndrome, a troupe of drag queens and kings with Down syndrome who

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have performed at RuPaul’s Drag Con UK and the Southbank Centre and tour internationally (https://www.dragsyndrome.com/). Interviewing Otto is a joyously chaotic experience. He slips effortlessly in and out of various characters in his repertoire while we’re talking, and peppers his answers with perfectly recalled lines from Beckett’s script, complete with choreography. I can never be entirely sure when he’s teasing me, and our absurd cross-talk often makes me feel like I’ve stumbled onto Beckett stage myself. Otto’s mother, Lucy Baxter, sits in on our interview, occasionally redirecting Otto’s energy back to the question at hand or adding her own perspective. Given how comfortable Otto seems in his own skin, how confident and devilishly carefree I’ve always found him, I’m surprised—probably naively—to hear Lucy talk about the repeated discrimination that Otto has faced, particular in his formal school and performance training. What did you think Waiting for Godot when you started working on it? OB [Otto Baxter]: It’s a really funny comedy. I really enjoy Samuel Beckett’s work. And I really enjoyed playing Estragon, because has funny lines. He gets all the laughs. He plays the fool. He’s mischievous [waggles his fingers arch-villain style at me] and winds people up sometimes… He likes mischief and games. Lots of mind games. So my character is quite fun. The other one, Vladimir, he’s really really boring.

[Laughs ] And what sort of work did you do to prepare for the performance? OB: We had to learn our lines. Learning lines is far too easy for me. And I did a lot of voice warm-ups, because you have to speak out and let the whole audience hear it.

And did you have a favourite line in the play? OB: Oh, actually, I do. [Immediately snaps into ‘Estragon’. Raises right hand to right cheek, with a highly stylised flourish.] “And is it Saturday?” [Raises left hand to left cheek, same flourish] “Is it rather not Sunday?” That one!

[Laughs ] I like that you still remember the movement that you had to do.

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OB: Yes, it’s a really funny comedy. [Snaps back into ‘Estragon] “Pooh! I’d do as well myself!”

You still remember all your lines! LB [Lucy Baxter]: Yes—over the course of three months of a play, he learns his lines and everybody else’s as well. OB: [taps his forehead with one finger, indicating ‘it’s all up there’ ] Yeah, I remember everybody else’s lines too. [Snaps into ‘Pozzo’ ] “Dance, misery!” LB: You’re a genius, you are. OB: An evil genius. Yes.

[Laughs ] Were you pleased by how the audience responded to your performance? OB: Yes, I was. [Thumbs up] It’s really exciting. I quite like it when people give nice comments, not bad, hateful comments. If they did give hatred, I would not invite them again. [Raises his fists, adopts an exaggeratedly tough Cockney accent ] “Oh, come on then, if you fink you’re ‘ard enough!”

Quite right, Otto. And do you think it’s important that we stage more performances with actors with disabilities? OB: [Laughs, and looks at me pityingly – a silly question] Yes, it is! And for ‘normal’ [air quotes with his fingers ] actors as well. LB: And he likes being in the mainstream. He likes being in the middle of everybody and everything. Actually, you did lots of theatre in your teens and early twenties, and then you got more into film and doing documentaries. But I think Otto’s true love is having a live audience. You know, film is fun, but that performance, he just came alive, and I realised how terribly confident he was in it, and how very conscious he was working with all the other actors on the stage. I’m probably the most critical person of Otto [Otto mimes choking himself ] but you were just very masterful in it, I thought. OB: Your true master, that’s me. LB: And we have this ridiculous situation where the local village hall has a panto – OB: And I’m in the panto! LB: Yes, he’s in the panto, but he has a walk-on, non-speaking part.

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OB: [adopts an authoritarian tone] “You! Go, go to the back of the stage!” LB: He’d gone with his CV and with some show reels, and it didn’t make any difference. And Otto, being the person he is, just accepts it. Which is why I’m saying a few things, because Otto doesn’t blow his own trumpet [Otto mimes blowing a trumpet, makes a cheerful trumpeting sound] so I think it’s important to point out that, you know, he does get a lot of discrimination. OB: Yeah. Respect me, please. LB: So the fact that he had such a fantastic meaty part [inWaiting for Godot ] was absolutely wonderful. And I wish they would do the whole thing; it was so perfect. And I know, I’m not in this, you’re interviewing Otto – OB: Yeah. You are in the audience, please. LB: I know, yes! But I just thought I’d interrupt and say this on your behalf.

Otto, do you think it can be harder sometimes to be an actor with Down syndrome ? OB: Well, sometimes it can be a bit hard. But I stand out from the crowd.

So it can be an advantage as well? OB: Yep. An advantage.

In what way can it be an advantage? OB: Well… I don’t actually know what “an advantage” is. LB: [Laughs ] Do you like standing out from the crowd? OB: Yep. I’m a public talker. It’s easy to speak out. So it’s actually a good thing, for me.

And you’ve been doing lots of performance with Drag Syndrome recently, yes? OB: Yes, I have! My drag name is Horrora Shebang. I really enjoyed doing drag. You have to dress up as a woman, and show those people who’s boss. I really enjoy doing things like that. I really enjoyed it. It was fun, excitement. Lots of [snaps into ‘Estragon’] “inspiring prospects”.

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LB: That’s fromWaiting for Godot , Otto!

Yeah, you know all the lines! OB: Faaaantastical! LB: And I think again, with drag, it’s that sort of mischief—Otto’s able to chat people up, and likes being outrageous. Am I right? OB: Yes—I like chatting to lots of women. Especially you, Hannah! [Winks.] LB: All his life, I’ve been saying to Otto, “Now, stop doing that”, and “Don’t do that”, and “You’ve got to fit in”, and “You’ve got to behave well”. So this is, you know—he can do what he wants, and everybody absolutely loves it.

Do you like getting attention from the fans? Is that one of the things you like about performing? OB: Yes! [Makes a sweeping circle with his hands ] I like to get allll attention on me. I want the enthusiasm. I want to be in a Broadway West End musical. LB: And you want to be a villain as well, don’t you? You’re longing to be a villain in something. OB: Oh yes! [Wriggles his fingers in a villain-like gesture at me] Oh yes. I love villains. I’d like to be a baddie. I’d like to play lots of different villains in panto.

And what’s nice about being in front of an audience? What do you like about being on stage? OB: I like being on stage because there are people looking at you, cheering, lots of clapping, lots of cheering. And I also like that people make eye contact with me. Because I want people to say things to my eyes, and not look the other way.

Do you find that people do that? OB: They do, actually, yes.

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Do you feel different being on stage to how you do in real life? OB: Yes, I do. I like to be on stage, but I also like real life. I like them both. But it’s very different. On stage, it’s different because of how you can make people feel. Theatre is very important, because you can show what you can do. LB: Yes. Because Otto has Down syndrome – OB: I certainly do. I’ve got this line. [Shows me his palmar crease, the single straight line that runs across his palm of his hand instead of the more typical three intersecting creases—a trait often associated with Down syndrome.] LB: But you also have one or two other things, don’t you? He also has Tourette’s, and hence the noises. OB: Yes, I do. [Makes a ‘loopy’ motion with his finger by his head] Bit mad! LB: And you also have a sort of ADD attention deficit whatever. OB: A disorder. LB: Well, I wasn’t going to say that, because it’s more like a talent that you have. OB: I’m a right character! LB: But I think he’s just absolutely made for this. Because there are other things which actually Otto finds quite difficult. He finds, you know, looking after himself quite difficult. He finds routines quite difficult. He doesn’t know what time of day it is, whether he’s had lunch, whether he hasn’t had lunch. He’s sort of in a time warp. OB: A time warp! Of no return… LB: He just doesn’t have a clue what time it is, or what day it is. OB: [Mugging exaggeratedly to me] Is it Friday? No! Monday! LB: And so the learning disability, as far as I understand… [Otto takes his glasses off, turns them upside down, puts them back on again, and sticks his tongue out to make me laugh] … is not across the board. I’ve adopted four sons who have Down syndrome, and they’re all completely different. And they have huge strengths and different abilities. With Otto, in a practical way, he needs quite a lot of help. But what he does well, he’s absolutely brilliant at. And you have a very good work ethic. [Otto makes ‘bunny ears’ with his fingers behind Lucy’s head, and checks to see if I’m laughing ] He works very hard. He learns scripts, and it’s a real gift—years on, he’ll still remember them. There are these real areas of huge talent. He wins quizzes, don’t you? You won something like seventy-five quid in the pub quiz last week! The villagers couldn’t keep up with you!

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OB: I’m a big quizmaster. [Rubs his fingers together to indicate “Money, money”.] And I’m completely mad, and very loopy. [Does an exaggerated bow.] LB: Sometimes more ‘straight’ people don’t get Otto. And as soon as you go into a pub… then they get him! Because then everyone else is slightly stoned, slight smashed. And so the arts scene has been really good. You’ve been very welcomed by people, haven’t you? They say, well, we’re all not quite the norm. Your fellow actors really, really get you. And the other thing which I notice is that if Otto goes around wearing, say, what you’re wearing today [jeans and a plain black ‘Culture Device’ t-shirt ], then people largely just see somebody with Down syndrome. But as soon as you wear something which is slightly different… OB: “Who’s that person in the dress?” LB: Yes, as soon as you wear something slightly outlandish, or you’re in drag, then it’s completely different. People suddenly look completely differently at him, and will then join him where he is. Whereas they don’t seem to be able to do that when he just has on the mask of somebody with Down syndrome. As soon as you’re dressed up, everybody falls at your feet. OB: [Mimes falling down on his knees in worship] “I’m not worthy! I’m not worthy!” LB: It’s an interesting phenomenon, isn’t it? But actually, there was terrible prejudice at Wilderness Festival [where Drag Syndrome performed in 2019]. When we were unloading at the campsite, and Otto doesn’t walk very well, so he was going to sit and wait for us to go park the car. And this security guard, who had his earphones in and was slumped on a chair, suddenly woke up and said, “You can’t leave him here! Somebody’s got to be with him! I can’t look after him!” And he was one of the performers! He was one of the actors who had been asked to come.

And is that sort of discrimination something that you’ve had a problem with, Otto? Is that typical? OB: Yes. In general, in my life, it’s been the very difficult bit. And in general, in my life. School. College as well, yes. Very bad. LB: Yes, he was terribly badly discriminated against at college. It was ‘Performing Arts and Production’, and they tried to get him put onto the special needs course when they’d accepted him already. OB: I’m not going to special needs school. LB: And then they cut his time down to just eleven hours instead of twenty-two, swore blind that all it was the same for all the other

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students, but of course it turned out it wasn’t. And he was paying for one of the other students to be a ‘buddy’, and when he and the other mature students were going out for lunch off campus with his buddy, all the powers that be came running out, and said, “Oh no, you’re not allowed to take Otto out, he has to stay here, he’s not allowed to go off the premises”. [Otto shakes his head sadly.] And they took him out of the car, and wouldn’t let him go! OB: And I am not a child! I’m a big adult now, and I decide what I desire. LB: But you didn’t tell them that! [Otto and Lucy laugh] You should be ruder, at certain times, Otto, and tell them to bugger off. OB: I should be rude! [Sticks up his middle finger] “Fuck off! I’m coming, whether you like it or not!” LB: First his middle school wouldn’t have him, and it took two years and going to a tribunal in London to get them to let him in. Then his secondary school, we got a letter saying he had a place, and then he went in for his induction—and the head teacher obviously saw him, because in the evening the Education Officer phoned up and told me that there had been a mistake, and he shouldn’t be there. I just laughed at them. Then, when he was at fourteen, they chucked him out, and told him to go to a special school. We went back to tribunal, which took a year, and the judge sent Otto back to the secondary school, saying “You can’t stop him, he’s not a nuisance.” So he went back, and he was supposed to be in Year Ten by then, but the headteacher put him in Year Seven. And there wasn’t any legislation, so there was nothing we could do about it. And I just felt that if I spent the same amount of time on Otto, and doing things with him, as I do fighting for him in that way…

So acting is a better world for you to be in, Otto? OB: Yes, it is. I’m happiest when I’m filming or performing. Especially with Daniel [Vais]. I did a ballet with him at the Royal Opera House, called The Rite of Spring . I was actually quite honoured to be there. To be a professional dancer, as well as a professional actor. People think they’re better than me—but they’re really not.

Otto, thanks so much for talking to me again—it’s really generous of you. OB: It’s no problem. Bye, sexy!

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Works Cited Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Barnard, Sam. Interview with Hannah Simpson. May 2020. Bates, Julie. Beckett’s Art of Salvage: Writing and Material Imagination, 1932– 1987 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Baxter, Otto. Interview with Hannah Simpson. May 2020. Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1995. ———. Proust, in Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit. London: John Calder, 1999, 9–93. ———. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. New York: Grove Press, 2009. ———. Murphy. New York: Grove Press, 2011. Blau, Herbert. Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Blin, Roger. “Interview with Roger Blin by Joan Stevens”, in Directing Beckett, ed. Lois Oppenheim. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994, 301– 314. Bruce, Fiona et al. “Parliamentary Inquiry into Abortion on the Grounds of Disability”, Parliament of the United Kingdom, 2013, https://dontscreenus out.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Abortion-and-Disability-Report-177-13.pdf Bull, Peter. I Know the Face, But… London: Peter Davies, 1959. Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Craig, Robin. “Breakfast on Pluto: Why Are Theatres Still Slipping Up on Trans Representation?” Exeunt Magazine, 11 March 2020, http://exeuntmagazine. com/features/breakfast-pluto-theatres-still-slipping-trans-representation/ “cretin, n. 1”, Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, June 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/44322 Curtis Lindsay, Sam. Interview with Hannah Simpson. April 2020. Davidson, Michael. “‘Every Man His Speciality’: Beckett, Disability, and Dependence”, in Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism, ed. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury, 2016, 109–127. Davis, Lennard J. “The End of Identity Politics: On Disability as an Unstable Category”, in Disability Studies Reader, 3rd edn., ed. Lennard J. Davis. London: Routledge, 2013, 263–277. Deland, Jane S. “Images of God Through the Lens of Disability”, Journal of Religion, Disability, and Health 3.2, 1999, 47–81. Eiesland, Nancy. “Encountering the Disabled God”, PMLA 120.2, 2005, 584– 586.

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———. The Disabled God: Towards a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994. Eltis, Sos. “‘It’s All Symbiosis’: Peter Hall Directing Beckett”, in Staging Beckett in Great Britain, eds. David Tucker and Trish McTighe. London: Bloomsbury, 2016, 87–104. Franklin, Sarah, and Celia Roberts. Born and Made: An Ethnography of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Gerber, David A. “The ‘Careers’ of People Exhibited in Freak Shows: The Problem of Volition and Valorization”, in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. New York: New York University Press, 1997, 38–54. Goddard, Henry Herbert. “The Elimination of Feeble-Mindedness”, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 37.2, 1911, 261–272. Goujard, J. “La mesure de la clarté nucale et le dosage des marqueurs sériques commencent-ils à modifier l’incidence de la trisomie 21 en France?” Gynécologique Obstétrique & Fertilité 32, 2004, 496–501. Graver, Lawrence, and Raymond Federman. “Introduction”, in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 2005, 1–38. “half-wit, n. 2”, Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, June 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/83531 Hargrave, Matt. Theatres of Learning Disability: Good, Bad, or Plain Ugly? London: Palgrave, 2015. Haslam, Molly C. A Constructive Theology of Intellectual Disability: Human Being as Mutuality and Response. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Jessop, Tommy. Interview with Hannah Simpson. April 2020. Kennedy, Seán. “First Love: Abortion and Infanticide in Beckett and Yeats”, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 22, 2010, 79–91. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Kriegel, Leonard. “The Cripple in Literature”, in Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images, ed. Alan Gartner and Tom Joe. New York: Praeger, 1987, 31–46. Lanfranchi, Silvia, Alan Baddeley, Susan Gathercole, and R. Vianello. “Working Memory in Down Syndrome: Is There a Dual Task Deficit?”, Journal of Intellectual Disability Research 56.2, 2012, 157–166. Maitland, Hayley. “The Stars with Down’s Syndrome Lighting Up Our Screens: ‘People Are Talking About Us Instead of Hiding Us Away’”, The Guardian,

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27 November 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/27/ the-stars-with-downs-syndrome-lighting-up-our-screens-people-are-talkingabout-us-instead-of-hiding-us-away Marzano-Parisoli, Maria Michela. “Disability, Wrongful-Life Lawsuits and Human Difference: An Exercise in Ethical Perplexity”, Social Theory and Practice 27.4, 2001, 637–659. McMillan, Dougald, and Martha Fehsenfeld. Beckett in the Theatre: The Author as Practical Playwright and Director. London: John Calder, 1988. McMullan, Anna. Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. London: Routledge, 2012. Middleton, J. Richard. The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis I . Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005. Nash, Melissa C. “Beyond Therapy: ‘Performance’ Work with People Who Have Profound and Multiple Disabilities”, in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, 190–201. Natoli, Jaime L., Deborah L. Ackerman, Suzanne McDermott and Janice G. Edwards. “Prenatal Diagnosis of Down Syndrome: A Systematic Review of Termination Rates (1995–2011)”, Prenatal Diagnosis 32, 2012, 142–153. Newton, Richard. “Neurological Disorders”, in Down Syndrome: Current Perspectives, ed. Richard W. Newton, Liz Marder and Shiela Puri. London: Mac Keith Press, 2015, 238–247. Nixon, Mark. “‘Happy Melancholy’: Pleasure and Pain in Early Beckett”, in Samuel Beckett and Pain, ed. Mariko Hori Tanaka, Yoshiki Tajiri, and Michiko Tsushima. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012, 24–42. Parens, Erik, and Adrienne Asch, eds. Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2007. Radosavljevi´c, Duška. “The Heterarchical Director: A Model of Authorship for the Twenty-First Century”, in Directors’ Theatre, David Bradby and David Williams, ed. Peter M. Boenisch. London: Red Globe Press, 2020, 247–267. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. “Samuel Beckett, or ‘Presence’ in the Theatre”, in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965, 108–116. Roberts, Lynette, and J. L. Richmond. “Using Learning Flexibly and Remembering After a Delay: Understanding Cognitive Dysfunction in Adults with Down Syndrome”, Journal of Intellectual Disability Research 62.6, 2018, 521–531. Rowlands, Sam, and Jean-Jacques Amy. “Sterilization of Those with Intellectual Disability: Evolution from Non-Consensual Interventions to Strict Safeguards”, Journal of Intellectual Disabilities 23.2, 2019, 233–249. Schneider, Alan. “Waiting for Beckett”, in Beckett at 60: A Festschrift, ed. John Calder. London: Calder and Boyars, 1967, 34–52.

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Schopenhauer, Arthur. Parerga and Paralipomena, volume II, trans. E. F. J. Payne. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. ———. The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, trans E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1969 Selikowitz, Mark. Down Syndrome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Siebers, Tobin. “In the Name of Pain”, in Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, ed. Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland. New York: New York University Press, 2010, 183–194. ———. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Simpson, Hannah. “‘Now Keep Out of the Way, Whitelaw’: Self-Expression, Agency, and Directorial Control in W. B. Yeats’s and Samuel Beckett’s Theatre”, Comparative Drama 49.4, 2015, 399–418. ———. “Waiting for Godot, Hackney Showroom, London [Rehearsal]”, The Beckett Circle, Autumn 2018 issue, https://thebeckettcircle.org/2018/12/ 11/waiting-for-godot-hackney-showroom-london-rehearsal/ Smith, Lydia. “Down Syndrome Drag Collective Banned from Performing over ‘Serious Ethical Concerns’”, Pink News, 28 August 2019, https://www. pinknews.co.uk/2019/08/28/down-syndrome-drag-collective-barred-ven ue-us/ Stasio, Marilyn. “Broadway Review: No Man’s Land/Waiting for Godot ”, Variety, 25 November 2013, https://variety.com/2013/legit/reviews/bro adway-review-no-mans-landwaiting-for-godot-1200851722/ Stourton, Edward, ed. Today: A History of the World Through 60 Years of Conversations and Controversies. London: Cassell, 2019. “symbiosis, n.”, Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, June 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/196194 Tajiri, Yoshiki. Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism. London: Palgrave, 2007. Thoelen, Thomas. “Crippling Crutches: Disability as ‘Narrative Prosthesis’ in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy”, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 32.2, 2020, 306–320. Trent Jr., James W. Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Intellectual Disability in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Tynan, Kenneth. “Endgame”, Observer, 4 April 1957, 164–166. Vais, Daniel. Interview with Hannah Simpson. April 2020. Walmsley, Jan. “Contradictions in Caring: Reciprocity and Interdependence”, Disability, Handicap & Society 8.2, 1993, 129–141. @ats5375. Twitter post, 2 June 2019, https://twitter.com/ats5375/status/113 5007919769100290

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@basedcabaret. Twitter post, 1 June 2019, https://twitter.com/basedcabaret/ status/1134761889114841088 @Daddio_7. Twitter post, 1 June 2019, https://twitter.com/Daddio_7/status/ 1134833496256442368/ @johngacinski. Twitter post, 2 June 2019, https://twitter.com/johngacinski/sta tus/1135017691104849926 @just_cents. Twitter post, 1 June 2019, https://twitter.com/just_cents/status/ 1134801792611561473 @RayClrkCrawford. Twitter post, 31 May 2019. https://twitter.com/RayClrkCr awford/status/1134570952799469569

CHAPTER 6

Epilogue: Disability Performance and the Virtuosic Body

The interviews in this book were conducted over a number of years, from my first speaking with Jess Thom in April 2017 up to my final interview with Edward Beckett in May 2021 (reproduced at the end of this chapter). Writing this book has given me the opportunity to consider these practitioners’ thoughts in closer correspondence to each other than I was able to do during our initial conversations, disjointed as they were across time, space, and varying modes of electronic communication when the Covid-19 pandemic struck. I close here with a reflection on some of the key lines of thought that have emerged across the interviews collected here. The first recurring strand is the pervasive presence of the impaired or otherwise unreliable body in Beckett’s stage plays, and its role in generating what I have called here Beckett’s disability aesthetic. None of Beckett’s stage characters inhabit a perfectly formed and functioning body or mind; as Not I actor Jess Thom observes, “Beckett definitely likes to impair his characters” (interview, 2020, Chapter Four). This repeated emphasis on the body’s refusal or inability to function exactly as expected resonates deeply with the lived experience of the disabled practitioners interviewed in this book—and, for many, with their own politics of representation. In its vision of a universe of varied forms of corporeal existence, stretching beyond limited, pathologised conceptions © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Simpson, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04133-4_6

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of the impaired body, Beckett’s work has much to offer disabled actors and theatre practitioners. These plays counteract the cultural marginalisation of the disabled body by way of the plural narratives of bodily disability and embodied difference depicted in the texts themselves, and the professional opportunities these playscripts offer to disabled actors. In the contemporary theatrical landscape, in which Beckett’s work exists as a widely recognised, commercially viable, and critically respected cultural landmark, his plays afford a particularly valuable opportunity for disabled actors to demonstrate their potential as highly skilled artists, and a means of resisting what Jess Thom calls the “cultural curation” of work made available to disabled practitioners and audiences (interview, 2020, Chapter Four). If “performance gives power”, as Richard Tomlinson, co-founder of disability-centric Graeae Theatre Company alongside Nabil Shaban, emphasises (1982, 12), Beckett’s work accords particular power to the disabled theatre practitioner. However, disability performance also serves the Beckett text. Beckett’s work is persistently concerned with embodied existence in a resistant or recalcitrant body, and with the associated ideas of struggle and deterioration, isolation and interdependency, precarity and endurance, compulsion and unexpected forms of agency. In turn, the disability performances explored in this book translate the corporeal, social, political, epistemological, and ontological concerns that run through Beckett’s original playtexts in strikingly immediate and embodied terms. We might think back here to Beckett’s recorded preference for physiological rather than psychological acting methods, explored in Chapter Two: the disabled actor can bring a heightened sensorimotor and conceptual understanding of the physical experiences scripted in Beckett’s playtexts. As Endgame actor Garry Robson puts it, “a disability production of the play offers a lived experience of the disabilities Beckett ascribes to his characters” (interview, 2017, Chapter Two). Thom concurs, explaining how there are elements of Mouth’s functioning in Not I “that I deeply understand, in a way that other people won’t” and “that I don’t need to act […] because that’s part of my everyday lived experience. So I can concentrate on delivering the text in the best way possible, in the way that draws on my lived experience, and that honours the text and its context” (interview, 2020, Chapter Four). Beyond the more vividly expressive rendering that such performance allows, the presence of the actually disabled body onstage heightens the affective and political charges of Beckett’s work. Disability activist and playwright John Bellusco explains:

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When you have a non-disabled actor playing the role, the curtain goes up at the end, the lights come up, it’s time for the curtain call. And the actor will stand out of the wheelchair and take a bow, and suddenly everything that has come before has just been erased. The audience is let off the hook. (Qtd. in Tolan 2011, 21)1

The disabled performer’s own persistent material existence on and off the stage—their refusal to be rendered metaphorical or abstract, as it were— magnifies the visceral impact and emotional authenticity of a playtext centrally concerned with impaired bodily existence. The profound coherence between Beckett’s plays and disability performance is a crucial factor for the Beckett estate when judging whether to grant performance rights to disability productions of Beckett’s plays. One of the final interviews I conducted for this book was with Edward Beckett, Samuel Beckett’s nephew and current executor of Beckett’s estate, in which we discussed the estate’s approach to disability performance of Beckett’s stage plays; the interview is printed in full at the end of this chapter. As the owners and administrators of the copyright and performance rights of Beckett’s body of work, the Beckett estate retains the final say over which companies can produce the plays—and to what degree they can experiment in their production. To some extent, they act as guardians or watchmen over the ongoing public representation of Beckett’s writings; Edward has referred previously to his role as both supporter and safeguard of his uncle’s work: “I do what I can to act as a catalyst and as a guardian, and try to equate those two things in as reasonable a way as possible” (qtd. in Gussow 1996, 134). The Beckett estate’s activity has attracted controversy over recent decades for what has been perceived as their too restrictive policing of stagings of Beckett’s plays (Hartley 2020, 133). In 2003, for example, Company B director Neil 1 In his rehearsal diary for the 1967 Beckett-directed Schiller Theater production of Endgame Michael Haerdter recorded how adamantly opposed Beckett was to the suggestion of the actors breaking their character to offer an end-of-performance bow:

No, no curtain calls! He’s extremely alarmed, his tone is suddenly tough – “That’s repugnant to me.” The lights are only to come up a couple of times after the blackout, while Hamm and Clov must remain unmoving in their final positions; Nagg and Nell must not show themselves any more – “No entries, no bows.” (Qtd. in McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, 226).

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Armfield decried the estate’s censure of his Belvoir St Theatre production of Waiting for Godot which added music and percussion to the playtext, protesting that “In coming here with its narrow prescriptions, its dead, controlling hand, its lists of ‘not alloweds’, the Beckett estate seems to me to be the enemy of art” (qtd. in Marks 2003). Arts journalist Van Badham complained in 2015 that “the strict edicts of the Beckett estate trap the work” in stasis, “choking the throat” of theatrical innovation (2015); more recently, theatre critic Kate Wyver borrowed the same metaphor to describe her sense of how Edward’s team “continues to throttle any production that sways from his uncle’s precise instructions” (2020).2 Edward laments this public perception of the Beckett estate as unduly restrictive: “It is frustrating that the Estate is labelled as difficult due to a few high-profile cases, [because] if one examines the range of permissions granted, the opposite is true” (interview, 2021). He reiterates his sense of the estate’s role in safeguarding Beckett’s original vision of his plays in production, insofar as this intention can be inferred from the history of performance in Beckett’s lifetime: “All we ask is that the play is performed as Samuel Beckett intended, no additions, no subtractions, no change of casting. That still allows great latitude to how the play is performed” (interview, 2021). The practitioners interviewed in this volume have encountered a range of responses from the Beckett estate in response to their proposed disability productions, from Culture Device and Hackney Showroom’s receiving no reply to their application for performance rights, to The Endgame Project’s securing permission on the condition that they could give only one public performance and not charge admission, to the close working relationship that the Touretteshero company developed with the estate and support they received in adapting traditional Not I performance practice. However, Edward readily acknowledges that “Samuel Beckett’s work is extremely relevant to people with disabilities, and it would be ridiculous to make it difficult for them to perform his plays” (interview, 2021). The Beckett estate’s approach to disability performance of Beckett’s plays, he explains, is to request that the production “stay[s] faithful to the text and casting” of the original playscript, with the caveat that, “in the case of a disability making that [fidelity] difficult or impossible, we would talk to the company to see what compromises 2 See Hartley (2020) for further detail and sustained discussion of Beckett’s and the Beckett estate’s intervention in productions of his plays between 1973 and 2016.

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are possible” (interview, 2021). This book has explored the range of ways in which disability performance offers particularly deep-rooted versions of fidelity to Beckett’s playtexts and their vision of universally impaired bodily existence. As director Daniel Vais explains of the Culture Device production of Waiting for Godot , for example, “there’s this extra layer, they’re opening up the text to territory that has never been explored” (interview, 2022, Chapter Five)—but this is a layer of meaning already deeply embedded in Beckett’s original playtext, concerned with the ‘struggle to be’ and hierarchies of value applied to living beings. Thom voices a similar sentiment in relation to Not I : “I think Mouth has always been disabled. Looking at what actually exists in the text, we’ve only shone a light on stuff that exists already within the writing. We haven’t added or layered up loads of stuff” (interview, 2020, Chapter Four). Thom corroborates Edward’s statement as to the estate’s prioritising fidelity to Beckett’s original creative intentions above all else in contemporary performance, recalling that in discussions concerning the Touretteshero production of Not I , “Edward’s response was that his sole concern is Samuel Beckett’s work being performed in the way that Beckett intended, and that if we were happy that we could honour that, he was happy for us to proceed” (interview, 2020, Chapter Four).3 Thom describes her own positive experience of the Beckett estate’s openness to artistic innovation during the development of the Touretteshero Not I : I know about the reputation of the Beckett estate from the questions that we get asked, but our experience of working with them was extremely positive and extremely supportive—and actually very creative in terms of their involvement. They were involved in the rehearsal room from the getgo. There was an open dialogue, and when we did hit issues, there was room for us to say, “We will experiment creatively and see where we get to”. (Interview, 2020, Chapter Four)

The broader coalescence of concerns between Beckett’s playscript and the Touretteshero disability production allowed space for Thom and her team to alter traditional performance practices that have accrued around Not I since its theatrical premiere, but which are not fixed in the original script, such as the relocation of the fixed spotlight inside Thom’s own 3 Recognition must be extended here to Beckett scholars Derval Tubridy and Jonathan Heron, who supported Touretteshero as academic consultants in the development of their Not I production and in their application to the Beckett estate for performance rights.

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stage costume, the introduction of a BSL interpreter on stage, the need for Thom to be positioned onstage “at an unnatural angle” (interview, 2020, Chapter Four) but not necessarily be tightly restrained—and, of course, the inclusion of Thom’s verbal and motor tics in a script centrally concerned with the loss of bodily control. In turn, Edward voices his admiring approval of the Touretteshero company and their production of Not I : The company were very accessible and listened to our suggestions, then found a way to make them work. Jess was wonderful, an inspiration […]. She took on one of Samuel Beckett’s most demanding plays, found a way to do it and the result was a moving performance that really worked, the audience reaction was testament to that. Her performance stayed faithful to Samuel Beckett’s intentions and gave the play added poignancy. (Interview, 2021)

Crucial here is how the Touretteshero production foregrounded the central thematic and aesthetic concerns inherent in Beckett’s original playscript—a feat which many other disability productions of Beckett’s plays are well placed to do, given Beckett’s recurrent interrogation of impaired and unruly bodily existence. To return to Edward’s description of balancing a disability production’s “staying faithful to the text and the casting” against possible “compromises” required to enable performance (interview, 2021): smaller local “compromises” to traditional staging practices are quickly outweighed in value by this more profound coherence of being and performance, consolidating and illuminating the original philosophical, aesthetic, and affective dimensions of Beckett’s playscripts. If the Beckett estate are guardians of Beckett’s work and its original concerns, they have little to fear from disability performance of Beckett’s work—and much to gain. A second strand of thought that emerges from these interviews—and one relevant to this discussion of the Beckett estate’s role in facilitating disability performance—is the rigour and respect with which each of these practitioners has approached the Beckett playtext, as both a guiding model for performance and as an artistic triumph in its own right. The practitioners repeatedly echo the need for rigorous attention to the detail and quality of the playtext in question in order to honour Beckett’s work. “You can’t be complacent with it, ever. It has no space for that”, Thom says of the Not I script (interview, 2020, Chapter Four). Vais speaks of

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his desire to produce a high-quality production of Waiting for Godot with his Culture Device cast, explaining “We’re willing to do the work. […] I’m very happy for [the Beckett estate] to come and veto it if it’s not good enough” (interview, 2020, Chapter Five). A deep admiration, even love, for Beckett’s writing recurs across the interviews printed here. “I’d been reading him constantly”, Endgame actor Dan Moran recalls, even before his Parkinson’s diagnosis. “I just kept reading a lot, getting deeper and deeper into him. Not really with any thought of performing, but just to get his words – his words are so great” (interview, 2021, Chapter Three). Thom similarly emphasises the “joy” she finds in reading and speaking aloud the Not I script, enthusing that it “is such an incredible piece of writing. It’s so beautifully crafted, and its rhythms are beautiful”. She describes how this admiration for the play as Beckett composed it impacted her approach to performance: At the very beginning, if I’m honest, there was a part of me that was like, “Right, if the Beckett estate say no, then we just put a question mark at the end, and why do Why Not I?” But actually, I lost interest in that very quickly, as soon as I realised, “I know this character, I care about her and I recognise her.” There was an opportunity here to do something way better than grumble about not being able to do something—to realise the importance of incorporating authentic perspectives into some of the understanding of these texts. So by the time we asked the estate, we knew that we really wanted to do it.

Thom’s admiration for Beckett’s work fused with her recognition of and “care” for Mouth as a disabled character, catalysing a determination to produce the play “authentically” in terms of both disability representation and fidelity to Beckett’s text. Similarly, the other practitioners interviewed here frequently voiced their sense of how crucial following the exact details of Beckett’s playscripts was to ensuring successful performance. “The words, they tell you what you need to know and what you want to feel”, Moran muses (interview, 2021, Chapter Three), and Hackney Showroom director Sam Curtis Lindsay likewise recalled that “what I realised is that it’s all there. It’s all there, written down—so actually, you just need to say it. And in lots of ways, it tells you how to play it. […] It’s written in such a way that it just tells you how to think and feel” (interview, 2020, Chapter Five). Indeed, even where these practitioners feel a strong resonance in Beckett’s texts with their own lived experience of

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disability, they all repeatedly refused to make any overly precise ‘diagnosis’ of the characters that went beyond the precise details of Beckett’s original playtext. While recognising the characters as disabled, and as sharing in a lived experience of disabled existence, these practitioners make no attempt to argue that Hamm and Clov actually have Parkinson’s disease, that Hamm has restricted growth, that Mouth has Tourette’s, or that Vladimir and Estragon have Down syndrome. “I wasn’t looking at it going, ‘How does this relate to actors with Down syndrome?’”, director Curtis Lindsay recalls. “I wasn’t trying to create any specific parallel. […] I just felt like in some way it chimed with the experience, the potential of these artists” (interview, 2020, Chapter Five). As Moran explains, although Endgame “spoke to” him as regards his experience of degenerative illness‚ in the beginning, I didn’t take anything from my Parkinson’s, like, I have to do this because of my Parkinson’s. […] All I thought about was: What am I saying here? Why am I saying it? What do I mean? What did Beckett mean? And that’s how the Parkinson’s would feed in. I said, “Well, it’ll feed in by the fact that we have Parkinson’s [laughs ], and we’re trying to do this play.” It’s as simple as that. (Interview, 2021, Chapter Three)

Likewise, Thom insists, “At no point am I saying that Beckett wrote this about Tourette’s. I don’t need to say that Beckett wrote this about Tourette’s, because that’s not what matters” (interview, 2020, Chapter Four). What matters here is the production of a rigorously engaged, highquality performance of Beckett’s playtext—and where the question “What did Beckett mean?” can be answered in some measure by reference to the playwright’s abiding concern with existence in a disorderly or dysfunctional body, then the disabled performer is ideally placed to bring this vision to life. This brings us to the third concern that recurs across these interviews: the refusal to frame these performances of Beckett’s work as didactic vehicles of disability education or awareness. Beckett’s plays are not straightforwardly ‘activist’ disability texts in any uplifting or politically correct way. These are playscripts which deploy the impaired or unexpectedly functioning body as a central element of their unsettling aesthetic and affective effect. As Endgame actor Shaban observes, “Obviously Beckett had never thought about disabled people playing these parts, writing for a non-disabled theatre public, and he wasn’t really writing the plays to

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be seen or experienced by disabled people”—and Endgame in particular is perhaps “not a play that a disabled person wants to see, if they want to see something positive about themselves” (interview, 2017, Chapter Two). These practitioners are not rewriting Beckett’s plays as edifying models of disability advocacy, nor are they claiming them as educational models of what disabled life is ‘like’, or as corrective standards of how disability ‘should’ be represented on stage. Rather, it is the resonance with disabled existence already present in the playtexts, often glossed over by the wider cultural and scholarly fields, which these practitioners have sought to emphasise: the dark and disturbing as well as the affirmative and joyful. Thom explains: I think that often plays that talk about disability have a very educative context? Even Biscuit Land definitely had an element of teaching nondisabled people about an element of our lives.4 With our production of Not I , it felt like that shifted. It wasn’t about us educating non-disabled people. It was about making visible and giving voice to a particular set of our own experiences; it was something that you would experience differently depending on your own lived experience. (Interview, 2020, Chapter Four)

These are not sermonising or politically cautious rescriptings of Beckett’s playtexts. As disability artist and scholar Petra Kuppers declares, “Welcome to the world of avant-garde disability art: this is not a collective of pride art, clear and message-ful. There is no inspiration here, either. Instead, the reader/viewer/unwrapper finds themselves challenged to make meaning, and to play in uncharted territory” (2017, 53–54). These productions are avant-garde rather than ambassadorial: starkly uncompromising art pieces that continue Beckett’s own legacy of theatrical and cultural disruption.

Beckett and the Virtuosic Performance Thinking about ideas of high-quality theatre performance alongside theatrical and cultural disruption brings me to this book’s final point

4 Backstage in Biscuit Land was the first Touretteshero stage production, in which Thom, in her own words “introduce[d] the extraordinary world Tourette’s creates around me” to her audience (2014).

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of contention: the notion of the virtuoso actor. Traditional conceptions of virtuosic performance and its insistence on precise command of the body have often posed challenges to disabled actors—or rather, to the mainstream cultural reception of their work. The virtuosic is defined as “displaying or characterized by exceptional technical skill in music or another artistic pursuit” (“virtuosic, adj.”, Oxford English Dictionary). The virtuosic performer displays an extreme level of mastery over their craft, a fluency—even a delight—in technical difficulty that allows them to push their performance to near-incomprehensible levels of capability. Audience response to the virtuoso performance is usually characterised not simply by enjoyment but by astonished wonder and awe, faced with “the sheer human impossibility of the perfection displayed in the performance, in the virtuosi’s mastery of their instruments, voices, bodies” (Brandstetter 2007, 178).5 Disability performances of Beckett’s plays offer us the opportunity to re-examine our conception of “virtuosic” stage performance. The concept of the idea virtuosic performance as one of perfect control of the body has migrated into modern and contemporary Beckettian performance. If there has not yet been an extended exploration of the concept of virtuosity in relation to Beckettian performance, the terms of the virtuoso have often been applied to distinguished Beckettian actors.6 Indeed, many of those actors have themselves emphasised the virtuosic rigour and precision required to perform the plays according to the playwright’s liking. Foremost Beckett actor Billie Whitelaw described how, when rehearsing Not I at the Royal Court in 1973, Beckett “told me in one place I had paused for two dots instead of three” (qtd. in Pountney 1988, 184), and how, when rehearsing Happy Days at the same theatre 5 See Ginsborg (2018), Cveji´c (2016), and Brandstetter (2007) for a fuller history of the term “virtuoso” and for historical and contemporary criticisms of the virtuosic performance style. 6 For example, Corey Wakeling described Lisa Dwan as giving a “virtuosic performance” as Mouth in Walter Asmus’s 2013–2014 Not I on the basis of her unprecedented nine-minute performance on the complex monologue (2017, 357), as did The Independent reviewer Paul Taylor (2014). Michael Miller praised Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon’s “virtuosic turn” in Trevor Nunn’s 2012 stage adaptation of All That Fall (2014). Katharine Worth described Anna Massey, Ronald Pickup and Penelope Wilton as giving “a virtuoso, high-speed performance” in Donald McWhinnie’s 1976 staging of Play at the Royal Court (1976, 75), and C.R. Lyons has recounted “Madeleine Renaud’s virtuoso performance” as Winnie in the 1964 Théâtre de l’Odéon Oh les beaux jours (1983, 132).

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in 1979, “If you said an ‘Ah’ instead of an ‘Oh’ he groaned, as if stabbed by a knife” (qtd. in Zinman 1994, 24). Actor Irena Jun agrees that performing Beckett’s work “requires maximum concentration and absolute control of one’s body and voice. Rehearsing and playing Beckett gives an actor the opportunity to master his own body and to turn it into a perfect instrument” (1992, 48). Other actors who have struggled with the requirements of Beckett’s stage scripts have likewise testified to the demands placed upon their technical capabilities. French actor Delphine Seyrig lamented her self-described inadequacy in Comédie in 1964 and Pas in 1978 by specifically invoking the terms of the virtuosic: There is a real virtuosity in Beckett’s texts, and I am no virtuoso. I was never able to summon the right precision for the role. It was almost as if the instrument itself was insufficient. […] To play Beckett you have to have a real capacity for precision in delivery. You have to know how to talk and act mechanically and precisely as if for a Bach partita. (1992, 20)

However, established conceptions of virtuosic performance and its stringent command of the body have done much to overshadow the disabled actor’s professional facility in both Beckettian stage performance and the wider acting industry. As Ann M. Fox observes, theatre’s “emphasis on actorly virtuosity” has “lent itself to the exclusion of the disabled body from the stage” (2016, 130). Traditional standards of stage virtuosity demand a degree of reliable bodily control that the disabled actor may not always be able to guarantee. Patrick McKelvey highlights, for example, the “compulsory nondisabledness” in much Western actor training in his reading of how Konstantin Stanislavsky’s influential acting manual An Actor Prepares (1936), which demands “exceptional bodily autonomy” and “an unusual degree of bodily control” (2019, 72, 79) as a basis for any conception of ‘good’ acting.7 Disability scholar and activist Carrie

7 Intriguingly, given the pervasive cultural associations between disability and deviancy or evil explored in Chapters Two and Five—there is also an etymological connection between the terms “virtuous” and “virtuoso”: each find a root in the noun “virtuosity”, meaning both “Moral goodness, virtuousness” (“virtuosity, n1a”) and “Exceptional technical skill in music or other artistic pursuit” (“virtuosity, n3”, Oxford English Dictionary). This confluence of meaning is the basis of orchestra manager Sweet Sue’s pun in the film Some Like it Hot (1959, dir. Billy Wilder), in which Sue closes her orchestra’s performance (and Marilyn Monroe’s sultry performance as singer Sugar Kowalczyk): “Well, that’s it for

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Sandahl emphasises the consequent “paradox for the disabled body” in the theatre industry, where the impaired or non-normative figure is typically believed to be “appropriately represented by a symmetrical body in full, even incredible, control. Disabled bodies, whose parts often move in opposing, unnatural ways […], are excluded from representing those whose bodies might most resemble their own” (2005, 260). So entrenched are our ideas of what ‘good acting’ or a ‘good actor’ looks like that praise for performances of disabled characters are still predominantly reserved for non-disabled actors. Award-winning films with crip central casting spring readily to mind: Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (1988), Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot (1989), Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman (1992), Leonardo DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993), Sean Penn in I am Sam (2001), Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything (2014), Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water (2017), Riz Ahmed in Sound of Metal (2019). Where non-disabled actors can undertake disability as “a kind of virtuoso performance they can add to their résumé” (Sandahl, qtd. in Tolan 2011, 21), the disabled actor is often not trusted even to play the disabled character. “We’re miles away from where we need to be”, director Curtis Lindsay declares in regards to what he calls the “grinding shift” of authentic casting: There’s still that practice of casting marginalised groups with nonmarginalised artists […] and it’s like, “Just work a bit harder”. Or, don’t do it! You know, don’t do that play if you can’t find that actor. You wouldn’t dream of doing Shakespeare’s Othello now without a lead black actor, would you? Because there’s absolutely no excuse for it. So why is there an excuse for this? Why do you want to tell that story if you’re not somehow giving the people that it represents a voice? (Interview, 2020, Chapter Five)

If opportunities for disabled actors to play disabled characters remain rare, the opportunities to play the possibly or potentially disabled character are still rarer. The body not explicitly identified as visibly disabled in most

tonight, folks. This is Sweet Sue saying goodnight, reminding all you daddies out there that every girl in my band is a virtuoso… and I intend to keep it that way.” Theatre reviewer Ben Brantley’s gushing description of Lisa Dwan’s 2014 performance in Not I , Footfalls and Rockaby at BAM, New York offers a recent example of the lingering association between both forms of “virtuosity”: Dwan, according to Brantley, “is an instrument of Beckett, in that way saints and martyrs are said to be instruments of God” (2014).

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texts is still presumed to be—and cast as—able-bodied. As Thom puts it, “The assumption is, if it doesn’t mention it overtly in the text, then it must be a non-disabled character, right?” (interview, 2020, Chapter Four). Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of us will experience some form of temporary or permanent illness, injury, or impairment over the course of our lives, the ‘neutral’ body is still framed as the ‘able body’: the perfectly formed, perfectly functioning, resolutely nondisabled figure. Sandahl has drawn attention to the ableist foundations of how “conventional associations between outward physicality and inner psychological states are embedded in the disciplinary practices of many actor-training programs”, which prioritise the concept of ‘neutral’, the physical and emotional state from which any character can be built. Actors who cannot be ‘cured’ of their idiosyncrasies to approach neutral may be considered physically and emotionally ‘inflexible’, unable to portray anyone other than themselves or those like them. (2005, 256)

The actors interviewed in this book have not been spared these cultural prejudices. When writing on Jess Thom’s performance in Not I , for example, theatre scholar Mira Felner outlined her sense of Thom’s supposed limitations as a disabled performer: Unlike other disabled actors, an actor with Tourette’s can never disappear behind a character. […] Because of the often-explosive nature of tics, they do not simply insert their presence into a performance; they disrupt the stage reality and its narrative, just as they disrupt continuity in everyday life. On some level, an actor with Tourette’s must always play herself, or the character portrayed must always have Tourette’s. (2019, 121)

Where non-disabled actors are praised for their “virtuosic” performances of disabled characters, the actually disabled actor is categorised as necessarily non-virtuosic, limited in their professional range by their bodily impairment. However, as theatre historians know, conceptions of what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ performances are far from immutable, and aesthetic standards of judgement inevitably change over time. If Beckett’s theatre work was itself crucial in shifting certain conceptions of ‘good’ or ‘acceptable’

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stagecraft, ushering in new theatrical models of stripped-back plot, stage action, character construction, and language, today Beckett’s plays—and particularly disabled performances of his plays—are well placed to once again destabilise reigning aesthetic conventions in the theatre field. These performances offer us space to rethink our ideas of what constitutes virtuosic performance or the virtuosic performing body—especially in the context of stage plays that are specifically concerned with the impaired or non-normative body, where “an assumed aesthetic integrity that appears to demand corporeal homogeneity and exclusivity” is an odd requirement (Smith 2005, 75). I resist the idea that we must reject the concept of virtuosic performance or aesthetic quality altogether when engaging with disability performance. Rather, by challenging our conscious or unconscious ideological commitment to normative concepts of what constitutes appropriate, skilled, or virtuosic performance, these works allow us to revaluate our ideas of artistic excellence—in specifically aesthetic as well as ethical terms. Thus, when theatre critic Matt Trueman asserts that, in the Touretteshero Not I , “Thom’s performance punctures notions of virtuosity and perfection” and “puts inclusion and accessibility ahead of old ideas of excellence” (2017), I quibble slightly. If Thom’s performance does indeed question “old ideas of excellence”, she does not do so at the expense of artistic excellence altogether. Tradition does not eternally determine our frameworks of aesthetic success. A resistance to established models of corporeal perfection and precision as a framework of success is strikingly relevant to Beckett’s work and its own refusal of traditional concepts of artistic “mastery”. If the conventional characteristic of the virtuoso performance is a heightened degree of autonomous control over the body as a perfectly functioning instrument, this is not a version of the body that we find reflected in Beckett’s own work. Beckett’s bodies stumble, fumble, and tumble their way through life: they limp, ache, crawl, stutter, collapse, even disintegrate across Beckett’s page and stage, by turns blind, mute and paralysed, losing control of their legs, voices, and bladders. Even where the body seems to verge on the mechanised in its functioning, as in Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot , the speakers’ responses to the spotlight in Play, or Mouth’s monologue in Not I , the impression is still of the body gone wrong, a frenzied loss rather than an excess of control. As theatre scholar Nicholas Johnson queries, “What would a ‘perfect’ performance even mean in the context of Beckett, that poet of failure?” (2018).

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We might well be puzzled, then, at how Beckett’s work as a theatre practitioner seems to have demanded the actor’s virtuosic control over their body to a degree that Beckett’s own textual bodies markedly lack. We must bear in mind the degree to which Beckett comments selfreflexively in his stage plays on his own ostensible attempts to regulate the unpredictable human body and its unstable signifying potential— and just how far he ironises the idea of virtuosity itself in his work. Echoing Beckett’s own musing that “[t]he kind of work I do is one in which I’m not master of my own material” (qtd. in Shenker 1956, 162), Hugh Kenner has aptly dubbed the playwright “the non-maestro, the anti-virtuoso” (1964, 77). Not only do Beckett’s figures lack full control over their own bodies, but his plays likewise emphasise the difficulty of imposing any stable, neatly categorised meaning onto the human form. Beckett’s plays persistently repeat this rejection of interpretative mastery over the onstage body. Vladimir, Estragon, and Pozzo offer competing interpretations of Lucky’s dance in Waiting for Godot , and Vladimir’s attempt at a final assessment trails off unfinished: “There’s something about it…” (CDW , 39). “We’re not beginning to… to… mean something?” Hamm asks in Endgame, and Clov scoffs, “Mean something! You and I, mean something! [Brief laugh.] Ah that’s a good one!” (CDW , 108). “What’s she doing? – he says – What’s the idea?” Winnie imagines her onlooker demanding in frustration in Happy Days : “What does it mean? he says – What’s it meant to mean? […] – What do you mean, he says, God help you?” (CDW , 156). Mouth cannot “make sense of”, let alone control, her own frantic monologue in Not I (CDW , 380), and Beckett highlighted during rehearsals both Mouth’s own lack of comprehension—“Her speech is a purely buccal phenomenon without mental control or understanding. Function running away with organ”—and his own rejection of any further interpretative certainty, “the old business of author’s supposed privileged information […] I no more know where she is or why thus than she does” (Letters IV , 2016, 311). Indeed, Beckett’s self-conscious scrutinising of the impossibility of exercising any total signifying authority over the onstage figure intensified over the course of his career. Footfalls (1976) pairs May’s enigmatic onstage pacing with the final assertion of carefully unspoken, inaccessible meaning, in a closing provocation that seems addressed as much to the spectator seeking final insight as to the character Amy: “Will you never have done… revolving it all? [Pause.] It? [Pause.] It all. [Pause.] In your poor mind” (CDW , 403). Ohio Impromptu (1981) similarly ends

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on the evocative but unexplained vignette of the onstage pair’s unreadable, “[e]xpressionless ” gaze: any revelatory final meaning is “[b]uried in who knows what profounds of mind […] [w]hither no light can reach” (CDW , 448). If the impromptu is typically the vehicle for “a virtuoso performance” in theatrical tradition, Andrew Gibson notes, here “Beckett ironizes the concept both of the impromptu and of its virtuosity” (2007, 249), simultaneously eliding physical showmanship and the grounds for any definitive interpretation from his stage. The Protagonist in Catastrophe (1982)—“crippled” by “fibrous degeneration” (CDW , 458)—raises his head to silence the canned applause that seems for a moment to end the play, disrupting the neat interpretation that the Director believes to have “in the bag” after his and his Assistant’s meticulous manipulation of the Protagonist’s body on stage (2006, 460–461); the undermining of the Director’s interpretation of his so-called “catastrophe” reflects back self-subvertingly on Beckett’s identically titled text. And in his final stage play, What Where (1983), the authoritarian torture or “works” enacted on the bodies of Bem, Bim, and Bom fails to elicit the desired information from them, in what Trish McTighe convincingly reads as Beckett’s own self-referential “summing up of a corpus of senseless corpses, the text’s failure to capture and contain, perceive and represent the body […] out of which Beckett as an author has attempted, and failed, to wring sense” (2013, 125). “Make sense who may. I switch off”, What Where ends, renouncing final interpretative authority (CDW , 476). There is, in short, something that always escapes signifying control in the Beckettian body’s performance—and Beckett’s representations of coerced, inscribed, and observed bodies reflect pointedly on this truncated process. There is a marked parallel between Beckett’s foregrounding of the onstage body’s resistance to absolute signifying or interpretative command, and the disability theorising which resists hermeneutic ideologies of containment and control. Much contemporary disability work rejects univalent medical or cultural narratives that seek to reduce or restrain disability into overly simplistic or regulatory categories of being. The body is conceived instead as an expansively plural and unruly existence whose “full meaning cannot be accurately defined or contained within a single, negatively imagined physical trait” (Mintz 2007, 138). We can add this to the compelling coalescence of elements valorised both in Beckett’s work and in disability performance and activism more

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generally: physical struggle, contingency, interdependency, endurance— and a resistance to overly systematic, categorical interpretations of the body itself. “The danger”, of course, “is in the neatness of identifications” (Beckett 1984, 19). Disability performances of Beckett’s plays can body forth a consummate rendering of textual concerns, “divest[ing] ablebodiedness of its mythical aura of perfectibility” and “reclaim[ing] the sloughed-off disabled exterior as a mantle of future possibility” (Snyder and Mitchell 2001, 386), incarnating Beckett’s own sceptical interrogation of the idealised body, artistic mastery, and conventional conceptions of theatrical virtuosity. The skilled disabled actor can stand as the virtuosic performer of Beckett’s playtexts, the master artist of a specifically Beckettian form of virtuosity. We neglect the possibilities of disability performance to the detriment not only of these practitioners, but also to the field of Beckettian stage practice, and to the development of theatrical performance at large. As Culture Device actor Otto Baxter puts it, with characteristic verve, “People think they’re better than me—but they’re really not”.

Interview: Edward Beckett, executor of the Beckett Estate, May 2021 Edward Beckett is the nephew of Samuel Beckett, and has been the executor of the Beckett estate since the author’s death in 1989. Son of Beckett’s brother Frank, he has made his career as an accomplished flautist, and lived for some time with Beckett and Suzanne in Paris while he was undertaking his conservatory training there; “He is a very lovable lad”, James Knowlson records Beckett writing in 1961 while Edward was staying with him (1997, 490). Edward spoke to me about the Beckett estate’s support for disability performances of Beckett’s stage plays. What is the Beckett Estate’s approach to disability performances of Beckett’s work? Initially the same as for any other request. Then we enter into dialogue with the company to see exactly how they are going to approach their performance given the particular disability. The Estate does not want to make difficulties for disability performances; on the contrary, we do our best to facilitate them. Harold Pinter’s [performance in] Krapp’s Last Tape is a case in point: he had to use a wheelchair but that in no way

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damaged the integrity of the play or his performance.8 Samuel Beckett’s work is extremely relevant to people with disabilities, and it would be ridiculous to make it difficult for them to perform his plays. What elements would allow or disallow performance rights for a disability-centric production? Much the same as for any other production: staying faithful to the text and casting. As a rule, the Estate demands that Samuel Beckett’s stage directions are adhered to but obviously, in the case of a disability making that difficult or impossible, we would talk to the company to see what compromises are possible and if we are happy with what is proposed, we would give the go-ahead. Jess Thom has spoken of how positive she found her experience of working with the Beckett Estate when putting together the Touretteshero production of Not I . What are your memories of working with Jess, and what were your own impressions of the resultant production? The company were very accessible and listened to our suggestions, then found a way to make them work. Jess was wonderful, an inspiration for people with speech disabilities. She took on one of Samuel Beckett’s most demanding plays, found a way to do it and the result was a moving performance that really worked, the audience reaction was a testament to that. Her performance stayed faithful to Samuel Beckett’s intentions and gave the play added poignancy. The Beckett Estate has something of a reputation in the public eye for keeping a tight rein over non-traditional performances of Beckett’s work. Do you think this is a fair assessment of the Beckett’s Estate’s approach? I am not sure what you mean by “non-traditional performances”. All we ask is that the play is performed as Samuel Beckett intended, no additions, no subtractions, no change of casting. That still allows great latitude to how the play is performed, as has been plain to see over the years. It is frustrating that the Estate is labelled as difficult due to a few high-profile 8 In Ian Rickson’s 2006 production of Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court, Pinter used a wheelchair to enable his performance in the title role; see “Introduction: Beckett’s Disabled Bodies” for further details and analysis.

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cases, if one examines the range of permissions granted, the opposite is true.

Works Cited Badham, Van. “Endgame Review—Innovation Choked by Samuel Beckett’s Strict Staging Edicts”, The Guardian, 6 April 2015, https://www.thegua rdian.com/culture/2015/apr/06/endgame-review-innovation-choked-bysamuel-becketts-strict-staging-edicts. Baxter, Otto. Interview with Hannah Simpson. May 2020. Beckett, Edward. Interview with Hannah Simpson. May 2021. Beckett, Samuel. “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce”, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn. New York: Grove Press, 1984, 19–34. ———. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 2006. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume IV: 1966–1989, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Brandstetter, Gabriele. “The Virtuoso’s Stage: A Theatrical Topos”, Theatre Research International 32.2, 2007, 178–195. Brantley, Ben. “Beaten (Down) by the Clock”, The New York Times, 8 October 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/theater/three-beckett-playsabout-time-at-bam.html. Curtis Lindsay, Sam. Interview with Hannah Simpson. April 2020. Cveji´c, Zarko. The Virtuoso as Subject: The Reception of Instrumental Virtuosity, c. 1815–c. 1850. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2016. Felner, Mira. “Beckett Meets Tourette”, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 41.1, 2019, 8–21. Fox, Ann M. “Reclaiming the Ordinary Extraordinary Body: Or, The Importance of The Glass Menagerie for Literary Disability Studies”, in Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism, ed. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury, 2016, 129–152. Gibson, Andrew. Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Ginsborg, Jane. “‘The Brilliance of Perfection’ or ‘Pointless Finish’? What Virtuosity Means to Musicians”, Musicae Scientiae 22.4, 2018, 454–473. Gussow, Mel. “Edward Beckett: ‘Mackerel and White Beaujolais’”, Conversations with (and about) Beckett. London: Nick Hern, 1996, 114–136. Hartley, Alexander. “Beckett’s Legal Scuffles and the Interpretation of the Plays”, Journal of Modern Literature 43.3, 2020, 132–149.

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Johnson, Nicholas. “Rethinking Difference and Disability with Samuel Beckett”, The Irish Times, 27 July 2018, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/ rethinking-difference-and-disability-with-samuel-beckett-1.3577469. Jun, Irena. “Interviewed by Antoni Libera”, in Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992, 47–50. Kenner, Hugh. Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians. New York: W.H. Allen, 1964. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Kuppers, Petra. Theatre & Disability. London: Palgrave, 2017. Lyons, C.R. Samuel Beckett. London: The Macmillan Press, 1983. Marks, Kathy. “Director Calls Beckett Heir an ‘Enemy of Art’ after Godot Censure”, The Independent, 11 January 2003, https://www.independent.co. uk/news/world/australasia/director-calls-beckett-heir-an-enemy-of-art-aftergodot-censure-124056.html. McKelvey, Patrick. “A Disabled Actor Prepares: Stanislavsky, Disability, and Work at the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped”, Theatre Journal 71.1, 2019, 69–89. McMillan, Dougald, and Martha Fehsenfeld. Beckett in the Theatre: The Author as Practical Playwright and Director. London: John Calder, 1988. McTighe, Trish. The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Miller, Michael. “A Year of Beckett in New York”, New York Arts, 13 November 2014, https://newyorkarts.net/2014/11/beckett-new-york/. Mintz, Susannah B. Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Moran, Dan. Interview with Hannah Simpson. June 2021. Pountney, Rosemary. Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama, 1956–1976. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988. Robson, Garry. Interview with Hannah Simpson. November 2017. Sandahl, Carrie. “The Tyranny of Neutral: Disability and Actor Training”, in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performances, ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, 255–267. Seyrig, Delphine. “Interviewed by Pierre Chabert”, in Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Shaban, Nabil. Interview with Hannah Simpson. October 2017. Shenker, Israel. “An Interview with Beckett”, The New York Times, 5 May 1956, Section II, 1, 3. Reproduced in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Garver and Raymond Federman. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, 146–149.

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Smith, Owen. “Shifting Apollo’s Frame: Challenging the Body Aesthetic in Theater Dance”, in Bodies in Commotion: Disability & Performance, ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, 73–85. Snyder, Sharon L., and David T. Mitchell, “Re-Engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment”, Public Culture 13.3, 2001, 367– 389. Some Like it Hot. Directed by Billy Wilder, Mirisch Company, 1959. Taylor, Paul. “Beckett Trilogy: Not I/Footfalls/Rockaby, Theatre Review—‘An Unforgettable Show’”, The Independent, 14 January 2014, https://www.ind ependent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/beckett-trilogynot-i-footfalls-rockaby-theatre-review-an-unforgettable-show-9058659.html. Thom, Jess. “Backstage in Biscuit Land”, Touretteshero, 19 March 2014, https:// www.touretteshero.com/2014/03/19/backstage-in-biscuit-land/. ———. Interview with Hannah Simpson. April 2020. Tolan, Kathleen, ed. “We are Not a Metaphor: A Conversation about Representation”, American Theatre 18.4, 2011, 17–21. Tomlinson, Richard. Disability, Theatre, and Education. London: Souvenir Press, 1982. Trueman, Matt. “Edinburgh Review: Not I (Pleasance Courtyard)”, Whats On Stage, 25 August 2017, https://www.whatsonstage.com/edinburgh-theatre/ reviews/not-i-pleasance-courtyard-jess-thom-tourettes_44466.html. Vais, Daniel. Interview with Hannah Simpson. April 2020. “virtuosic, adj”, Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/223846. “virtuosity, n1a. and n3” OED Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/223847. Wakeling, Corey. “Samuel Beckett’s Hypnotic Theatre”, Modern Drama 60.3, 2017, 342–363. Worth, Katharine L. “Review: Beckett’s Fine Shades: Play, That Time and Footfalls ”, Journal of Beckett Studies 1, 1976, 75–80. Wyver, Kate. “Not Waiting for Godot: New Show Tackles Beckett’s Ban on Women”, The Guardian, 18 October 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2020/oct/18/not-waiting-for-godot-new-show-tackles-becketts-banon-women. Zinman, Toby Silverman. “Billie Whitelaw: What Beckett Said to Me”, American Theatre, 11.4, 1994, 24–25.

Index

A ableism, ableist, viii, 7, 32, 34, 38, 40, 43, 74, 104, 124, 158, 159, 172, 176, 213 abortion, vii, 157, 158 access, 3, 8, 22, 104, 105, 112, 119–121, 124–128, 133, 137, 139, 152, 153 achondroplasia. See restricted growth aesthetic nervousness, 22, 39, 40, 51, 84 aesthetics and ethics, overlap of, 142 ageing, 48, 73 agency, 5, 11, 37, 40, 44, 72, 105, 109–113, 117, 118, 126, 128, 164, 167, 170, 171, 173, 202 Akalaitis, JoAnne, 19 akinesia, 64 allegory, allegorical. See metaphor, metaphorical Alzheimer’s disease, 64 American Sign Language, 121 amnesia. See memory

amputation, amputee, 23, 52 anxiety, 3, 37, 39, 44, 82, 126, 127, 168, 169 aphasia, 3 Arts Council England, 5, 53 Asmus, Walter, 29, 113, 117, 126, 210 asylum. See institutionalisation attention deficit disorder, 192 audience etiquette, 104 Auditor, 104, 119–126, 128, 139 authentic casting, 108, 136, 212 autism, 3 autonomy, 109, 117, 128, 149, 160, 161, 164, 211

B Backstage in Biscuit Land, 104, 121, 129, 133, 209 Barbican Theatre, 143, 163 Barca, Pedro Calderón de la, 156 Battersea Arts Centre, 103, 114–116

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Simpson, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance, New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04133-4

223

224

INDEX

Baxter, Otto, ix, 149, 150, 163–166, 169, 170, 177, 178, 182, 187, 188, 217 Beckett, Edward, 41, 116, 135, 139, 171, 201, 203, 217 Beckett estate, 19, 41, 53, 92, 104, 116, 122, 127, 135, 139, 140, 171, 175, 179, 203–207, 217, 218 Beckett, Frank, 64, 75, 217 Beckett, May, 64, 65, 69 Beckett, Rishard, 149, 150 Beckett, Samuel - works Catastrophe, 30, 216 Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 105 Eh Joe, 95 Eleutheria, 29 En attendant Godot , 41, 65, 154 Endgame, 4, 17–19, 22–26, 28, 30, 33–35, 37, 38, 40–49, 51–54, 63, 65–73, 75–81, 83–85, 88, 90–92, 95, 120, 202, 203, 207–209, 215 Fin de partie, 19, 23, 65 Footfalls , 29, 30, 65, 69, 110, 212, 215 Happy Days , 1, 2, 7, 30, 33, 85, 119, 210, 215 Ill Seen Ill Said, 65, 72 Krapp’s Last Tape, 3, 30, 32, 46, 47, 68, 85, 95, 217, 218 Lessness , 112 Mal vu mal dit , 72 Murphy, 65, 158 Not I , 4, 30, 33, 41, 83, 103–109, 111–113, 115, 117–131, 133, 134, 137, 138, 140–143, 201, 202, 204–207, 209, 210, 212–215 Ohio Impromptu, 215 Pas moi, 122, 123

Play, 110, 119, 210, 214 “Proust”, 156 Quad, viii, 110, 111 Rockaby, 65, 68, 69, 110, 212 Sans , 112 That Time, 95 The Old Tune, 95 The Unnamable, 87, 110 Waiting for Godot , 1, 4, 29, 30, 41, 85, 91, 92, 149–154, 156, 158–164, 166, 167, 170–179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 188, 190, 191, 204, 205, 207, 214, 215 Watt , 65 “What is the Word”, 110 What Where, 110, 216 Worstward Ho, 87 Bennett, Andrew, 24 Bernard, Sam, ix Bernfield, Jim, 66, 68, 75 Birds of Paradise Theatre Company, 52 blind, blindness, 3, 28, 29, 33, 38, 48, 49, 51, 76, 97, 142, 159, 160, 193, 214 Blin, Roger, 25, 154, 155 Blue Apple, 151 Bourdet, Gildas, 19 bradykinesia, 64, 68 Brewer, Jamie, 153 British Sign Language (BSL), 104, 105, 119–124, 128, 138, 139, 206 brittle bones. See osteogenesis imperfecta Browne, Sarah, 4 Buck v. Bell , 155 Buggy, Niall, 95 Bull, Peter, 166 C cancer, viii, 3

INDEX

Carel, Havi, 75, 76 carer, 28, 48, 161 Cartesian. See Descartes, René cataract, 29 catheter, 23, 79 Catrou, Jacques, 105 cerebral palsy, vii, 44, 182 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 65 chromosome 21 trisomy, 157 Clarac, Roger, 64 Classic Stage Company, 63, 72, 73, 94 co-dependency, co-dependent. See interdependency, interdependent complex embodiment model. See models of disability Complicité, 31, 174 compulsion, compulsive, viii, 30, 33, 103, 105, 106, 108–113, 127, 128, 140, 162, 202 compulsory optimism, 78 contingency, 66, 80–82, 84, 127, 136, 164, 217 coprolalia, 105, 129 Cotard’s syndrome, 3 Covent Garden Royal Opera House, 151 crip, cripping up, x, 22, 27, 29, 39, 43, 49, 54, 212 Culture Device, 4, 149–155, 157, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166–173, 177, 182–185, 187, 204, 205, 207, 217 Cumming, Alan, 26, 31, 32 Curtis Brown, 171 Curtis Lindsay, Sam, ix, 149, 153, 154, 163, 167, 170–173, 176, 177, 187, 207, 208, 212

D DaDaFest, 39, 52

225

Day-Lewis, Daniel, 33, 42, 50, 52, 212 deaf, deafness, viii, 28, 45, 54, 142, 160, 182 Deafinitely Theatre, 121 death, 1, 2, 37, 63, 65, 66, 73–77, 81, 84, 89, 112, 217 degenerative, degeneration, 8, 63, 64, 66, 69, 71, 73–76, 80, 202, 208 Descartes, René, 11, 122, 128 Devine, George, 25 Devlin, Alan, 25 Dillane, Stephen, 26 Dinklage, Peter, 17, 25, 28, 94 disability, vii–x, 1, 3–12, 17–19, 21–35, 37–40, 44–54, 66, 70, 72, 75–81, 83–85, 105, 108, 109, 117–120, 127–129, 131, 133–135, 137, 138, 142, 144, 149, 151–162, 164, 166–168, 173, 174, 179–181, 185, 202–212, 214, 216–218 acquired, 2, 28, 66, 160 congenital, 28, 46, 66, 74, 160 disability aesthetic, 6, 105, 201 dismodernism, 10 Down, John Langdon, 151 Down syndrome, 4, 11, 74, 76, 149, 151–155, 157, 158, 160, 165–168, 172, 173, 176–179, 182–185, 187, 190, 192, 193, 208 drag, 38, 151, 168–170, 173, 187, 190, 191, 193 Drag Syndrome, 151, 168, 169, 173, 187, 190, 193 drama school. See training Dream notebook, 105 Dukakis, Olympia, 29, 85 Duncan, Martin, 19, 53 Dwan, Lisa, 113, 117, 210, 212 dwarfism. See restricted growth

226

INDEX

dyslexia, 152, 173 dyspraxia, 17, 25, 28

E Echo’s Bones , 4 echolalia, 104, 105 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 103 Elcar, Dana, 29 End/Lessness , 112 Endgame Project, The, 4, 17, 25, 63, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 75, 77–85, 93, 95, 127, 204 epilepsy, 26, 28 Epstein, Alvin, 25, 94 eugenics, eugenicist, vii, 155 Evans, Lee, 26

F Finney, Albert, 68 Fittings Multimedia Arts, 52 Flanagan, Bob, 44 Forsythe, Henderson, 122 Fox, Michael J., 67, 74, 80 freak show, 167, 168

G Gambon, Michael, 26, 210 Game of Thrones , 17 Geller, Ruth, 117 genes, genetics genetic predisposition, 64, 158 genetic research, 157 genetic screening, 159 preimplantation genetic diagnosis, 157 Geulincx, Arnold, 122 glaucoma, 29 Goddard, Henry H., 155 Gordy, Sarah, 153, 182 Gottsagen, Zack, 153

Graeae Theatre Company, 27, 45, 182, 202 Grifasi, Joe, 63 H Hackney Showroom, 149, 150, 163, 165, 166, 170, 171, 173, 175, 177, 178, 186, 187, 204, 207 Haerdter, Michael, 30 Hale, Jamie, 44 Hall, Peter, 162, 163, 166 Heron, Jonathan, 3, 104, 112, 120, 140, 205 heterarchical directorship, 170 Hill, Conleth, 26 homeopath, homeopathy, 64 Howard, Russell, 112, 126 Hunt the Tiger, 157, 187 hypomimia, 64, 67, 68 I identity-first language, 11, 12 imago Dei, 158, 159 inspiration porn, 79 institutionalisation, 155 intellectual impairment, 151, 155 interdependency, interdependent, 5, 9, 149, 160–162, 164, 167, 170, 171, 202, 217 involuntary. See compulsion, compulsive IQ, 151, 155 Irish Red Cross, 64 Irwin, Bill, 91 isolation, 9, 11, 109, 134, 135, 202 J Jarrett, Lucinda, 4 Jessop, Tommy, ix, 149, 150, 152, 153, 163–166, 170, 172, 173, 175, 178, 182, 183

INDEX

Jones, Chris, ix, 63, 64, 66, 69, 72–75, 77, 79, 81–84, 91, 127 Joyce, James, 65 Julien, André, 25 L La Hire, Christian, 25 Laruy, Jean-Pierre, 25 La vida es sueño, 156 learning disability, 192 Levodopa, L-DOPA, 74, 97 limp, 22, 23, 28, 31, 214 M MacGowran, Jack, 25, 34, 161 Maclennan, Dolina, 18 Magee, Patrick, 25, 34, 38 Mandell, Alan, 24 Marron, Hanna, 2 Martinez, Francesca, 182 Martin, Jean, 23, 25, 65 Martin, Steve, 91 Mathias, Sean, 166 McBurney, Simon, 24, 26, 31, 174 McGovern, Barry, 25 McKellen, Ian, 166 McWhinnie, Donald, 23, 25, 68, 210 memory, 6, 32, 69, 82, 93, 155, 166, 167, 179, 185, 186, 218 Mental Deficiency Act, 1913, 155 Mental Health Act, 1959, 155 Merlin, Serge, 26 Merrion Nursing Home, 64 metaphor, metaphorical, 7, 9, 28, 33–35, 43, 49, 54, 68, 203 Me to Play (documentary), 66, 79 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 29 Miller, Brian, 122 Mitchell, Katie, 26 Mitchell, Roger, 2 models of disability

227

complex embodiment model, 8, 118 medical model, 8, 53 social model, 8, 12, 53, 118, 131, 134 Molloy, John, 25 Moran, Dan, ix, 63, 66, 67, 69, 72–75, 77–79, 81–84, 127, 207, 208 mortality. See death Mullins, Luke, 31 Mundhenk, Kassie, 153

N neurodiversity, neurodivergency, 131, 175 Nordau, Max, 73, 105 Nottingham Playhouse, 19, 53

O O’Brien, Martin, 44 obsessive-compulsive disorder, 3 Old Vic Theatre, 24–26, 31 O’Reilly, Kaite, 7, 46 osteogenesis imperfecta, 4, 18, 46, 74

P pain, viii, 9, 10, 12, 21, 37, 48, 64, 66, 69, 75, 79, 80, 82, 116, 117, 124, 131, 143, 160, 168 Pan Pan Theatre, 24 Paralympic Games, 52 paralysis, paralysed, viii, 214 Parkinson, James, 65 Parkinson’s disease (PD), 3, 4, 17, 63–71, 73–80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88–90, 93–97, 207, 208 Parpanit, 64 pemphigus vulgaris, 3 person-first language, 11, 12

228

INDEX

Pinter, Harold, 3, 217 polio, 4, 18, 53 Potter, Lauren, 153 Pountney, Matthew, 104, 130 precarity, 66, 81, 82, 84, 85, 202 preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). See genes, genetics prenatal screening, 118, 157 prostate, 154 prosthesis, prosthetic, 19, 28, 31, 32, 35, 161 R Radcliffe, Daniel, 17, 25, 28 Radical Beauty Project, 173 Rae, Robert, 18–21, 36, 46, 70 Rahbani, Vahid, 29 Ramps on the Moon, 52 Rank, Otto, 156 Rawlins, Lester, 25 Rea, Stephen, 23, 25 relaxed performance, 105, 119, 124, 125, 128–133, 137, 143 restricted growth, 4, 18, 25, 208 Rickson, Ian, 3, 218 Rite of Spring , 153, 173, 194 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 150 Robson, Garry, ix, 17–22, 28, 36, 42–46, 52, 53, 66, 202 Rosetta Life, 4 Royal Commission for the Care and Control of the Feeble Minded, 155 Royal Court, 2, 3, 23, 25, 45, 50, 68, 113, 120, 122, 125, 210, 218 Rylance, Mark, 26, 31 S Saint-Lô, 64 schizophrenia, schizophrenic, 3, 107 Schmahl, Hildegard, 29

Schneider, Alan, 25, 35, 107, 120, 163 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 156 Schroeder, Ernst, 30 Scottish Arts Council, 21, 53 Sealey, Jenny, 52, 182 Shaban, Nabil, ix, 17–22, 27, 28, 31–33, 35–42, 44–46, 49, 66, 74, 77, 182, 202, 208 and The First to Go, 45 Shakespeare, William, 180, 182, 184, 212 Sharmanka Theatre Glasgow, 18 Short, Raymond, 18 Sinclair, Cissie, 65 sin of being born, the, 156 Snyder, Lyndsey, 121 social model. See models of disability Softley Gale, Robert, 44 Somerset, Robert, 25 spontaneous, 109, 110, 112, 126, 128, 215 sterilisation, 118, 155 Stewart, Patrick, 166, 167 stroke, 4, 107 Stroke Odyssey, 4 symbol, symbolic. See metaphor, metaphorical T Tandy, Jessica, 113 Theatre Workshop Scotland, 4, 18–22, 24, 25, 36, 37, 43, 46, 53, 66, 70 This.Here, 4 Thom, Jess, ix, 31, 41, 83, 103–106, 108–110, 112–129, 135, 140, 141, 182, 201, 202, 204–209, 213, 214, 218 and Backstage in Biscuit Land, 104, 121, 129, 209 and Lamppost, Light of My Life, 112

INDEX

and Welcome to Biscuit Land: A Year in the Life of Touretteshero, 129 tic, ticcing fit, 83, 104, 105, 110, 111, 113, 127, 129 Tomlinson, Richard, 27, 44, 45, 202 Tourette, Gilles de la, 105 Tourette’s syndrome, 3, 4, 74, 76, 103–106, 108, 109, 112, 127, 128, 187 Touretteshero. See Thom, Jess training, 46, 188, 217 actor training, 32, 50, 93, 211, 213 trauma, ix, 107 Trauma of Birth, The, 156 Tredinnick, David, 26 trisomy. See chromosome 21 trisomy Tubridy, Derval, 113, 117, 123, 135, 205 Turturro, John, 26, 94 U unpredictable. See spontaneous

229

V Vais, Daniel, ix, 149, 152–154, 167, 170–173, 177, 184, 194, 205, 206 Vergette, Richard, 157, 187 virtuoso, virtuosic, 22, 210–217

W Wade, Cheryl Marie, 44, 79 Weaving, Hugo, 26, 28, 31 Webster, George, 153 wheelchair, viii, 1–3, 8, 18, 19, 23, 24, 28, 32, 34, 46, 47, 53, 65, 81, 88, 104, 115, 121, 129, 135, 136, 161, 203, 217, 218 Whitelaw, Billie, 2, 68, 69, 113, 117, 120, 122, 125, 210 Whoroscope notebook, 157 Williams, Robin, 91 Wombwell, Charmaine, 116, 121, 123, 124, 126, 127 Woodthorpe, Peter, 161