A Piece of Monologue
Encyclopedia
Play (theatre)
A play is a form of literature written by a playwright, usually consisting of scripted dialogue between characters, intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading. There are rare dramatists, notably George Bernard Shaw, who have had little preference whether their plays were performed...
by Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
. Written between 2 October 1977 and 28 April 1979 it followed a request for a “play about death” by the actor David Warrilow who starred in the premiere in the Annex at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club is an off-off Broadway theatre founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart, and named in reference to her. Located on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the theatre grew out of Stewart's tiny basement boutique for her fashion designs; the boutique's space acted as a theatre for...
, New York on 14 December 1979.
Synopsis
The light fades up on a room in which a white-haired old man – identified simply as Speaker – stands motionless facing a blank wall. To his left is a standard lamp the same height as the actor with a globe about the size of a human skull; it is faintly lit. Just visible to his extreme right is the white foot of a pallet bed. “[I]t is much like the room in the television play Ghost TrioGhost Trio (play)
Ghost Trio is a television play, written in English by Samuel Beckett. It was written in 1975, taped in October 1976 and the first broadcast was on BBC2 on 17 April 1977 as part of the Lively Arts programme Beckett himself entitled Shades. Donald McWhinnie directed with Ronald Pickup and Billie...
, although without the mirror.” The man is wearing a white nightgown and white bed-socks. After a ten second pause the actor begins speaking and continues without a break till the end of the play.
Speaker “tells a ‘story’ of a man so much like himself that it is clear he is simply speaking of himself in the third person" who is first seen staring out of a window at “that black vast.” He has been contemplating the length of his life, which he totals up to “two and a half billion seconds” or “thirty thousand nights.” (This works out to 79 years of seconds and 82 years of nights ). He focuses at first on only two things, being handed around as an infant and the various funerals that have punctuated his time on earth.
Speaker describes the man’s efforts to light an old-fashioned oil lamp in great detail. He uses up three matches in the process. The baseball
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...
expression ‘three strikes and you’re out’ comes to mind here. It is more likely that Beckett is alluding the wartime superstition that it was a portent of impending death to keeping one match alight for sufficiently long to enable an enemy sniper to pinpoint troops' position. Thus the third one to take a light from it became the target.
Now able to see the man turns eastward to face a blank wall. This appears to be a nightly ritual. The wall that the man stands before used to be “covered with pictures” of once “loved ones” (an expression he doggedly avoids saying). He looks at some of marks left on the wall and remembers a photo of his father, one of his mother, one of them on their wedding day – “the dead and gone” – and one of “He alone” which is likely one of himself – “the dying and the going.” These have been “ripped from the wall and torn to shreds” though not in a single emotional scene, as with the character O in Film
Film (film)
Film is a film written by Samuel Beckett, his only screenplay. It was commissioned by Barney Rosset of Grove Press. Writing began on 5 April 1963 with a first draft completed within four days. A second draft was produced by 22 May and a forty-leaf shooting script followed thereafter...
, but rather over a period of time and then swept “under the bed with the dust and spiders.”
Speaker describes going to the window and lighting the lamp again and then a third time only this time a single lighted “spill
Spill
A spill occurs when the contents of something, usually in liquid form, is emptied out onto a surface, often unintentionally.Spill may also refer to:*Daniel Spill , English entrepreneur*Thomas Spilsbury, soccer player nicknamed Spill...
” is used rather than the matches.
The action at an open grave is then narrated in cinematic terms: “Umbrellas round a grave. Seen from above … Thirty seconds … Then fade.” The funeral is taking place in the pouring rain. The man describes watching someone speak at the graveside – presumably the minister – but only “half hearing what he’s saying.” The funeral is of a woman, very likely that of his mother. The fact that Speaker corrects himself, “his way” becoming “Her way”, suggests that the death of this female loved one is the critical event of this partial and oblique story. Or, more accurately, the attempt to speak of this specific event and renounce it from memory is the most significant behaviour represented in the narrative.”
The text fragments from this point on. The narrator jumps back and forth from the funeral to the window to the lamp to the wall to his birth. The action does progress somewhat however: in the first mention of the funeral the grave is empty, in the second the coffin is “out of frame” and in the third the coffin is “on its way.”
“[One] of Freud’s
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
theories that had an impact on Beckett because it reinforced his own experience was that the agony of birth induced a primal anxiety in human beings.” Beckett claimed to have remembered his time in utero
In utero
In utero is a Latin term literally meaning "in the womb". In biology, the phrase describes the state of an embryo or fetus. In legal contexts, the phrase is used to refer to unborn children. Under common law, unborn children are still considered to exist for property transfer purposes.-See also:*...
along with his own painful birth. The word ‘birth’ preoccupies Speaker. He returns to it over and over again describing graphically at one point, in as great a detail as he does the lighting of the lamp, how the word is said. This is an important moment and one that caused Beckett major problems when he came to adapt the piece into French since “no similar word is vocalised in this way in French.” This resulted in his omitting whole passages and “reduced the piece to a free version, shorter, entitled Solo.”
“Parting the lips is both a condition for and a result of pronouncing the plosive
Stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...
consonant “b”; thrusting the tongue forward, more precisely, pushing it out through the parted lips and teeth, describes in turn the action involved in pronouncing the sound “th”… This connection links the parting of lips and thrusting forward of the tongue, necessary for the articulation of the word “birth,” with the actual act of birth. In other words, the pronunciation of this word is simultaneously the image or symbol of that which it signifies.”
There is also the familiar mathematical precision, which provides a structuring order to the old chaos. Not for the first time Beckett plays on the number three. There are three attempts to light the lamp, three images of the advancing spectre of death, and three denials—‘No such thing as none’ ; ‘No such thing as no light’ ; ‘No such thing as whole’ . And there are the multiples of six: six references to loved ones, six descriptions of the pictures which once adorned the now blank wall the speaker faces, six steps in the ritual” and six uses of the word ‘birth’, three included in the expression – or a slight variation of – “Birth was the death of him.”
“The isolated man in A Piece of Monologue … has ruthlessly cut himself off from his past, ‘exorcising’ his ‘so-called’ loved ones by removing their photographs, tearing them up and scattering them … In seeking ‘less to die’, in deliberate acts of emotional desiccation, he attempts to abjure the memories of himself in relationship. As he destroys the photographs that reduce his once-loved mother and father to grey voids, and him to another, he tries to obliterate the memories that connect him with life and intimacy. Nothing remains but dim recollection and an anticipated funeral to mark the end of his slow death mark from birth to oblivion”… Hovering as Old Father Time
Father Time
Father Time is usually depicted as an elderly bearded man, somewhat worse for wear, dressed in a robe, carrying a scythe and an hourglass or other timekeeping device...
in his shroud
Shroud
Shroud usually refers to an item, such as a cloth, that covers or protects some other object. The term is most often used in reference to burial sheets, winding-cloths or winding-sheets, such as the famous Shroud of Turin or Tachrichim that Jews are dressed in for burial...
, he is ‘waiting on the rip word’ … to avaunt his ‘so-called loved ones’ and his ‘ghastly grinning’ self.
Kristin Morrison argues, "The rip word in A Piece of Monologue is `begone', that word by which the speaker dismisses from his life that which he has always really wanted.” Linda Ben-Zvi considers the word as "the pun on R.I.P., requiescat in pace (rest in peace
Rest in peace
"Rest in peace" is a short epitaph or idiomatic expression wishing eternal rest and peace to someone who has died. The expression typically appears on headstones, often abbreviated as "RIP"...
), which suggests that death is the final way of ripping the dark." The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (p 365) proposes that ‘love’ is the “rip word” because his ripping the photographs of his “loved ones” from the wall “fails to bring about the consummation desired.”
Beckett effectively attempts to achieve on stage what he has previously achieved in fiction: to allow the two parts of the self to exist simultaneously. There is Speaker framed on stage who does not move (effectively a Tableau Vivant
Tableau vivant
Tableau vivant is French for "living picture." The term describes a striking group of suitably costumed actors or artist's models, carefully posed and often theatrically lit. Throughout the duration of the display, the people shown do not speak or move...
) – he resembles a photograph – and then there is the man in his story. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
remark, "Action is character," has never been truer than in this short play.
“The play ends on the growing pull of the image of death: ‘Treating of other matters. Trying to treat of other matters. Till half hears there are no other matters. Never were other matters. Never two matters. Never but the one matter. The dead and the gone. The dying and the going. From the word go. The word begone’ . The two issues, birth and death, ultimately become only death. From birth, the beginning—‘the word go’—the presence of death is constant, just as the word ‘go’ is part of the word ‘begone.’”
Background
In August 1977, the actor David Warrilow, who had had such a resounding success with the adaptation of The Lost Ones wrote to Beckett asking him if he would write a solo piece for him to perform. After clarifying what exactly he was after Beckett declined: “My birth was my death. But I could not manage 40 min. (5000 words) on that old chestnut. Not with it now within reach.” The day afterwards he did however sit down and attempt a piece with the opening words: ‘My birth was my death.’ Written in the first person singular; it was provisionally entitled ‘Gone’.“It broke down … after a few thousand groans” but he considered it salvageable and returned to it in January 1979 when Martin Esslin
Martin Esslin
Martin Julius Esslin OBE was a Hungarian-born English producer and playwright dramatist, journalist, adaptor and translator, critic, academic scholar and professor of drama best known for coining the term "Theatre of the Absurd" in his work of that name...
wrote to him to ask if he had an unpublished work that could appear in The Kenyon Review
The Kenyon Review
The Kenyon Review is a Literary magazine based in Gambier, Ohio, USA, home of Kenyon College. The Review was founded in 1939 by John Crowe Ransom, critic and professor of English at Kenyon College, who served as its editor until 1959...
. He added a set of stage directions to what had been up till then simply a monologue and, on his seventy-third birthday, he posted copies to both Esslin and Warrilow. He considered it “unsatisfactory … I do not expect you to use it,” he wrote to Warrilow.
“The piece drew on childhood memories: “his father teaching him to light a match on his buttocks; the various operations involved in lighting an old-fashioned oil lamp … what his mother had told him about how he was born just as the sun was sinking behind the larches ‘new needles turning green’; a gleam of light catching the large brass bedstead that had stood in his parents’ bedroom.” He had also recently calculated his own age in days and incorporated a figure of “Twenty five thousand five hundred and fifty dawns” in his initial draft.
Interestingly, a few days after Beckett began work on ‘Gone’ he arranged for his whole house to be painted “grey like the proprietor” and, on his return from a trip to Germany seeing the walls now bare and uncluttered, he chose to let them remain that way. As James Knowlson puts it in Damned to Fame (p 650): “Life here emulated art, or at least echoed the mood that inspired it.”
Breath
The oxymoronOxymoron
An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms...
"Birth was the death of him" evokes a fusion of the two events. We find this in Breath, in which a stage littered with rubbish is accompanied by a faint cry, followed by inspiration, silence, expiration, another cry and silence again. End of piece.
Krapp's Last Tape
To access his memories (i.e. to see the wall) the man in Monologue has first to turn on the lamp. In Krapp's Last TapeKrapp's Last Tape
Krapp's Last Tape is a one-act play, written in English, by Samuel Beckett. Consisting of a cast of one man, it was originally written for Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee and first titled "Magee monologue"...
before Krapp can access his he needs to locate the appropriate tape and switch on the machine. Today, when digital
Digital
A digital system is a data technology that uses discrete values. By contrast, non-digital systems use a continuous range of values to represent information...
technologies accentuate the process of the externalisation of memory begun with the invention of written language, these plays are more relevant than ever.