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The Game-Play In Twentieth-Century Absurdist Drama: Studies In A Dramatictechnique
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WAGNER, Marlene Strome, 1942-
. THE GAME-PLAY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ABSURDIST
DRAMA: STUDIES IN A DRAMATIC TECHNIQUE.
University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1971
Language and Literature, modern
University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan
THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED
THE GAME-PLAY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ABSURDIST DRAMA:
STUDIES IN A DRAMATIC TECHNIQUE
by
Marlene Strome Wagner
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Comparative Literature)
August 1971
U N IV E R S IT Y O F S O U T H E R N C A L IF O R N IA
T H E G R A D U A T E S C H O O L
U N IV E R S IT Y P A R K
LO S A N G E L E S , C A L IF O R N IA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, w ritte n by
Marlene Strome Vagner
under the direction of /t.er— - D issertation Com
mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The G radu
ate School, in p a rtia l fu lfillm e n t of require
ments of the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H IL O S O P H Y
Dean
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairman
PLEASE NOTE:
Some Pages have in d is tin c t
p r i n t . Filmed as received.
UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS
Occasionally I believe I perceive a
little of what you are, but that's
pure accident. Pure accident on
both our parts, the perceived and
the perceiver. It's nothing like an
accident, it's deliberate, it's a
joint pretense. We depend on these
accidents, on these contrived
accidents to continue.
The Dwarfs
— Harold Pinter
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The study of literature is one of self-discovery;
like the figure Frost draws of a poem, one begins in
delight and hopes to end in wisdom. Among the many who
have guided me, I remember Miss Marsh, my high-school
Latin teacher, who pointed to the core of the universality
of literature in Vergil's famous phrase in the Aenied,
"Sunt lacramae rerum (These are the tears of things)."
The rest of literature is but a commentary on it.
At Boston University, I thank Professor Angelo P.
Bertocci, Chairman, Department of Comparative Literature,
for introducing me to the study of philosophy and
literature.
At the University of Southern California, I thank
Professor David Malone, Chairman, Program in Comparative
Literature, for accepting me into the program and for
recommending me for the National Defense Education Act
Fellowship and The Graduate School Travel Fellowship. I
also thank those professors at the University of Southern
California who have enriched me through a study of
literature: Professors Malone, Goodrich, Gillespie,
Casson, Durbin, Shulz, Roy, Stahl, Samuels, Spaleck,
Belle, Berkey, and Tufte.
Higher education is an expensive goal and I am
grateful for the financial assistance I received during my
undergraduate and graduate years: to Boston University
and the Dewey Stone Foundation at Boston University; to the
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; and to the
Graduate School at the University of Southern California.
Very special thanks to the chairman of my
dissertation committee, Dr. Malone, for his suggestions,
corrections, and scrupulous reading of my thesis, and for
his encouragement, patience, and sensitivity.
I also wish to thank Professors James Durbin and
Herbert Stahl for their careful readings of my thesis and
their own very special knowledge of drama.
To friends and fellow graduate students in
Comparative Literature who have studied with me, I am
grateful for their insights into literature and into
myself, as well, in particular, Ann Abernathy Daghistany
whose friendship dates back to undergraduate years at
Boston University.
Finally, I wish to thank the family who have loved
and prodded me, my grandparents, Sonya and Max; my late and
beloved father, Joseph; my mother, Frances; my sister,
Lois; my Aunt Rose and Uncle David; my son, Joseph
Benjamin, for his cooperation at nap time so that I might
finish the writing of this dissertation; and my husband,
Michael, for his deeply appreciated suggestion that I
pursue the study of literature in graduate school, and for
his continuous encouragement during that time.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......................................... iii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS..................................viii
INTRODUCTION ........................................... 1
Towards a Definition of Game and a
Clarification of Its Relationship
to Theater
The Game-Play as a Dramatic Device
The Game-Play as Metaphor: The
Inadequacies of Genre Theories
Some Distinctions between the Game-Play
and the Play within a Play
Summation
References
Chapter
I. EDWARD ALBEE'S WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA
WOOLF?....................................... 29
References
II. SAMUEL BECKETT'S WAITING FOR GODOT AND
ENDGAME..................................... 54
Waiting for Godot
Endgame
References
III. JEAN GENET'S THE MAIDS: A CEREMONIAL-
RITUAL-GAME ................................ 94
References
vi
Chapter Page
IV. HAROLD PINTER: THE MULTIPLICITY OF
The Collection: Games of Evasion
The Lover: Marital Games Revisited
The Basement: Pinter's "Notes from
Underground"
References
PERSONALITY 120
EPILOGUE
162
References
A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 177
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure Page
1. Performance C h a r t ...............................' 5
2. Construction of a Five-act P l a y ............... 34
3. Triangular Form of Virginia W o o l f ............. 45
4. Pucciani's Division of The Maids................ 96
viii
INTRODUCTION
Towards a Definition of Game and a
Clarification of Its Relationship
to Theater
This dissertation investigates the dramatic
technique of the game within a play and is restricted to
four dramatists of The Theater of the Absurd, Genet,
Beckett, Pinter, and Albee, in whose plays this technique
most notably occurs. A play which utilizes this device
has descriptively been called a "game-play."
The need for a definition of game and for
clarification of its use in drama is apparent when one
encounters such frequent nonsensical criticism as the
following: "The play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a
series of games and rules. The games are seriously playful
imitations of the social games we play to stay alive.""*'
Moreover, Richard Schechner, noting that theater has "more
in common with sports and games than with ritual or play,"
suggests that this
. . . should be the cue to explore work in mathemati
cal and transactional game analysis as methodologies
in the study of theatre. . . . This is so because
plays are completed actions, involving interpersonal
relationships, usually pivoting on a conflict situa
tion. Thus there is a perfect joining of what
theatre presents to what these theories are attempt
ing to analyze.2
1
3
According to the dictionary, a game is a contest
between two or more players governed by a set of rules. It
may be played for amusement, as a test of physical or mental
prowess, or for a prize in the form of money or other
stakes. It may consist of a single contest or a fixed
number of contests. The method of winning is often
determined by a certain number of points called the score.
A game may also employ certain props or equipment such as a
board or pieces.
For the purpose of studying the game in drama, a
more useful definition is provided by Bernard Suits. Suits,
noting the various attempts by social and behavioral
scientists to define a game, offers the following
philosophical appraisal:
To play a game is to engage in activity directed
toward bringing about a specific state of affairs,
using only means permitted by specific rules, where
the means permitted by the rules are more limited
in scope than they would be in the absence of the
rules, and where the sole reason for accepting such
limitation is to make possible such activity.4
According to Suits, it is impossible to win the game and,
at the same time, break one of its rules, because the rules
in a game are inseparable from its ends; therefore, winning
by cheating is not playing the game. On the other hand,
commitment to the rules in a game is not ultimate. Their
observance is "part of the end of the activity,'1 but "other
5
rules can always supercede the game rules," that is, "the
g
player can always stop playing the game."
A third definition of game— that of Eric Berne in
his well-known study, Games People Play— should not be
overlooked. The reader, however, should keep in mind an
important difference between the games used in the game-
play and the unconscious games people play, which are the
object of Berne's study. Berne's theories apply to
psychologically observable behavior in the "real" world;
my study is concerned with the nature of games within the
specific literary medium of drama and with the way the
Absurdist playwrights emphasize the ultimately conscious
choices of their characters to play these games.
Berne defines a game colloquially as "a series of
7
moves with a snare or 'gimmick'." Berne's study
contributes two important ideas to the study of game in
drama: first of all, his notion of a snare or gimmick as
an integral part of a game gives rise to the concept of the
basically dishonest nature of games. Individuals involved
in game-playing are out to win at any cost. A premium is
placed on wit and cleverness. Secondly, his conclusion
that games themselves are not a final answer provides for
"certain fortunate people" an intimacy, a spontaneity, an
awareness that is "more rewarding than games. . . . This
may mean that there is no hope for the human race, but
0
there is hope for individual members of it."
In the most extensive and illuminating study I have
come across, Richard Schechner suggests a horizontal
relationship between games and theater. He rejects the
Cambridge thesis concerning the origins of Greek drama out
of ritual, classifying ritual as "one of several activities
related to theatre":
The others [activities] are play, games, and sports
(special kinds of games). The relation among these
that I wish to explore is not vertical— from any one
to any other— but horizontal: each autonomous form
shares characteristics with the others; methods of
analysis of one may be useful in the analysis of
the others. Together these five comprise the public
performance activities of men.9
A summary of the "horizontal" relationship between
these five activities is given in Figure 1— "Performance
Chart"— which Schechner has compiled; note that games
acquire both a symbolic reality and a script when they are
incorporated into theater.
Games, sports, and theatre are the "middle terms,"
balancing, and in some senses combining play (+)
and ritual (-). In the middle terms the rules exist
as frames: some rules say what must be done and
others what must not be done. Between these frames
there is freedom. In fact, the better the player
the more able he will be to exploit the freedom
left to him.l^
Schechner enumerates four basic qualities which are
shared by these activities: (1) a special ordering of
time, (2) a special value attached to objects, (3)
nonproductivity, and (4) rules. I will discuss briefly
each of these characteristics now and refer to them again
i
Play Games Sports Theatre Ritual:
Special ordering of time Usually Y es Yes Yes Yes
Special value for objects Y es Yes Y es Yes Y es
Non-productive Y es Yes Y es Yes Yes
Rules Inner Frame Frame Frame Outer
Special place No Often Y es Y es Usually
Appeal to other No Often Y es Y es Yes
Audience Not neces Not neces Usually Yes Usually
Self-Assertive’ * " ' * ' . . „
sarily
Yes
sarily
Not totally Not totally Not totally No
Self-Transcendent No Not totally Not totally Not totally Yes
Completed Not neces Y es Yes Yes Yes
Performed by group
sarily
Not neces Usually Usually Yes Usually
Symbolic reality
sarily
Often No No Yes Often
Scripted No No No Yes Usually
These five activities can be further subdivided into three groups:
S elf-Assertive
"I": +
play
jrules established by player "Do" (free
Social
"We": ±
games
sports
theatre
choice) "Don* t do" rules
S elf-Transcendent
"Other": -
ritual
given by authority
1
pleasure principle, Eros, balance between pleasure and reality principle parental,
id, private world reality principles, accom- Thantos, superego
modation
Fig. 1.—
with the world, ego
13
Performance Chart
U l
6
later as they pertain to the individual plays which are
analyzed in this study.
Time in the performance activities, unlike clock
time, is adapted to the event. There are three major
varieties of performance time:
1. Event time, in which the activity itself has a
set form and all the steps within that form must
be completed no matter how long (or short) the
elapsed clock-time.
Examples: baseball games, racing; rituals in
which a "response" or a "state" is sought. . . .
Scripted theatrical performances taken as a
whole.
2. Set time, in which an arbitrary time pattern is
imposed on the events— they begin and end at a
certain moment whether or not they have been
"completed." Here there is an agonistic contest
between the activity and the clock.14
Examples: football, basketball, games
structured on "how many" or "how much" you can
do in X time.
3. Symbolic time, in which the span of the activity
represents another (longer or shorter) span of
clock-time.
Examples: theatre, enactment rituals, make-
believe, play, and games.15
A second characteristic which these performance
activities share is the special value which is often
attached to objects, a value which is not related to their
practicality, scarcity, or beauty, but which gains its
particular worth within the context of the activity itself:
Balls, pucks, hoops, batons, bats— even props— are
designed to be common objects, cheaply replaced if
lost or worn out. During the activity these simple
objects are very important. Often they are the
focus of the conflict; sometimes, as in theatre or
children's play, they help create the symbolic
reality. I think that the play element— the "other-
wordliness"— of these activities is enhanced by the
valuelessness of the objects used.16
Thirdly, the separation of play, games, sports,
theatre, and ritual from productive work is "the most
interesting— and unifying— factor" of the five performance
activities. Johan Huizinga observed:
Summing up the formal characteristics of play, we
might call it a free activity standing quite
consciously outside "ordinary" life as being "not
serious," but at the same time absorbing the player
intensely and utterly.17
Roger Caillois agrees: "A characteristic of play,
18
in fact, is that it creates no wealth or goods."
Lastly, there are special rules which apply because
"these activities are something apart from everyday life":
The rules are designed not only to tell the players
how to play but to defend the activity against
encroachment from the outside. . . .
Special rules exist, and are formulated and
persist. . . . A special world is established
where men can make the rules, re-arrange time,
assign value to things, and work for pleasure. . . .
In psychoanalytic terms, the world of these
performance activities is the pleasure principle
institutional!zed.19
The dramatist of the Absurd does not end his plays,
however, on the note of exultation with which Berne
concludes his study. On the contrary, his characters must
create games in order to alleviate their absurd position in
the universe. The game is a metaphor, in paradoxical terms,
of man's absurd situation: on one hand, he creates games
in order to give substance and order to the meaninglessness
of a world devoid of religion, tradition, and certainty; on
the other hand, he recognizes that, while game-playing is
not really a substitute for living, it does pose an
alternative to the absurdity of life: the game itself
provides significant meaningful action. On a fantasy
level, the level of game-playing, man is able to achieve
that of which, on a real level, he is deprived. Thus, in
The Lover. Sarah is able to have a fantasied lover, whom
her husband would deny her in reality; in Virginia Woolf.
Martha and George can reminisce about their imaginary
child; Solange and Claire can become Madame in The Maids;
and in Endgame. Hamm and Clov can play a waiting game with
death.
For those players who abandon their games, as I
would suggest Martha and George do, there is, as Berne
attests, something which was not possible earlier, an
awareness, a spontaneity, an intimacy. Moreover, for the
playwright, Virginia Woolf suggests a shying away from the
absurd, perhaps even a search for meaning on a realistic
level. But for players who cannot, or do not wish to,
forego their games, like Gogo and Didi in Godot. or Hamm
and Clov in Endgame. or Claire and Solange in The Maids. or
Richard and Sarah in The Lover, there is a deep commitment
to the philosophy of the Absurd. For playwrights like
Genet, Beckett, and Pinter, there is no easy exit from the
absurd to the meaningful.
The Game-Play as a Dramatic Device
The game as a literary device has been previously
employed in various types of literature— from the funeral
games of the epic to the guessing game which Oedipus plays
with the Sphinx to the highly serious game of dueling in
both the novel and the drama. In the late nineteenth
century, Ibsen called attention to the often "serious"
nature of games. In A Doll1s House. Nora realizes that
playing "at house" has not been enough to keep her marriage
together:
You've always been so kind to me. But our home has
never been anything but a playroom. I've been your
doll-wife, just as at home I was Papa's doll-child.
And the children in turn, have been my dolls. I
thought it fun when you played games with me, just
as they thought it fun when I played games with
them. And that's been our marriage, Torvald.20
The metaphor of game, which Ibsen employed, has
been utilized throughout centuries of drama; but not until
the second decade of the twentieth century did the
innovative Luigi Pirandello use the game as a structural
device to reveal plot,.a device which the Absurdists would
later use to substitute for plot of any kind. The play
which perhaps best demonstrates Pirandello's twofold use
of game as a structural and thematic device is The Rules of
the Game (1918). This play "almost sets the pattern" for
21
"the relentless logic behind absurdity." The plot is
flawlessly logical, albeit absurdly improbable. A wife,
provoked by the apparent indifference of her husband to an
22
affair she is having, instigates a duel between her
husband and a superb duelist. The husband, remaining true
to his philosophy that one must destroy feelings in order
to cope with all situations, plays the "self-imposed role
of tamer of my feelings," while naming, as his second, his
wife's lover, a professional second. On the day of the
duel, the husband refuses to fight and his second,
according to the rules by which they both are bound, must
fight. The husband explains:
Quite in accordance with the rules of the game. I'm
playing my part, he's playing his. I am not going
to budge from my anchorage. And his opponent looks
at it as I do, too. Oh, you thought you'd have a
little game with me, didn't you. You thought between
you, you could win my life from me? Well, you've
lost the game, my friends: I have outplayed you.23
The husband, by skillfully employing this absurd logic,
. . . has issued the challenge (a nominal function)
because he is her husband (in this case, a nominal
position); but the lover, as the real husband, has
to fight the duel (the real obligation) and is
killed.24
It is this relentless logic behind Pirandello's plays
which links him to the flawless logic behind Absurdist
drama.
The Absurdists, however, expanded Pirandello's
twofold use of game. In Absurdist drama, the game
functions on three levels: (1) on the structural or formal
level, (2) on the thematic or metaphoric level, and (3) on
the absurd or existential level.
On a formal level, the game functions in two ways:
first of all, it substitutes for plot in its traditional
sense by providing pattern and continuity of action. This
substitution occurs most frequently in the plays of The
Theater of the Absurd, because Absurdist plays lack a
traditional plot, i.e., exposition, progression, climax,
and denouement. Continuity is maintained instead through
"sporadic rituals and games. Out of boredom the characters
play their improvised games, and in pathetic attempts to
relate themselves to meaningful realities beyond them they
25
go through ritualistic action."
Secondly, the use of game in modern drama imposes
certain restrictions on the basic structure or form of
these plays. Schechner has distinguished two kinds of
form in contemporary drama, triangular and open, and
summarized their differences in the following way:
12
Triangular Open
characters
sequential time
life-careers
stories
plot
life-rhythms
games-rules
rhythm or pattern
characteristics
circular, bracketed, or
action
connections
resolution
non-time
activity
jumps
circularity, bracketing,
dialectic
flow
acting the events
time makes changes
causality
or simply no ending
no synthesis
explosions
becoming the events
time is a cue
determinist/random
"Life rhythms in contemporary drama make an open form of
increasing tension, explosion, and return to the original
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is structured traditionally
or in triangular form, perhaps because its absurdity is
contained within a realistic setting. The other six plays,
Waiting for Godot. Endgame. The Maids. The Lover. The
Collection. and The Basement, follow a pattern of open
form. The most important aspect of their "life-rhythms,"
from the point of view of the game-play, is that they are
set within the context of a game; thus, as we have already
noted, "rules replace plots":
A single game or a series of related games, usually
of a rhythmic-explosive nature, is played. Instead
of an action being "completed," permutations on a
given set are explored. The story yields to the
situation."
26
Only one of the seven plays which I shall analyze
13
game as a matrix of the theatrical situation. Thus
we have the game of "the Lesson," the game of
"waiting for Godot," the game of "killing Madame"
in The Maids. and so forth. This is a radical
change because it decreases our interest in
character (people follow set patterns rather than
invent ways around or through difficult situations)
and psychological motivation.27
On a metaphoric level, the game is a meaningfully
structured activity which functions as a partial metaphor
for the play's theme or themes. The use of metaphor for
direct comparison, life _i£ 3 a game, rather than the use of
simile, life jas a game, is an important rhetorical device
for The Theater of the Absurd. The playwright and the
players, while starting with the hypothesis that life is
either absurd, or as Pinter defines it, a "contrived
accident," or, as others suggest, a game, seek to provide
a "play" structure and an existential meaning to their
lives. As Schechner notes, performance activities are the
"social counterparts to individual fantasy":
Thus their social function is to stand apart from
productive life, both idealizing it (in these
activities the rules work) and criticizing it (why
can't all life be a game?). There are, therefore,
"constant analogues" between productive life and
these activities.28
On an absurd or existential level, the game provides
the players a purpose, a structure, an order to their
otherwise absurd position. "Life is not so much absurd as
it is a game that can be sinister, savage, pathetic,
compassionate, and comic":
14
Games of logic have been played frequently in
contemporary drama— between husband and wife
(Osborne's Under Plain Cover. Pinter's The Lover,
or Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?);
between friends to pass the time (Beckett's
Waiting for Godot or Pinter's The Dumb Waiter);
or between strangers (Albee's The Zoo Story).29
Paradoxically, game playing is both a means of coping with
the absurd condition and an alternative to absurdity;
individual choices— ends in themselves— become a series of
moves in a game, an end in itself; this is the core of
existential philosophy as it is expressed in Absurdist
drama. Edward Albee, an occasional playwright of the
Absurd, points to this influence of existential philosophy
on Theater of the Absurd:
The Theater of the Absurd is an absorption in art of
certain existentialist and post-existentialist
philosophical concepts having to do, in the main,
with man's attempts to make sense for himself out of
his senseless position in a world which makes no
sense because the moral, religious, political and
social structures man has erected to "illusion"
himself have c o l l a p s e d . 30
The Game-Play as Metaphor: The Inadequacies
of Genre Theories
Martin Esslin, who coined the term The Theater of
31
the Absurd in 1961 in his book by that title, has provided
a "generic heading" which "has become a kind of
intellectual shorthand for a complex pattern of
similarities in approach, method, and convention of shared
32
philosophical and artistic premises." In New English
15
Dramatists 12 (1958), Irving Wardle summarizes the
characteristics of that body of writings which Esslin,
seven years earlier, had described as The Theater of the
Absurd:
Its characteristics are: the substitution of an inner
landscape for the outer world; the lack of any clear
division between fantasy and fact; a free attitude
towards time, which can expand or contract according
to subjective requirements; a fluid environment
which projects mental conditions in the form of
visual metaphors; and an iron precision of language
and construction as the writer's only defense
against the chaos of living experience.33
Nelvin Vos traces the beginnings of this theater to
Paris in the early fifties in the works of Eugene Ionesco,
Samuel Beckett, and Jean Genet. In England, a "more recent
ferment" can be found in the plays of Harold Pinter; and in
the United States, the Theater of the Absurd is represented
in the plays of Arthur Kopit, Jack Gelber, and Edward
Albee. It is well to note, however, that
. . . these dramatists do not form any self-
proclaimed or self-conscious school or movement.
Each has his own approach to his subject matter and
employs his own form. Yet, very clearly, and
almost in spite of themselves, they also have much
in common, for their work sensitively mirrors much 34
of the characteristic malaise of the age of anxiety.
Albert Camus, in his retelling of the myth of
Sisyphus, uses the word absurdity to describe man's
alienated position in the universe:
A world that can be explained by reasoning, however
faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe
that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of
16
light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable
exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost
homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised
land to come. This divorce between man and his life,
the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the
feeling of Absurdity.35
Martin Esslin has aptly summarized the twofold
purpose of the Absurdist playwrights. First, they satirize
"the absurdity of inauthentic ways of life"; more
essentially, they attempt to expose a deeper layer of
absurdity, "the absurdity of the human condition itself in
a world where the decline of religious belief" has
3 6
"deprived man of certainties."
The decline of religious belief deprived man of
the very basis on which tragedy depended— a moral universe.
John Gassner offers the following explanation:
With no myth or cult to assure the continuity of
time-honored values, with no religion to relate the
individual unequivocally to the universe, with no
fixity of class structure to bind men to their
place, we presumably cannot have significant
dramatic action: it cannot be significant because
it cannot be communally meaningful. The high
concern with human fate that has characterized
tragic art in past ages must therefore make way
for considerations of temporary and local conflicts
between ant-men who are paradoxically common without
being representative.37
Lionel Abel, another critic trying to explain why
tragedy is so difficult, if not indeed impossible for the
modern dramatist, substitutes for tragedy "a comparably
38
philosophic form of drama" which he terms Metatheatre.
A metaplay is a necessary form for "dramatizing characters
17
who having full self-consciousness, cannot but participate
39
in their own dramatization.1 1 As an example he cites
Antigone: "If Antigone were self-conscious enough to
suspect her own motive in burying her brother Polyneices,"
40
her story would hardly be "a tragic one." This lack of
self-consciousness is as "characteristic of Antigone,
Oedipus, and Orestes, as self-consciousness is
characteristic of Hamlet, that towering figure of Western
41
metatheatre." A major difference, therefore, between
tragedy and metatheatre is that the former "glorifies the
structure of the world," which it supposedly reflects in
its own form, "whereas the latter glorifies the unwilling
ness of the imagination to regard any image of the world
42
as ultimate."
The game-play shares with the metaplay a common
theme— a theme which is inherent in the very medium of the
drama itself— the conflict between illusion and reality
(life is a dream, the world is a stage, life is a game);
it also shares a common characteristic, that of the self-
consciousness of the player. The basic difference between
the game-play and the metaplay is that a game-play is a
dramatic device, like that of the play within a play, and
not a distinct dramatic form, as Abel suggests the
metaplay is. The classification of metaplay as a dramatic
form necessitates the need to defend it as a genre distinct
18
from that of tragedy, or comedy, for that matter; whereas
the classification of the game-play as a dramatic technique
needs no such elaborate defense. In the last analysis,
the difference may be a semantic one, but the implications
behind the classification of technique as form are at the
heart of the literary debate on the subject of genre and
43
of modern tragedy.
Richard Schechner, concluding that genre theories
have "proved inadequate in dealing with the proliferation
of forms our century has seen," suggests the advantages of
44
constructing models, a technique which is advocated by
game theory and transactional analysis. "These are— as
they would apply to theatre— simple, graphic, structural
45
representations of the action of a play or scene."
The tragic mode is perhaps an inadequate approach
to the problems which twentieth-century man faces. "The
creative spirit of an age should be allowed, and indeed
expected, to engender its own dramatic form or to modify
46
existent ones." Playwrights like Genet, Beckett, Pinter,
and Albee have done just that; they have chosen to depict
the chaos of the modern world not in terms of tragedy or
comedy, but in terms of absurdity; specifically, they have
chosen to relate their unique vision of the world through
a common metaphor, the metaphor that life is a game.
19
Some Distinctions between the Game-Play
and the Play within a Play
How did the technique of the game-play evolve? A
brief iook at the history of medieval drama reveals that
the play during the Middle Ages first developed as a
dramatic technique, the play within a ritual. When the
theater became detached from the Church at the end of the
47
Middle Ages, the play-within-a-play emerged, occurring
spontaneously in the principal European literatures of the
Renaissance, although its first use was probably in the
48
English play, Fulgens and Lucres (1497) by Medwall.
Technically, the difference between the game-play
and the play within a play lies in an alteration of the
traditional roles of the actor and the audience. Robert J.
Nelson posits that there are really two spectators in the
play within a play, the actor, or onstage spectator, and
the audience, or offstage spectator.
Nelson considers the offstage spectator the key
figure in defining the "inner play," as he calls the play
within a play. The offstage spectator identifies the
actor as real by a willing suspension of disbelief at the
same time that he accepts the illusion of both the inner
49
and outer plays; thus the offstage spectator defxnes the
play within a play as such.
The role of the offstage spectator is changed in
20
the game-play. He no longer identifies with the actor in
The Theater of the Absurd because the actor no longer
possesses the individuality and/or personality with which
50
he had traditionally identified. As Esslin explains,
"the incomprehensibility of the motives, and the often
unexplained and mysterious nature of the characters1
actions in The Theater of the Absurd effectively prevent
identification." Because the audience fails to identify
with the characters, Absurdist theater "is comic theater
in spite of the fact that its subject matter is somber,
51
violent, and bitter."
As for the onstage spectator of the play within a
play, he "may not know that he is watching or participating
in a play"; more importantly, he is not aware, as is the
offstage spectator, that "the action of the play within a
play is occurring within some action which he admits to be
52
as unreal as the play he watches." In addition, there
may be a separate set of actors who perform in the play
within a play (such is not the case in the game-play where
at least two of the players in the play remain the same as
the players in the game).
The role of the onstage spectator in the play
within a play is modified in two ways in a game-play:
first of all, he is converted to an onstage participant;
he initiates the game and/or participates in it, knowing
21
that it is a false action, a make-believe action; neverthe
less, he enjoys it because he dissociates it from the
"real" world of the play. Secondly, he can now savor the
pretense which was reserved for the offstage spectator of
the play within a play because he accepts the illusion of
the game in the same way that the offstage spectator of
the play within a play accepted the illusion of both the
inner and outer plays. For example, Sarah and Richard in
Pinter's The Lover enjoy the games which give substance to
their marriage at the same time that they, as well as the
53
audience, accept their "make-believe" status.
In brief, the onstage spectator of the play within
a play has become a participant in the game within a play.
Furthermore, while the audience (or offstage spectator) no
longer routinely identifies with the actor in Theater of
the Absurd, they can still participate in the theater game
of let us pretend; that is why they are "upset if the
54
Absurd players on stage change the usual rules."
The play within a play reflected the predicament
of Renaissance man, self-conscious man, doubting man. The
theater of that time mirrored his self-concern in a
"literary form of self-consciousness called the play within
a play. . . . The play within a play is the theater
55
reflecting on itself, on its own paradoxical seeming."
22
The game-play reflects the frustrations of
twentieth-century man, plagued by nameless anxieties and
vague terrors, overwhelmed by the technological advances
of the era, and distraught by the senseless inevitability
of human suffering. From this perspective, the metaphor,
life is a game, offers a means— imaginary though it is,
paradoxical though it seems—
. . . of coping with the meaninglessness of contra
dictory existence. . . . As they [the characters]
perform their ceremonious rituals and play empty
games they are part of a drama in which human
anguish, as it becomes more and more dominant,
becomes less and less m e a n i n g f u l .56
Summation
The specific aim of this dissertation is an
analysis and evaluation of the triple function of the game
as a dramatic technique in seven Absurdist dramas: Who1s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Waiting for Godot. Endgame. The
Maids, The Collection. The Lover, and The Basement. I am
indebted to Eric Berne and Richard Schechner, in particular,
for their observations and suggested methodologies on game
and game in relation to the theater. Schechner has
suggested that "mathematical and transactional game
analysis, model building, comparisons between theatre and
related performance activities— will prove more fruitful"
than "the close textual readings of New Criticism" which
"seem more related to literature than theatre," or than
23
the peripheral historical and biographical reconstructions.
He cautions that such approaches "are difficult; often they
demand that the theorist, critic, and practitioner learn
the language of other disciplines (but this has always
been the case)." He also encourages that such approaches
"may be extremely productive because they explore
horizontal relationships among related forms. They also
yield results which situate theatre in its proper place:
57
performance, not literature."
24
References
■*"Allan Lewis, "The Fun and Games of Edward Albee,"
Educational Theatre Journal. XVI (March, 1964), 34.
2
Richard Schechner, "Approaches to Theory/
Criticism," Tulane Drama Review. Summer, 1966, p. 38.
3
See Webster's Third New International Dictionary
of the English Language Unabridged (Springfield. Mass.:
G. & C. Merriam and Co., 1961), p. 933.
4
Bernard Suits, "What Is a Game?" Philosophy of
Science. XXXIV (June, 1967), 148-149.
5
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play
Element in Culture (Boston! Beacon Press, 1950) , p. 11,
describes the rules governing the activity of play as
determining "what 'holds' in the temporary world
circumscribed by play. The rules of a game are absolutely
binding and allow no doubt. . . . Indeed, as soon as the
rules are transgressed, the whole play-world collapses. The
game is over. The umpire's whistle breaks the spell and
sets 'real' life going again." From this viewpoint, we can
understand the importance of the rules in the games which
Martha and George play in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
and why, when those rules are broken, George kills their
imaginary son, justifying it to Martha in this way: "You
broke our rule, baby. You mentioned him . . . you mentioned
him to someone else."
8Suits, "What Is a Game?" pp. 151-152.
7
Eric Berne, Games People Play: The Psychology of
Human Relationships (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 48.
8Ibid.. p. 184.
9
Schechner, "Approaches to Theory/Criticism," p. 27.
8Ibid. , p. 37.
11-12
Schechner acknowledges his debt to Arthur
Koestler for the way he uses the terms "self-assertive" and
"self-transcendant." See Koestler's "Some Aspects of the
Creative Process" in Control of the Mind, ed. by Seymour M.
Farber and Roger H. L. Wilson (New York, 1961), pp. 188-208.
25
13
Schechner, "Approaches to Theory/Criticism,"
p. 35.
14
Ibid.. p. 29, fn. 25 adds: "One might think that
this agonistic element exists in racing. But there one is
racing against someone (or someone's 'record'). In
football, on the other hand, the game is complicated by the
fact that both teams, while playing against each other, are
also playing against the clock. While stalling is a
negligible strategy in baseball and a disastrous one in
racing, it is crucial in football, where many games end
with the leading team 'running out the clock.' Suspense
drama adapts this attitude towards time; frequently the
hero is attempting to get something done before the
deadline."
15Ibid.. pp. 28-29.
* 1 C
Ibid.. pp. 30-31. Schechner notes, fn. 29, that
musical instruments are an exception.
17
Huizinga, Homo Ludens. p. 13.
18
Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (New York:
Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), p. 21.
19
Schechner, "Approaches to Theory/Criticism,"
pp. 3 2-33.
20
Henrik Ibsen, Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen, trans.
by Eva Le Gallienne (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 76.
^Arnold P. Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter (New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1967), p. 32.
22
I disagree with Mr. Hinchliffe's interpretation
of the wife's motives for provoking the duel. He feels:
"She hopes that her husband in fulfilling his conventional
obligations, will get killed and leave her free to enjoy
life with her lover," p. 33. I suggest that she is angered
by his apparent indifference to her infidelity.
23
Luigi Pirandello, Penguin Plays: The Rules of
the Game. The Life I Gave You. Lazarus, ed. by E. Martin
Browne (London: Penguin Books, Inc., 1959), p. 73.
^^Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter, p. 33.
26
25 *
Nelvin Vos, Eugene Ionesco and Edward Albee: A
Critical Essay ([Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co.], 1968), p. 36.
76
Schechner, "Approaches to Theory/Criticism,"
pp. 46, 50-51.
2^Ibid. . p. 47.
2BIbid.. p. 33.
29
Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter, p. 33.
30
Edward Albee, "Which Theater is the Absurd One?"
in The Modern American Theater: A Collection of Critical
Essays. ed. by Alvin B. Kernan (Englewood Cliffs, New
Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 172.
31
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden
City, New York: Doubleday"^ 1961) .
32Vos, Ionesco and Albee. pp. 5-6.
33
Quoted by Hinchliffe, The Absurd (London:
Methuen, 1968), pp. 6-7.
34Vos, Ionesco and Albee. p. 6.
35
The Myth of Sisyphus, guoted by Martin Esslin in
The Theater of the Absurd, p. xix.
3 6
Esslin, The Theater of the Absurd, p. 292.
37
John Gassner, "The Possibilities and Perils of
Modern Tragedy," in Theatre in the Twentieth Century, ed.
by Robert W. Corrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1963) ,
p. 216.
38
Lionel Abel, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic
Form (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963) , p. vii.
3BIbid.. p. 78.
40~41xbid.t p. 7 7.
^2Ibid.. p. 113.
27
43
For example, some critics have proposed labels
on the basis of thematic similarities such as Ruby Cohn's
"cosmological comedy," J. S. Doubrovsky's "ontological
theatre," Rosette Lamont's "metaphysical farce," J. L.
Styan's "Dark Comedy (going back to Euripides)," or Nelvin
Vos' "seriocomic drama." Others have suggested terms on
the basis of dramatic techniques, ideological postures, or
the nature of the theatrical experience; such terms include
Theater of the Concrete, Theater of the Unconscious,
Theater of Protest and Paradox, or Theater of Revolt. See
Vos, Ionesco and Albee. p. 5.
44
Schechner defines a model, p. 39, fn. 45: "A
model is an outline of a play's action in terms of its
shape. From there one could proceed to do the traditional
work of the critic: discussing characterization,
motivation, theme, imagery, and so forth."
^Ibid. . p. 39.
46
Gassner, "Modern Tragedy," p. 228.
47
Robert J. Nelson, The Play within a Play: The
Dramatist's Conception of His Art: Shakespeare to Anouilh
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), pp. 8-9, relates
the alternative meanings of the word ludo (frolic, dallying,
wantonness, mockery, sport, banter, deception, delusion,
make-believe, play) to this severance of the medieval ritual
theater from the secular theater of the Renaissance. He
points out also that the play as a jeu (Latin iocus or
joke) was a meaning anticipated as early as 1276 by Adam de
Halle (Le Jeu de la feuillee), and that the sixteenth-
century French word for the plot of a play, fable. also
emphasized the fictional, unreal nature of the dramatic
illusion.
48
Ibid. . p. 8. Nelson's source is F. S. Boas,
"The Play within a Play," in A Series of Papers on
Shakespeare and The Theater by Members of the Shakespeare
Association. p. 136.
49
Nelson suggests the terms, which I also find
quite useful, inner and outer play, to refer to the play
within a play and the play as a whole, respectively.
50
Vos, Ionesco and Albee. p. 34.
51
Esslin, The Theater of the Absurd, p. 301.
28
52
Nelson, Play within a Play, p. 7.
53
In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? this pretense
is withheld from the audience and from Nick and Honey until
the last act, when we learn that the child is an
"imaginary" creation.
54Vos, Ionesco and Albee. p. 35.
55
Nelson, Play within a Play, p. 10.
^Vos, Ionesco and Albee. p. 39.
57
Schechner, "Approaches to Theory/Criticism,"
p. 53.
CHAPTER I
EDWARD ALBEE'S WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' * ' first produced on
Broadway by Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder, has received
both critical acclaim and disapproval. The reviewers called
it "shattering drama," "brilliantly original work of art,"
"excoriating theatrical experience," "a crucial event in
2
the birth of a contemporary American theater." It won the
Critics Circle Award and that of the Association of the
Foreign Press, but was denied the Pulitzer Prize: "The two
drama critics on the committee, John Mason Brown and John
Gassner, resigned in protest against the negative decision
3
of their colleagues."
Among professional literary critics, Richard
Schechner condemned it as "a tragedy which is bad theatre,
bad literature, bad taste— but which believes its own lies
with such conviction that it indicts the society which
4
creates it and accepts it." Alan Schneider, its original
Broadway director, in a reply to Schechner, reasoned that
to blame "Albee for the 'sickness1 of his subject matter is
like blaming the world's ashcans on the creator of Nagg and
5
Nell— which has been done."
29
30
Many critics, however, agree with Schechner. Diana
Trilling attributed the reason for its popular success to
the fact that it exposed our cultural aristocracy as "worse
than the rest of our society." Thus the public finds its
0
own self-image "much improved." Richard J. Dozier found
it "an unsatisfactory play, a play of half-heartedly
7
developed ideas." George Wellwarth found "nothing more in
this than a dissection of an extremely ambiguously
0
conceived sick marriage." Melvin L. Plotinsky discerned
the major flaw in Albee's dramaturgy as "irresolution":
his "inability to evolve conflicts that are at least
9
theoretically capable of resolution."
In a more positive light, Wendall V. Harris
considered it a significant play: "It does not assert that
life is as much an illusion as that which occupies the
stage. Ruby Cohn, in her sensitive analysis of the
play, concludes that "Albee reaches a pinnacle of mastery
of American colloquial idiom." To questions such as "why
does George stay up to entertain Martha's guests? Why does
she invite them? Why do they stay?" Mrs. Cohn suggests
that "the play coheres magnetically only if we accept the
Walpurgisnacht as a donnee: these four people are together
to dramatize more than themselves."'1 ' ' 1 '
There have also been various interpretations of the
play's title. Many critics have suggested that it echoes
31
the Disney song, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?"^
Others have postulated direct and oblique references to the
novelist herself, who committed suicide, suggesting that
perhaps Martha's fears were similar to those of Mrs.
13
Woolf. Albee has offered his own explanation, which is,
perhaps, as valid as any:
There was a saloon— it's changed its name now— on
Tenth Street, between Greenwich Avenue and Waverly
Place, that was called something at one time, now
called something else, and they had a big mirror
on the downstairs bar in this saloon where people
used to scrawl graffiti. At one point back in
about 1953...1954 I think it was— long before any
of us started doing much of anything— I was in
there having a beer one night, and I saw "Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" scrawled in soap, I sup
pose, on this mirror. When I started to write the
play it cropped up in my mind again. And of course,
who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means Who's afraid
of the big bad wolf...who's afraid of living life
without false illusions. And it did strike me as
being a rather typical university intellectual
joke.
Within the context of the play the title is a
refrain, referring to a song or joke or game which occurred
earlier that evening at a party. It remains a private
allusion, or "in-joke," shared by the four characters on
stage, but which we, the audience, do not "get." The
refrain is sung three times in the play. Not until the
final tableau, however, when George, putting his hand
"gently on her shoulder" while Martha "leans her head
back," sings the refrain for the last time, does Martha
acknowledge the question, Who afraid of Virginia Woolf?
32
with the confession of her fear: "I ... am ... George ...
I ... am." (242)
For the purposes of this dissertation I have
15
classified Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a game-play.
My methodology is to analyze how the games function within
the play on the three levels I have previously described:
the thematic or metaphoric, the structural or formal, and
the absurd or existential.
These games provide the major action in the play
and are the mainstays in the marriage of Martha and George,
the older members of the academic community in New
1 6
Carthage. The time of the action is the late evening and
early morning following a party for new faculty members, a
party at which Martha and George meet Nick and Honey, a new
professor and his wife. Martha invites the younger couple
back to her house where all four become embroiled in a
series of contests of wit and wickedness. Early in the
play Nick discovers the two-edged sword of George's
gamesmanship:
Do you want me to say it's funny, so you can contra
dict me and say it's sad? or do you want me to say
it's sad so you can turn around and say no, it's
funny. You can play that damn little game any way
you want to, you k now!17
The characters' awareness of game-playing is
followed in importance only by their serious regard for
the rules which establish a "special world," and create an
33
activity "apart from everyday life." When Martha
knowingly trespasses the rules by confiding the secret of
their imaginary son to Honey, George uses this fact to
justify killing him, "You broke our rule, baby."
1. The structural or formal level.— From a
structural point of view, the play can be divided in two
ways: into three acts or into four games. Albee has given
titles to the acts, a practice more common in the novel
than in the drama. Act I, entitled Fun and Games, actually
forms a prelude to the bizarre fun and games in Act II,
Walpurgisnacht. Three episodes in the first act prepare
for "the more awful than funny" games of Act II: (1) the
guessing game which Martha plays with George; (2) the
pointed references to Nick's prowess at physical games such
as football and boxing ["Hey you played football hunh?"
(51) or "Intercollegiate state middle weight champion."
(52)]; and (3) Martha's story of her boxing match with
George in which she accidentally punched him in the jaw
and landed him in a huckleberry bush ["It was awful,
really. It was funny, but it was awful. I think it's
colored our life." (57)]. With the coming of daylight
Act III, The Exorcism (Albee's original title of the play),
begins. This act, as its title hints, will terminate the
game-playing by purging the characters of the illusions
which have sustained them. . — -
The play may also be divided into four games to
which Albee has likewise given titles. On a formal level,
these games serve a twofold purpose. First of all, these
games, and the rules which bind them, are a device to
reveal the plot by providing convenient pegs on which to
hang the action. The first three games (Humiliate the
Host, Get the Guests, and Hump the Hostess) are parts of a
larger game, Bringing Up Baby, which Martha and George have
played almost all of their twenty-three years (their
imaginary son is about to celebrate his twenty-first
birthday). Each game is a microcosm of the play's
structure, mimicking Freytag's pyramid construction for a
18
traditional five-act play (see Figure 2). This
C lim a x
Inciting moment Moment of last suspense
Fig. 2.— Construction of a Five-act Play
35
traditional structure, which is evident in the games,
contributes to the triangular form of the play itself
19
which Schechner has described. The Absurdity which the
play contains is thus limited to its thematic content and
is not "typically" representative of the Theater of the
Absurd, where the conflict situation is usually not
resolved, but returns again, like Sisyphus' rock, to its
original position. In Virginia Woolf, however, there is a
resolution of the conflict-situation: the imaginary child
is killed and the games must come to an end.
The games are retaliatory responses on the part of
the one who initiates them. The first game, Humiliate the
Host, is initiated by Martha in response to George's
shooting her with a fake gun, a sexual allusion to his
sterility and the incentive to beginning their games in
earnest. (George shoots her as a retaliatory response to
her embarrassing retelling of their boxing match.) The
action builds toward a climax as Martha recites a list of
George's failures, culminating in her threat to reveal the
truth about George's novel. George tries to prevent her
from exposing him: "THE GAME IS OVER.'" Martha, however,
persists: "No, Sir, this isn't a novel at all ... this is
the truth ... this really happened ... To ME!" (137)
The games, as George indicates, are verbal
contests: one wins by the cleverness of his wit. The
36
games are played (and won) on a linguistic, rather than an
actual, level. For example, in the game of Hump the
Hostess, Martha suggests that Nick's triumph is not a
physical one, i.e., an actual one; therefore, she
humiliates him, albeit on a verbal level, for his lack of
sexual prowess: he is a houseboy, not a stud. There is,
in fact, a preponderance of this kind of verbal
competitiveness. Early in the play Martha cues us by
calling George "Phrasemaker." (14)
Sometimes their verbal sparring takes the form of
the search for le mot juste:
MARTHA: He's a biologist. Good for him. Biology's
even better. It's less... abstruse.
GEORGE: Abstract.
MARTHA: ABSTRUSE] In the sense of recondite. (63)
At other times, their word games achieve a form of
ridicule and black humor:
MARTHA: And I was an atheist (Uncertainly) I still
am.
GEORGE: Not an atheist, Martha ... a pagan. (To
HONEY and NICK) Martha is the only true pagan on
the eastern seaboard.
But the verbal sparring, in its most degredating
form, becomes venemous namecalling such as the following
dialogue, imitative of one in Godot:
GEORGE: Monstrel
MARTHA: Cochon!
37
GEORGE: Betel
MARTHA: Canaille1
GEORGE: Putainl (101)
Eventually, Nick, too, is drawn into this kind of
verbal sport, correcting George to say gangle when he
refers to "a bunch of geese." George, however, has been
playing these games a lot longer than Nick:
Well, if you're going to get all cute about it,
ornithological, it's gaggle ... not gangle, gaggle.
(113)
The clap of George's hands, like the ringing of a
bell, signals the start of the second game and continues
the rising action of the play:
I've got it. I'll tell you what game we'll play.
We're done with Humiliate the Host ... this round,
anyway ... we're done with that ... and we don't
want to play Hump the Hostess, yet ... not yet ...
So I know what we'll play. . . . We'll play a
round of Get the Guests. (140)
Honey and Nick both object. [Honey: "I don't like these
games." Nick: "Yeah ... I think maybe we've had enough
of games, now. (140-141)] George insists: "You can't
fly on one game." (141)
George, taking his cue from the climax of Martha's
game, composes an "imaginary" second novel, "an allegory,
really--probably— but it can be read as straight cozy
prose . . . and it's all about a nice young couple who come
out of the middle west." (142) George's allegory is, in
38
reality, an expose of Nick and Honey's marriage. When
Nick objects, George vents his anger for his guests'
complicity in Martha's game: "This is my gamel You
played yours ... you people." (142) As he rattles the
skeleton in their closet, the fact of Honey's hysterical
pregnancy ["the puff went away ... like magic ... poufl"
(147)], he succeeds in horrifying Honey and in angering
Nick. Nick's anger, in turn, precipitates the third game,
Hump the Hostess. When George taunts Nick, "go pick up
the pieces and plan some new strategy," Nick responds to
his baiting by once again indicating the verbal nature of
the games, "I'll play the charades like you've got 'em
set up. . . . I'll play in your language." (149-150)
This game, however, is really Martha's game; Nick
is a convenient pawn in a game which, Martha indicates,
she has played before. She tries to explain that the
physical act, by itself, is meaningless because it does
not assure sexual-emotional satisfaction:
I disgust me. I pass my life in crummy totally
pointless infidelities ... (Laughs ruefully)
would-be infidelities. Hump the Hostess? that's
a laugh. A bunch of boozed-up ... impotent lunk
heads. (189)
George, she asserts, is the "only one man in my life who
has ever ... made me happy." (189) Snapping her fingers
to signal the start of a third round, she suggests the
snapdragons in the last game which accompany the death of
their son. George calls the snapdragons "Flores; flores
para los muertos. Flores." (195) Albee has borrowed the
line from Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.
In Williams' play, the line is recited by a blind Mexican
woman selling gaudy tin flowers (in Albee's play, George
speaks the line "in a hideously cracked falsetto"); she is
vending outside while Mitch is confronting Blanche inside
about all the lies she has told him about her purity and
innocence. Blanche, like Martha, denies the accusation:
MITCH: Lies, lies, inside and out, all lies.
20
BLANCHE: Never inside, I didn't lie in my heart.
George, like Mitch, suspects that, this time, Martha has
deceived him:
GEORGE: Look! I know the game I You don't make it
in the sack, you're a houseboy.
NICK: I AM NOT A HOUSEBOY.'
GEORGE: No? Well then, you must have made it in
the sack. Yes? (He is breathing a little heavy;
behaving a little manic) Yes? Someone's lying
around here; somebody isn't playing the game
straight. Yes? Come on; come on; who's lying?
Martha? Come on I
NICK: (After a pause; to MARTHA, quietly with
intense pleading) Tell him I'm not a houseboy.
MARTHA: (After a pause, quietly, lowering her
head) No; you're not a houseboy.
GEORGE: (With great, sad relief) So be it.
MARTHA: (Pleading) Truth and illusion, George;
you don't know the difference.
40
GEORGE: No; but we must carry on as though we did.
( 202)
The Martha who begins Act III contrasts sharply
with the Martha of Act I; she is tender now, instead of
vitriolic, as she enters looking for George:
. . . George who is out somewhere in the dark. . . .
George who is good to me, and whom I revile; who
understands me, and whom I push off; who can make
me laugh, and I choke it back in my throat; who can
hold me at night; so that it's warm, and whom I
will bite so there's blood, who keeps learning the
games we play as quickly as I can change the rules;
who can make me happy and I do not wish to be
happy. George and Martha: sad, sad, sad. (190;
Italics mine)
The ring of the chimes, like the previous clapping
of hands, or the snap of fingers, or the pop of the fake
gun, is the signal to announce the start of the fourth and
last game. (When Martha began her game of Humiliate the
Host, she accidentally hit against the chimes and cursed
their ringing, "Goddam bongs," an obvious foreshadowing of
the bells chiming to announce George's entry in Act III,
and, more importantly, a preparation for George's
announcement from the messenger who rang.) George enters
with a bouquet of snapdragons, pretending to mistake Nick
for their son, "our own little all-American something-or-
other." (196) (The line recalls the "ideal" boy of The
American Dream.) George, beginning with an absurd parody
of "here we go round the mulberry bush" called "Snap went
the dragons," "throws snapdragons— his flowers for the
41
dead— at Martha, one at a time, stem first, spear-like,
phallic, as he echoes her 'snaps' at him. St. George slew
the dragon; Albee's George slew the dragon; Albee's George
21
slays with snapdragons."
As George initiates a ritualistic mockery of the
Catholic Death Mass, the playfulness of the games merges
with the serious, ritualistic recitation of the Mass: "The
actions that many of the Absurd plays imitate have been a
rediscovery of the roots of drama: ritual and game":
Sometimes the two actions are inverted. The
seriousness of ritual has been transformed into the
meaninglessness of mere repetition: Gogo and Didi
are ritualistically waiting. The spontaneity of
game and play has moved into terrifying seriousness:
Hamm and Clov are role-playing the Endgame. And
still more frequently, the two actions are
intertwined and merge: the Fun and Games of Act I
of Virginia Woolf move imperceptibly into The
Exorcism.22
Martha, Honey, and Nick no longer want to play
games. Martha pleads: "No more games ... please. It's
games I don't want. No more games." (207) George insists
"one last game," foreshadowing the death of his imaginary
son by using literally the expression, "we're going to play
this one to the death." (209) Clapping his hands together
once, he instructs: "All sit. . . . This is a civilized
game." (210) Honey intervenes, pretending that she does
not remember their earlier conversation. But George warns
her he will tell Nick about her "secret little stud-
42
murders." While Nick pleads with Martha, "We don't have to
hear about it ... if you don't want to," (216) George
counters, "You in a position to set the rules around here."
(216) Nick-is a pawn in the games whose rules Martha and
George have already determined.
They begin to play Bringing Up Baby by reminiscing
about their imaginary son, his birth, his early years, his
growth; Martha muses:
And as he grew ... and as he grew ... ohi so wise!
... he walked evenly between us ... (She spreads her
hands) ... a hand out to each of us for what we
could offer by way of support, affection, teaching,
even love ... and these hands, still, to hold us
off a bit, for mutual protection. (221-222)
Then, her tone changes:
. . . to protect us all from George's ... weakness
... and my ... necessary greater strength ... to
protect himself ... and us. (222)
Simultaneously, interspersed with her musings, George
recites the liturgy over the dead: "Libera me, Domine, de
morte aeterna, in die ilia tremenda." (227)
The climax of the game (which is also the end of
their game-playing) is George's announcement that a telegram
has arrived containing a message that their son is dead:
He was ... killed ... late in the afternoon. ...
(Silence) He was ... killed ... late in the
afternoon. ... (Silence) (A tiny chuckle) on a
country road, with his learner's permit in his
pocket, he swerved to avoid a porcupine, and
drove straight into a ...
... large tree. (231)
43
Game and ritual "move imperceptibly" into exorcism; truth
and illusion merge indistinguishably, as the "fictional"
murderer of his real parents becomes the "real" murderer
of an imaginary child.
Albee’s use of an imaginary child has sparked a
critical turmoil. From a negative perspective, Richard
Schechner discounts any "real hard bedrock of suffering in
Virginia Woolf— it is all illusory, depending upon a
23
'child' who never was born, a gimmick, a trick, a trap."
(Such a "gimmick" is the essential characteristic
governing Eric Berne's definition of game.) Robert
Brustein agrees, finding that "moment of truth after an
24
evening of stage illusions unsatisfying."
In a more positive appraisal, Lee Baxandall regards
the invented child as George's "crazy wish to perpetuate
history. . . . The fantasy baby gives Martha someone all
her own, to use any way she wants." It is not the motives
that Baxandall finds extraordinary, but "the resources
George brings to the project and his final exorcism of the
25
fantasy." Ruby Cohn points out that "far from a deus ex
machina. the child is mentioned before the arrival of Nick
and Honey; George warns Martha not to 'start in on the bit
about the kid'." Wendall V. Harris accepts the child as
"a symbolic assertion that at least a great part of the
turmoil and feelings of futility in human life results not
44
from an unalterably tragi-comic human dilemma, but from
27
remediable human error compounding itself."
Alan Schneider posits the most satisfying
explanation for me, linking the child as a symbol to other
elusive literary symbols:
If the child in Virginia Woolf is merely a "gimmick,"
then so is the wild duck, the cherry orchard, that
streetcar with the special name, even our old
elusive friend Godot. But Albee's play is not
about the child— just as Godot is not about Godot
but waiting for him— but about the people who have
had to create him as a "bean-bag" or crutch for
their own insufficiencies.28
Albee, when asked to comment on why the audience
questioned the credibility of the imaginary son at all,
replied:
It always struck me as odd that an audience would be
unwilling to believe that a highly educated,
sensitive, and intelligent couple, who were
terribly good at playing reality and fantasy games,
wouldn't have the education, the sensitivity, and
the intelligence to create a realistic symbol for
themselves to use as they saw fit.29
George's announcement that their invented son is
dead, the climax of the last game, is a type of revelation.
Within each of the games and within the play itself, there
has been a similar type of disclosure. These disclosures
comprised the climax in each game and in the play as a
whole. For example, in the first game, Humiliate the
Host, the climax occurred when Martha exposed the truth
about George's novel; in Get the Guests, when George
45
revealed the secret of Honey's hysterical pregnancy; in
Hump the Hostess, when Martha confessed she had, in fact,
committed adultery, the climax of the game and of the play
itself.
In summary, I have divided the action of the play
into four major games and have shown that the major
incidents of the plot have been constructed around them.
30
The form of the play is a triangular one.
A diagram of the triangular form of Virginia Woolf
might be constructed as in Figure 3.
Hones ty
(Ma rria
Adultery
Marriage
Decei t
Fig. 3.— Triangular Form of Virginia Woolf
Martha and George, and to a lesser extent, Nick and Honey,
are individuals in conflict because they have chosen to
deceive themselves and each other. Their situations are
resolved not by a return to lies, games, or the like, but
46
by rejecting the illusions on which their relationships
were based. The play retains a traditional plot structure
because the games in it are a device to reveal the plot
rather than a substitute for it; the games are the
dramatic pegs on which the action is hung.
2. The thematic or metaphor level.— On a
metaphoric level, the games contribute to the development
of a major theme in the play: the continual blurring of
truth and illusion:
The play is paced in an alternation of games and
rest periods. . . . Everything happens as if the
illusion had been interrupted briefly by a resurgence
of reality which is immediately toned down. Both
aspects unite in a perfect crescendo: the life of
the protagonists, their vitality, their agitation,
is marked by longer and more intense game periods,
while their real existence is manifested in quiet
intervals of shorter and shorter duration, which
interrupt their marathon of illusions. This
acceleration also reveals their growing fear of
looking at themselves as they are, and their more
and more extravagant desire to veil reality.31
We are never sure, even at the end of the play, of
what the truth has been, or whether Martha or George has
ever told it. Is George being truthful when he confides to
Nick: "Martha hasn't been sick a day in her life, unless
you count the time she spends in the rest home." (89) Is
George's novel the story of his own life: is he the boy
who killed his mother and, swerving to avoid a porcupine,
also killed his father? Is he speaking about himself when
47
he informs us that this boy has existed for the last
thirty years in an asylum where he has not uttered one
sound, an ironic commentary on his marriage, perhaps?
There is a resounding note of personal sympathy in George's
view of the insane, "the quiet ones," who "don't change ...
they grow old. . . . They maintain a ... a firm-skinned
serenity ... the ... the under-use of everything leaves
them ... quite whole." (97)
There are other blurrings of fact and fantasy. Did
Martha have a stepmother, "a very old lady with warts who
was very rich"? (109) Was George ever in the
Mediterranean? The continual mixing of truth and
pretension is necessary to the continuance of the games
which Martha and George play. Martha, admitting in the
end to the physical act of adultery, denies any emotional
commitment; this is one of her "would-be infidelities."
3 2
(189) Like Blanche, she has "never lied in her heart."
George, however, refuses, in T . S. Eliot's terms, to
distinguish between "the emotion and the response," "the
desire and the spasm"; for George, it is the move, not the
motive, which propels the game to its end. Although we
may not know the difference between truth and illusion,
between game and life, George insists, "we must carry on
as though we did." (202)
48
3. The absurd or existential level.— In Virginia
Woolf. Albee has veered away from the more obviously
absurdist drama of The American Dream. The characters and
setting are realistic, almost naturalistic. The form is
traditional or "triangular," rather than absurd or "open."
There are, however, absurd elements in the play, such as
the use of games to reveal the plot and the symbolic use
of an imaginary child within those games.
There is, on the other hand, a causality at work
which is lacking in true absurdist drama. The evening's
game-playing has resulted in specific changes in each of
the characters. For Nick and Honey, there is the
realization of their own childlessness and the basic
sterility in their relationship. Honey seems sincere in
recognizing her need: "I want a child." (222) For
Martha and George, they have ended their life's game of
Bringing Up Baby, the absurd joke on which their marriage
revolved.
On the absurd (and existential) level, these games
have provided Martha and George, a childless couple, with
their much-wanted child, and fulfilled for them, albeit on
a fantasy level, on the level of make-believe, which is
both theater and game, their wish and their need for a
child. But on the realistic level of the play, where
Albee leaves us, Martha accepts that their game-playing is
49
over, even while she still wishes they could continue to
play: "I don't suppose, maybe, we could ....1 1 (241)
The ending is a hopeful, though by no means,
untroubled one. There is the "coming together" which had
before seemed impossible. Richard J. Dozier finds this
sudden shift of values in the third act a serious challenge
to "the dramatic integrity of the first two acts" because
"reconciliation cannot follow infidelity too closely."
33
Thus "Martha's adultery is reduced to a farce." Dozier
fails to account both for the remorse which is present in
Martha's long monologue at the beginning of Act III and for
the title of the act, The Exorcism.
Without the verbal-intellectual-wish-fulfillment
games on which to structure their lives, Martha, George,
and perhaps Albee as well, are left pondering what, if any,
new edifice can be erected now that not only the "moral,
religious, political and social structures man has erected
34
to 'illusion' himself have collapsed," but the make-
believe one as well. The grim laughter of the spectator
who sees the outcome of the final game as an absurd joke
helps to appease his righteous indignation at the death of
35
an imaginary child. Absurdist Theater, and that is what
Virginia Woolf is, in this sense, is comic theater despite
its caustic commentary: "The laughter paradoxically
50
accentuates the ritual sacrifice of the illusion that it
3 6
renders at once more poignant and more bearable."
51
References
^Citations from this play in my text are to Edward
Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (New York: Pocket
Books, Inc., 1965).
2
Jean Gould, Modern American Playwrights (New York:
Dodd, Mead Co., 1966), p. 284.
3
Gilbert Debusscher, Edward Albee: Tradition and
Renewal. trans. by Anne D. Williams (Brussels: American
Studies Center, 1967), p. 57.
^Richard Schechner, "Who's Afraid of Edward Albee?"
Tulane Drama Review. VII (1963), 9.
^Alan Schneider, "Why So Afraid?" Tulane Drama
Review. VII (1963), 11.
^Diana R. Trilling, "The Riddle of Albee's Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" in Claremont Essays, ed. by
Diana R. Trilling (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World
Publishers, 1964), p. 218.
7
Richard J. Dozier, "Adultery and Disappointment in
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Modern Drama. February,
1969, p. 432.
Q
George Wellwarth, "Hope Deferred: The New
American Drama: Reflections on Edward Albee, Jack
Richardson, Jack Gelber, and Arthur Kopit," Literary
Review. VII (1963), 15.
9
Melvin L. Plotinsky, "The Transformation of
Understanding: Edward Albee in the Theater of the
Irresolute," Drama Survey. IV (Winter, 1965), 228.
■*"^Wendall V. Harris, "Morality, Absurdity, and
Albee," Southwest Review. LXIX (1964), 255.
"*''*'Ruby Cohn, Edward Albee (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 24.
52
12
Debusscher, Edward Albee, p. 50. Debusscher
notes that "Prague called the play 'Who's Afraid of Kafka?'
which at once conjures up the corrosive bureaucratic
nightmares of the external world and the feeling of
unreasoning, inexpiable guilt which compresses the
individual."
13
Cohn, Edward Albee. p. 26.
^'Sjriters at Work: The Paris Review Interviews
(3rd series; New York: Viking Press, 1967), p. 333.
15
For an analysis of the games m the play using
Berne's criteria and terminology, see Joy Flasch, "Games
People Play in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Modern
Drama. December, 1967, pp. 280-288. Her effort is
reminiscent of Ernest Jones' Freudian analyses of Oedipus
and Hamlet: it relies on forcing the theory to "fit" at
the same time that it ignores the play's own "labels,"
that is, the names which the characters give to the games
they play.
■^Cohn, pp. 24-25, notes the following significance
in the names: "Carthage, which means 'New City,' was
founded in the ninth century B.C. by a semilegendary,
deceitful Dido, and it was razed to the ground by the very
real Romans in 146 A.D. By the fifth century it had again
become a power, which St. Augustine in his Confessions
called 'cauldron of unholy loves.' Albee uses the
historical conjunction of sex and power as spice for the
American stew he simmers in this cauldron.
"Albee's unholy lovers are George and Martha,
whose names evoke America's first and childless White House
couple."
17
Page 33.
18
Diagram from Joseph T. Shipley, ed., Dictionary
of World Literature (Paterson, N. J.: Littlefield, Adams
and Co., 1962), p. 189.
19
See Introduction, p. 12.
20
See Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
(New York: The New American Library, 1947), p. 119.
21
Cohn, Edward Albee. p. 21.
53
22 n
Nelvin Vos, Eugene Ionesco and Edward Albee: A
Critical Essay ([Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co.], 1968), p. 36.
23
Schechner, "Who's Afraid of Edward Albee?" p. 8.
24
Robert Brustem, "Albee and the Medusa Head," m
Seasons of Discontent: Dramatic Opinions 1959-1965 (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), p. 147.
^Lee Baxandall, "The Theatre of Edward Albee,"
Tulane Drama Review. IX (Summer, 1965), 33.
2 6
Cohn, Edward Albee. p. 20.
27
Harris, "Morality, Absurdity, and Albee," p. 255.
2ft
Schneider, "Why So Afraid?" p. 12.
29
Writers at Work, pp. 338-339.
30
See Introduction, p. 12.
31
Debusscher, Edward Albee. pp. 55-56.
^^Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, p. 119.
33
Dozier, "Adultery and Disappointment," p. 436.
34
Edward Albee, "Which Theater is the Absurd One?"
in The Modern American Theater: A Collection of Critical
Essays. ed. by Alvin B. Kernan (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 172.
35
Lionel Abel, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic
Form (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963) , p. 27, believes that
"it is as difficult to justify inflicting death on a
character as to justify killing a real person." Abel
classifies together an imaginary person, a fiction, and a
character in a play: thus the killing of an imaginary son
is as real as that of the killing of an actual character.
36
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden
City, New York: Doubleday~j 1961) , p. 301.
CHAPTER II
SAMUEL BECKETT'S WAITING FOR GODOT
AND ENDGAME
why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed
is it not better abort than be barren
"Cascando," 1935
— Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett is a poet, a novelist, and a
dramatist. His first success, a long poem entitled
Whoroscope (1930), was followed by a philosophical essay on
Proust (1931) which contains the ideological foundations
for his later works. His first novel, Murphy (1938), is
his most traditional in terms of plot or story line. The
trilogy of novels which followed, Malloy. Malone muert
(1951), and L'Innommable (1953), revealed the absurd
situations of Beckett's characters; plot became minimized
and obscured. With the publication of En Attendant Godot
(1952) and its production on January 5, 1953 at the
Theatre de Babylone, Beckett achieved phenomenal success:
his play ran for 400 productions, was translated and
produced with the same inexplicable success all over the
54
55
world; more importantly, Beckett discovered in the medium
of drama, which before his plays had demanded both action
and language as necessary components, a medium for
expressing both inaction and silence. Particularly in his
plays, Beckett gives "dramatic expression to a vision that
accepts reality as a game of chance. man as an exercise in
perversity, and language as irrelevant sound."'*'
The period from the publication of Godot to 1970
was a prolific one. His major works during that period
include Nouvelles et Textes pour rien (1955), Tous ceux gui
tombent. Act without Words I. and Act without Words II
(1957); La Derniere Bande and Cendres (1959); and Comment
c1est and Happy Days (1961). In 1970 he was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature.
In the two plays which I have selected to analyze
as game-plays, there is an ironic contrast between their
central actions— or inactions. In the first play, Waiting
for Godot. Gogo and Didi try to make the time pass guickly
while waiting for Godot to come; in the second play,
Endgame. Hamm and Clov try to stop time from passing
because they know that each moment foreshortens their lives
and brings them closer to the endgame. Hamm and Clov are
antagonists in a cruel game of domination and dependency
which has no winner— except, perhaps, Death! Like Gogo and
Didi, they are caught in the net of time; all their actions
56
realize the absurdity, the futility, in Hamm's case, his
utter immobility (except for the times when Clov wheels
him) to move or change position on the gameboard of Life.
Beckett's characters are "tragic in the sense of having
been born, but they are also comic in the sense that they
2
apprehend existence as a game." It is from this
perspective, that of life as a game, that I shall examine
these two plays.
Waiting for Godot
The expression that there is nothing to express,
nothing with which to express, nothing from
which to express, no power to express, no desire
to express, together with the obligation to
express.
Three Dialogues
— Samuel Beckett
3
Samuel Beckett's first play, Waiting for Godot.
can be analyzed on the three levels which I have suggested
define the game-play: the structural or formal, the
thematic or metaphoric, and the absurd or existential. The
characters, Estragon and Vladimir, affectionately Gogo and
Didi, play games in order
. . . to "fill time" .... Whenever there is
nothing "to do" they remember why they are here:
To wait for Godot. That memory, that direct
confrontation with Time, is painful. They play,
invent, move, sing to avoid the sense of waiting.
In other words, their activities. or games as I call them,
57
keep them from "a consciousness of the action of the
4
play." I have tabulated seven types of game-activities
which I discuss in the next section.
1. The structural or formal level.— Waiting for
Godot, even more than other game-plays which I discuss,
lacks plot in the traditional sense. Instead of a
narrative chain of events, or a plot-line, episodes flow
freely from one imagining or game to the next. Esslin
agrees:
Beckett's plays lack plot more completely than other
works of the Theatre of the Absurd. . . . They
confront their audience with an organized structure
of statements and images that interpenetrate each
other and that must be apprehended in their
totality.^
Richard Schechner describes the play's "basic
rhythm" as "habit interrupted by memory, memory obliterated
by games":
Why do Gogo/Didi play? In order to deaden their
sense of waiting. Waiting is a "waiting for" and
it is precisely this that they wish to forget.
One may say that "waiting" is the larger context
within which "passing time" by playing games is a
sub-system, protecting them from the sense that
they are waiting.6
The first line, "Nothing to be done" (7) contains
the play's central paradox; the remainder of the play
consists of the characters' frenetic attempts "to do."
Their activities or games fall into several different
categories or "occupations," "relaxations," "recreations,"
58
as the characters refer to them. I have tabulated seven
separate game-activities, and shall give examples of each
kind.
The first type of game I call "storytelling.1 1
There are three examples of this activity of "storytelling."
The first occurs when Didi tells Gogo the story of the two
thieves: "The four of them [Evangelists] were there— or
thereabouts"(he doubts even the credibility of the legend
which places the four of them "there"), "and only one
speaks of a thief being saved." (9) The game, in order to
continue, needs Gogo's support: "Come on, Gogo, return the
ball, can't you once in a way?" (9) Gogo complies by
returning the serve: "I find this really most extra
ordinarily interesting." (9) A second example is "the
story of the Englishman in the brothel," (11) a pat, off
color joke-routine. While Didi recognizes "the insignifi
cance of it all," he also realizes the need to remain busy
"while waiting" for Time to pass, for Godot to arrive, for
night to fall. A third example, actually a variation of
the device, is the use of song, perhaps with the Brechtian
purpose of alienating the audience in order to make them
conscious of the play as play. Frederick J. Hoffman notes
that the round song, with its potential for endless
repetition, "serves Vladimir to fill in a dread space of
7
loneliness until Estragon arrives on the second day."
59
Estragon's perhaps serious suggestion to pass the
time, "What about hanging ourselves?" (12) provides a
second type of game-activity which I call a "physical
ritual." Both agree to hang themselves, not at this point
from despair or disappointment as they will later propose
to do, but in hopes that the hanging itself may give them
an erection. A second example of this type of physical
ritual is the act of eating. While hunger interrupts their
games, making them conscious at least of their appetites,
it also provides a new motif for their games. When Gogo
comes close to ending the game-playing, "Nothing to be
done," (14) he nevertheless keeps it going by proffering
the remains of the carrot to Didi, "Like to finish it?"
(14) The pun, on finish, refers both to devouring the
carrot and to continuing the game by supplying another line.
A third example of this "physical ritual" can be observed
in the act of trying on the boots, a stage prop whose
g
symbolic overtones are explicit in the play:
VLADIMIR: Yes, yes. Come on we'll try the left
first.
ESTRAGON: We always find something, eh Didi, to
give us the impression we exist? (44)
A third type of game-activity involves a process I
call "elaboration." In the first example, Gogo and Didi
fantasize a past conversation with Godot, embellishing it
with new details as they go along:
60
ESTRAGON: What exactly did we ask him for?
VLADIMIR: Oh ... Nothing very definite.
ESTRAGON: And what did he reply?
VLADIMIR: That he'd see.
ESTRAGON: That he couldn't promise anything.
VLADIMIR: That he'd have to think it over.
ESTRAGON: In the quiet of his home.
VLADIMIR: Consult his family.
ESTRAGON: His friends.
VLADIMIR: His agents.
ESTRAGON: His correspondents.
VLADIMIR: His books.
ESTRAGON: His bank account.
VLADIMIR: Before taking a decision. (13)
A second example of "elaboration" is evidenced by supplying
actual details for imaginary occurrences. In the following
exchange, the dialogue moves from the possibility of shouts,
to a reason for the shouting, to an actual object at which
the "imagined" shouting was directed:
VLADIMIR: I thought it was he.
ESTRAGON: Who?
VLADIMIR: Godot.
ESTRAGON: Pahi The wind in the reeds.
VLADIMIR: I could have sworn I heard shouts.
ESTRAGON: And why would he shout?
VLADIMIR: At his horse. (13)
A fourth type of game-activity occurs when the
characters' actions are interrupted by the appearance of
other people, thus providing Gogo and Didi with new
material for their games. The entrance of Pozzo, the cruel
master, and Lucky, his strange servant, who is literally
bound to Pozzo by a rope, is a revealing sight, following
directly and, by no means, coincidentally, Gogo's sincere
concern: "I'm asking you if we're tied" to Godot. Didi's
61
reply indicates the unpredicability of his certainty: "No
question of it. (Pause.) For the moment." (14) The
appearance of Pozzo and Lucky offers numerous examples of
new and sadistic games which Gogo and Didi will devise to
pass the time:
In the first act, Gogo/Didi suspect that Pozzo may
be Godot. Discovering that he is not, they are
curious about him and Lucky. They circle around
their new acquaintances, listen to Pozzo's speeches,
taunt Lucky, and so on. . . . They make out of the
visitors a way of passing time. And they exploit
the persons of Pozzo/Lucky, taking food and playing
games. . . . They play rather cruel games with them,
postponing assistance.5
For example, when Pozzo collapses on stage, Gogo/Didi
postpone aid to him, suggesting possibilities of aid
instead: "Perhaps I could crawl to him" (53); "We might
try him with other names" (53); but, as if to linger on
any one game might bring them too close to reality, Gogo
proposes to change the content of the game: "Let's pass
on now to something else, do you mind?" (54) At the same
time he comments on the nature of their activity: "Child's
play." (54)
When Pozzo and Lucky finally make their exit in
Act I, Didi and Gogo become conscious once again of their
wait:
VLADIMIR: That passed the time.
ESTRAGON: It would have passed in any case.
VLADIMIR: Yes, but not so rapidly. (31)
Beckett, in his essay on Proust, described men as "victims
62
of this predominating condition and circumstance— Time;
. . . We are not merely more weary because of yesterday,
we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity
of yesterday, Beckett's characters recognize the threat
of time, at the same time that they deny its existence:
"Time has stopped" (25); "Let's not waste time in idle
discourse" (51); "We have time to grow old" (58); "How time
flies when one has fun" (49); "The blind have no notion of
time. The things of time are hidden from them, too." (56)
To remain unconscious of Time's passing, they once
again devise a "recreation," in the form of what I would
call "language games." These "language games" are a fifth
type of game-activity and are employed throughout the play,
at times in conjunction with other types of game-activities.
Not only "the fate of consciousness in a closed system" but
also language conceived as a game may be glimpsed in the
philosophical writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, "whose
Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus and Philosophical
Investigations Beckett must have pondered."^"'' This is how
Wittgenstein defines his concept of language as a game:
Systems of communication . . . we shall call
"language games." They are more or less akin to
what in ordinary language we call games. Children
are taught their native language by means of such
games. . . . We are not, however, regarding the
language games which we describe as incomplete
parts of language, but as language complete in
themselves, as complete systems of human
63
communication. To keep this point of view in mind,
it very often is useful to imagine such a simple
language to be the entire system of communication
of a tribe in a primitive state of society. Think
of primitive arithmetics of such tribes.12
To the frequent query, "What do we do now?" and its
negative counterpart, "Nothing to be done," their
inventiveness provides several alternatives: "In the
meantime, let us try and converse calmly, since we are
incapable of keeping silent." (40) "We could start all
over again perhaps." (41) Sometimes they follow through
with their own suggestions:
ESTRAGON: That's the idea, let's contradict each
other.
VLADIMIR: Impossible.
ESTRAGON: You think so? (41)
Or the following:
ESTRAGON: That's the idea, let's ask each other
questions.
VLADIMIR: What do you mean, at least there's
that? (41)
Sometimes they succumb to their despair:
ESTRAGON: We should turn resolutely toward Nature.
VLADIMIR: We've tried that. (41)
A playful form of these "language games" is "let's
fight and make up." They begin with the idea, "Let's
abuse each other":
VLADIMIR: Moroni
ESTRAGON: Vermin!
VLADIMIR: Abortion I
ESTRAGON: Morpion!
. VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat!
ESTRAGON: Curate!
64
VLADIMIR: Cretin!
ESTRAGON: (with finality) Crritic!
VLADIMIR: Oh!
He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.
The winner, Gogo, proposes the next game: "Now let's make
up." (48)
VLADIMIR: Gogo!
ESTRAGON: Didi!
VLADIMIR: Your hand!
ESTRAGON: Take it!
VLADIMIR: Come to my arms!
ESTRAGON: Your arms?
VLADIMIR: My breast!
ESTRAGON: Off we go!
They embrace. They separate. Silence.
VLADIMIR: How time flies when one has fun!
A variation of the use of these language games is
a series of literary or rhetorical devices which debase and
devalue words and, ultimately, lead to the disintegration
of language as a means of communication. It is a world
where people wait for a Godot to come, knowing that he will
not come. (There is no love, no friendship.) The situation
borders that nebulous realm which some have described as
tragicomic, others as absurd. Beckett revealed the
metaphysics of Godot in his earlier essay on Proust:
But if love, for Proust, is a function of man's
sadness, friendship is a function of his cowardice;
and, if neither can be realized because of the
impenetrability (isolation) of all that is not
"cosa mentale," at least the failure to possess
may have the nobility of that which is tragic,
whereas the attempt to communicate where no
communication is possible is merely a simian
vulgarity, or horribly comic, like the madness
that holds a conversation with the furniture. . . .
There is no communication because there are no
vehicles of communication.13
65
The play can be read, almost line for line, as a
tour de force in the "absurd" use of language. I have
selected three examples of language used for this effect.
The first is language which needs to be gualified, repeated,
and reduced to cliche in order to present its meaning:
ESTRAGON: Funny, the more you eat the worse it
gets.
VLADIMIR: With me it's just the opposite.
ESTRAGON: In other words?
VLADIMIR: I get used to the muck as I go along.
ESTRAGON: (after prolonged reflection) Is that
the opposite?
VLADIMIR: Question of temperament.
ESTRAGON: Of character.
VLADIMIR: Nothing you can do about it.
ESTRAGON: No use struggling.
VLADIMIR: One is what one is.
ESTRAGON: No use wriggling.
VLADIMIR: The essential doesn't change. (14)
A second example of the absurd use of language is
language which carries a double meaning when it is
qualified verbally, as in the following exchange on both
time and the pleasure of pipe-smoking:
POZZO: I hope I'm not driving you away. Wait
a little longer, you'll never regret it.
ESTRAGON: (scenting charity) We're in no hurry.
POZZO: (having lit his pipe) The second is
never so sweet ... (he takes the pipe out of his
mouth, contemplates it) 771 as the first I mean.
(He puts the pipe back in his mouth.) But it's
sweet just the same. (19; Italics in text mine)
The second is, at first, a reference to a measure of time,
but it is qualified by a means of a gesture and the words
which follow; thus it carries with it a second meaning, the
pleasures of smoking. A variation of this device is
66
language which is qualified by means of a pause, as the
following:
POZZO: ...— what happens in that case to your
appointment with this ... Godet ... Godot ...
Godin ... who has your future in his hands ...
(pause) ... at least your immediate future? (19)
The use of certain vowels and consonants selected
from a complete sentence to form a single word, a type of
language compression, if you like, demonstrates a third
example of the absurd use of language:
VLADIMIR: You waagerrim?
POZZO: I beg your pardon?
VLADIMIR: You want to get rid of him? (21;
Italics minel
The transliteration of French into English provides a
variation of this same technique: "Oh tray bong, tray,
tray, tray bong." (25)
Specific demonstrations of technical variations and
vulgarizations give way to more serious breakdowns in
thought and communication; in the following exchange, an
alternative is provided where a consolation was sought:
ESTRAGON: (on one leg) I'll never walk again!
VLADIMIR: (tenderly) I'll carry you. (Pause)
If necessary"! (22)
Questions which one character asks are unanswered; dialogue
becomes monologue. The Boy, who is the messenger of Godot,
is ironically commanded: "Words words. (Pause) Speak!"
(33)
67
The sixth form of game-activity in which the
characters indulge, and which I have tabulated, is that of
pantomime. One example is Lucky's contorted dance, a
performance in pantomime of one who "thinks he's entangled
in a net." (26-27) A second example of a game in
pantomime form is Gogo and Didi's vaudeville-like routine
of passing the hat:
Estraqon takes Vladimir's hat. Vladimir adjusts
Lucky's hat on his head. Estraqon puts on
Vladimir's hat in place of his own which he hands
to Vladimir. Vladimir takes Estraqon's hat.
Estraqon adjusts Vladimir's hat on his head.
Vladimir puts on Estraqon's hat in place of
Lucky's which he hands to Estraqon. Estraqon
takes Lucky's hat. Vladimir adjusts Estraqon's
hat on his head. (et cetera, et cetera) (46)
A third example of pantomime occurs when Didi
suggests "Let's just do the tree, for balance." (49)
Whereupon they proceed to hobble about, first on one leg,
then the other, imitating the only other living thing in
sight.
As soon as one type of game-activity ends, however,
they invent new ones or combine two former activities
together as in the following combination of a "physical
ritual" and "elaboration":
VLADIMIR: We could do our exercises.
ESTRAGON: Our movements.
VLADIMIR: Our elevations.
ESTRAGON: Our relaxations.
VLADIMIR: Our elongations.
ESTRAGON: Our relaxations.
68
VLADIMIR: To warm us up.
ESTRAGON: To calm us down.
VLADIMIR: Off we go. (49)
When they tire of these exercises, Didi is ready once
again with a suggestion, "What about a little deep
breathing?" (49) Gogo's reply is sadly humorous: "I'm
tired breathing." (49) As Hoffman notes, the language
itself is a "comic routine in Godot":
Beckett's language is "real" in the sense of its
being held to commonplace reality. Its realism is
indispensable to its critical function; his
creatures are victims both of a high degree of
expectation sponsored by centuries of rational
confidence and of their own sobering recognition
of things as they miserably are. The two
languages— that of a metaphysically stimulated
confidence, that of an existential limitation—
sometimes clash. Always in Godot. the clash is
there, though it is often merely implicit. The
impact of situational realism is especially
strong when it is defined within the limits of
"tramps," hoboes, the apotheosic "bum."14
The seventh and last category of game-activity is
that of "role-playing," or the "imitation" of other
people's actions:
VLADIMIR: Will you not play?
ESTRAGON: Play at what?
VLADIMIR: We could play at Pozzo and Lucky. (47)
The players are conscious not only of their game-
playing but of their performances, their audience, and the
theater itself. On their performances, Pozzo remarks:
"How do you find me? (Vladimir and Estragon look at him
blankly.) Good? Fair? Middling? Poor? Positively bad?
69
. . . I weakened a little towards the end, you didn't
notice?" (25) Toward the end of the play, Didi comments
on their lagging performances: "We were beginning to
weaken. Now we're sure to see the evening out." (49)
They are conscious, too, of the theater, as a place
set apart for the performance of their activity: "Charming
spot" (10); "Encore" (26); "End of the corridor; on the
left." "Keep my seat" (23); "Charming evening we're having."
( 23)
The characters acknowledge also the presence of an
audience. Pozzo reflects: "So I ask myself is there
anything I can do in my turn for these honest fellows who
are having such a dull, dull time." (26) Didi, trying to
help Gogo find a way out, takes his arm and drags him
toward the front of the stage, gesturing toward the
audience: "There! Not a soul in sight! Off you go!
Quick! (He pushes Estragon towards auditorium. Estragon
recoils in horror.) You won't? (He contemplates
auditorium.) Well, I can understand that." (47)
The audience, in this way, is incorporated into
the action; they, too, play the "waiting game," spectators
as well as participants, in a nightly recurring ritual.
The two "time rhythms" which Schechner delineates, one of
the play, the other of the stage, merge in the end:
70
Theatrically, the exit of the Boy and the sudden
night are strong cues for the act (and the play)
to end. We, the audience, are relieved— it's
almost over for us. They, the actors, do not
move— even when the Godot-game is over, the theater
game keeps them in their place: tomorrow they must
return to enact identical routines. Underlying the
play . . . is the theater, and this is exactly what
the script insinuates— a nightly appointment
performed for people the characters will never meet.
Waiting for Godot powerfully injects the mechanics
of the theater into the mysteries of the play.15
2. The thematic or metaphoric level.— The
characters' consciousness of their wait for Godot is, we
have observed, lessened by a series of games which they
play with one another. "They confront Time (i.e., are
conscious of Godot) only when there is a break in the
16
games, and they 'know' and 'feel' that they are waiting."
But he does not arrive, and the characters, who say they
will go at the end of each act, do not move; in the end,
we, the spectator-participants, choose to leave our seats,
empty the theater, in effect, abandon our wait, only to
linger elsewhere, perhaps, in another seat, in another
theater, by another tree; this is not only the play as a
game but the theater as a game.
The game is thus a metaphor for life in which
life's central action is that of waiting. (Waiting is an
action, albeit a passive or static form of action. It
means "to experience the action of time, which is constant
change. And yet, as nothing real happens, that change is
71
in itself an illusion. The ceaseless activity of time is
self-defeating, purposeless, and therefore null and
void. "^)
The characters' failure to remember events robs
events both of significance and of their place in time.
Gogo does not remember the earlier appearance of Pozzo
and Lucky; Pozzo claims he has a "defective" memory; the
Boy does not remember having seen Gogo and Didi before;
Gogo cannot remember the tree by which they wait,
yesterday, if he has ever met Godot, or even if he and Didi
are waiting in the right place for Godot to come.
For a time, however, for the time of the
performance and for some time after, the metaphoric level
of game and its thematic use within the play merge with the
reality of life as we conceptualize life in poetic form,
as a game of waiting, where "time flies when one has fun,"
when one is unconscious of the process of waiting itself.
As Richard Schechner points out, "The gamesmanship of
Waiting for Godot is extraordinary":
Most of the play is taken up by a series of word
games, play acting, body games, routines. Each of
these units is distinct, usually cued in by
memories of why Gogo/Didi are where they are.
Unable simply to consider the ramifications of
"waiting," unfit, that is, for pure speculation
(as Lucky was once fit), they fall back onto
their games: how many thieves were saved, how
many leaves on the tree, calling each other names,
how can we hang ourselves, and so on. These games
72
are not thematically meaningless, they feed into the
rich image-texture of the play; but they are
meaningless in terms of the play's action: they
lead nowhere, they contribute to the non-plot.18
3. The absurd or existential level.— Waiting for
Godot is an absurdist play. The "non-seriousness" of the
characters1 actions accounts for the successful repression
of time's passing: "How time flies when one has fun."
(49) This "non-seriousness" is a formal aspect of play
itself as Huizinga defines it:
Summing up the formal characteristics of play, we
might call it a free activity standing quite
consciously outside "ordinary" life as being "not
serious," but at the same time absorbing the player
intensely and utterly.19
Such non-seriousness results in the separation of the five
performance activities (play, games, sports, theatre, and
ritual) from productivity. Nowhere is that separation more
clearly presented than in the futile wait for Godot where
"nothing to be done" represents Gogo's and Didi's lack of
productive goals, while "what do we do now?" reveals only
too sadly the absurdity of their state, that they must
continue to play their games while waiting.
A second related characteristic which applies both
to the performance activities in general, and to game-plays
in particular, is the special value which is attached to
certain objects whose practical worth, beauty, or scarcity
is negligible. These objects are more than just stage
73
props; sometimes they are the subject of the game itself.
As Schechner points out, "These simple objects are very
important. Often they are the focus of the conflict;
sometimes, as in the theatre or children's play, they help
20
create the symbolic reality." Such objects in Godot
include Gogo's boots and laces, the carrot, the turnip,
Pozzo's whip, bags, basket, pipe, and vaporizer, Lucky's
stool, hat, the rope by which he is attached to Pozzo, the
bones which Gogo salvages from Lucky, the handkerchief with
which Gogo wipes away Lucky's tears, even the moon itself,
which Didi describes as "pale for weariness . . . of
climbing heaven and gazing on the likes of us." (34)
A third characteristic of absurdist plays, their
"inner landscapes," is demonstrated in what I would call
an anti-game activity, the act of dreaming. Dreaming is
an unconscious or subconscious process (games are a
conscious activity). Their purpose within the play is to
allow Gogo an escape from the consciousness of Time; thus,
the purpose of dreaming and of playing games is the same,
despite the fact that one is an unconscious process, while
the other is a conscious one. Dreaming occurs twice in
the play, once at the beginning, again in the end. Both
times Gogo falls asleep and is awakened by the lonely Didi.
Both times Gogo's question and Didi's answer are the same:
74
ESTRAGON: Why will you never let me sleep?
VLADIMIR: I felt lonely. (11, 57)
Didi wakes Gogo because he does not want to confront time,
because he wants to blot it out by playing games, since he
is unable to sleep, too.
When Gogo is first "restored to the horror of his
situation." as Beckett describes his awakening, he
confesses, "I had a dream." (11) But Didi prevents him
from revealing its contents, "Don't tell mel" (11) The
second time Didi awakens Gogo, he reveals the mood of his
dream, "I was dreaming I was happy." (57) Didi's reply
at once confirms the reason for his jealousy and
annoyance, "That passed the time." (57) Didi is unable
to pass the time by dreaming; at the same time, he wonders
which one of them has really been asleep and which one
awake. As Schechner astutely observes: "Vladimir has his
epiphany while Estragon sleeps— in a real way his
21
perception is a function of the sleeping Gogo":
Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I
sleeping now? To-morrow, when I wake, or think I
do, what shall I say of to-day? That with Estragon
my friend, at this place, until the fall of night,
I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his
carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But
in all what truth will there be? (Estragon. having
struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off
again. Vladimir looks at him.) He'll know nothing.
He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll
give him a carrot. (Pause) Astride of a grave and
a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly
the grave-digger puts on the forceps. . . . (He
75
looks again at Estraqon.) At me too someone is
looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping,
he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (58-59)
Waiting for Godot is not only an absurdist play,
it is also an existentialist play; the one verifies and
corroborates the other:
But the reliance upon the existence of an eternal
being, to the neglect of personal responsibility
for existence, is a major object of Beckett's
criticism. . . . Waiting for Godot is an
existentialist play, and as such it argues against
the assumption of an image that drains off the
energy of stark human responsibility. . . . In
fact, "waiting" is itself a meaningless activity,
if it is a waiting for a specific supporting
force. The tramps describe again and again the
futility of such expectations.22
Edith Kern qualifies the kind of dramatic emphasis in
Godot's existentialism:
But, unlike Sartre, Beckett's characters are never
"en situation." They are, rather, entirely removed
from the more immediate problems of society and,
not living within a social world they do not play
a part either in good faith or in bad. . . . They
are never "engages," or committed, never the god
like creators of their essence as men.23
To summarize, the arrival— or nonarrival— of Godot
is never the crucial issue. As R. Lamont points out,
conversation and literature are for Beckett "forms of what
Pascal calls 'le divertissement,' possibly the 'supreme
game' of Mallarme, but a game nevertheless, one of man's
inventions to divert himself from the thought of death— a
24
way of killing time while it is killing you." It is
games in the end which are the most significant form of
76
activity, for it is in the wait for Godot, and in the games
which the characters play to fill that time of waiting, and
in our wait, as spectators of a game-play, as participants
in this Game of Life, that the full absurdity of the human
situation is revealed:
Religious interpretations seem to overlook a number
of essential features of the play— its constant
stress on the uncertainty of the appointment with
Godot, Godot's unreliability and irrationality, and
the repeated demonstration of the futility of the
hopes pinned on him. The art of waiting for Godot
is shown as essentially absurd. Admittedly it might
be a case of "Credere quia absurdum est." yet it
might even more forcibly be taken as a demonstration
of the proposition, "Absurdum est credere."25
Endgame
If it was the end I would not so much mind, but
how often I have said, in my life, before some
new awful thing, It is the end, and it was not
the end, and yet the end cannot be far off now.
From An Abandoned Work
— Samuel Beckett
Beckett's second play, Endgame. bears immediate
similarities and obvious differences to Waiting for Godot.
Like the symbiotic couple in Godot, Hamm and Clov are the
two characters in Endgame. They live bounded by the four
walls of their shelter (unlike Gogo and Didi who wait
outside by a tree) with Hamm's parents, Nagg and Nell, who
are even further enclosed within two ashcans. These four
are the only survivors— they are all that remain after the
77
holocaust. Clov can look out through two small windows at
the top of the shelter only with the aid of a ladder and a
telescope.
The game, or games, in Endgame is by no means
clearly defined the way it is in Waiting for Godot. What
the endgame is, how one plays it, what its rules are, these
are guestions that leave critic and reader as bewildered as
the players themselves. Martin Esslin, almost by necessity,
skirts the issue: "If Waiting for Godot shows its two
heroes whiling away the time in a succession of desultory,
and never-ending games, Beckett's second play deals with an
26
'endgame,' the final game in the hour of death."
Richard M. Eastman posits a more satisfying
explanation:
Limbo, chess game, stage play— each one would by
itself provide a ready frame for parable. The three
blended together provide a compound reality in
Endgame which is triply suggestive, avoiding the
simple one-to-one correspondence of allegory to
theme which would stultify the rt der's imagination.
One can speculate that the game which Hamm plays
is one with an unseen player, Death himself. Like the
plight of other Beckett characters, Hamm fears to die, yet
he has tired of living. It is only when he thinks Clov has
left him that he covers himself with the sheet— or the
shroud, if you like, and gives up. Yet one strongly
suspects that Beckett intended this very obscurity about
78
the nature of the endgame, its rules, even whether Hamm,
Clov, or Death is the winnerc Like the game of Chess to
which the play is metaphorically likened, one makes the
best moves that one can, one eliminates the other player-
pieces on the board, and the game ends— in checkmate or—
in stalemate]
1. The structural or formal level.— "The end is in
28
the beginning and yet you go on." Hamm speaks this line
more than half-way through Endgame, suggesting that the
idea of an end is already contained in its beginning, that
death is a condition of birth. More importantly, the line
foreshadows the play's end, already present in its
beginning, revealing the circular structure of a drama
which ends almost as it begins. In fact, the opening seems
strangely apt as a closing:
CLOV: (fixed gaze, tonelessly) Finished, it's
finished, it must be finished.
(Pause)
Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly,
there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.
(Pause)
I can't be punished any more.
(Pause)
I'll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by
ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. (1-2)
In Schechner's definition of open form, a circular
structure is one which is bracketed or exists in nontime.
The structure of Endgame is bracketed by the removal and
replacement of the Veronica's veil or handkerchief at the
79
play's beginning and end. On a theatrical level, this
removal and replacement suggests an opening and closing
curtain. The dissolution of sequential time (all is "Zero"
within the shelter) points to the occurrence of activities
within the realm of nontime: "Moments for nothing, now as
always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed
and story ended." (83) This circularity accounts both
for its lack of an ending and for its lack of a synthesis.
Hamm's first words are "Me to play," yet the
remaining action concerns the interplay between Hamm and
Clov, Hamm and his parents. This interplay occurs chiefly
through games and stories which are devised (not like the
games in Godot which Gogo and Didi invent to pass the time)
to prevent time from passing, to stop time as it were, by
29
preventing the impossible heap from one day accumulating.
Hamm's favorite game (the only activity in which
he is actually mobile) is to take a little turn around the
shelter in which he is enclosed:
HAMM: Take me for a little turn.
(Clov goes behind the chair and pushes it forward.)
Not too fast!
(Clov pushes chair.)
Right round the world!
(Clov pushes chair.)
Hug the walls, then back to the center again.
(Clov pushes chair.)
I was right in the center, wasn't I? (25)
The props in this game consist of the wheel chair, the
ladder by which Clov raises himself to peer out of the two
80
windows of the room (some critics have suggested the eyes
of a skull), and the telescope or "glass" through which
Clov, with great theatricality, turning it on the
auditorium, sees "a mutitude ... in transports ... of joy.
(Pause) That's what I call a magnifier." (29) Clov then
reflects on the humorousness of his remark, lowering the
telescope and turning towards Hamm: "Well? Don't we
laugh?" (29)
The shelter in which Hamm and Clov, the two primary
players in the Endgame. and Nagg and Nell, Hamm's parents,
are contained (Hamm's parents are contained in ashbins
within the shelter) has been described as "one corner of a
great chessboard" where Death plays a traditional game of
chess with Hamm:
Hamm is in a hopeless position and by the sacrifice
of other pieces (two trapped pawns and a greatly
restricted knight) can delay but not prevent
checkmate. As in chess, Hamm is not removed from
the "board," at the end. With checkmate, the king
is dead, the board is frozen with the king and any
other pieces fixed in their places, and Death is
everywhere triumphant.30
That the play is a game is suggested in still a
second way by Beckett's conscious efforts to focus on the
play as play. The frequent use of dramatic terminology, of
such terms as aside. exit. underplot. character. soliloquy.
a beginning, middle. and end, dialogue reveals the craft
and craftiness of a master craftsman, Beckett himself. The
81
characters, too, are self-conscious performers. Hamm, for
example, is the ham-actor implied by his name. He is also
a creator, like the apocryphal tailor in the story his
father narrates, an "engraver" of tales; the comparison
between God, the tailor-artist, and Hamm is an apt one.
Hamm, like the tailor, is more concerned with the making
of stories than with finishing them. Unlike God who
31
finished the world in six days, neither the tailor, nor
Nagg, nor Hamm, nor Clov himself can finish the Endgame,
though Nagg notes he tells the story "worse and worse."
(20) Nevertheless, the task remains to continue. As Clov
remarks, "I use the words you taught me. If they don't
mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be
silent." (44) But the end of one story necessitates the
beginning of another. Hamm postulates: "Perhaps I could
go on with my story, end it and begin another." (69) Such
self-consciousness of the actors as players, performers,
and creators is a chief characteristic Lionel Abel ascribes
to the great figures of Metatheatre.
Insofar as games have replaced plot in the game-
play, the major action of the play involves Clov's threat
to leave Hamm and Hamm's ploys to prevent him by inventing
stories, by continuing, that is, to write his chronicle:
CLOV: I'll leave you.
HAMM: No!
CLOV: What is there to keep me here?
82
HAMM: The dialogue.
(Pause)
I've got on with my story.
(Pause)
I've got on with it well.
(Pause. Irritably)
Ask me where I've got to.
CLOV: Oh, by the way, your story?
HAMM: (surprised) What story?
CLOV: The one you've been telling yourself all your
days.
HAMM: Ah you mean my chronicle? (58)
The relationship between Hamm and Clov is a
symbiotic one, bearing similarities to that of the friends,
Gogo and Didi, who wonder whether or not things wouldn't
be better if they should part, and likenesses, also, to the
master-slave relationship between Pozzo and Lucky. Indeed,
the blind Hamm is grotesquely reminiscent of the blind
Pozzo of Act II of Godot. Hamm, like Pozzo, is cruel,
infirm, and impotent. His faithful Clov remains with him,
bound as much by habit as Lucky by his rope.
As the action of the play evolves, the central
question remains how to end the game, how to leave Hamm.
When Clov protests he cannot leave because he does not know
the combination to the cupboard, Hamm promises to tell it
to him if he will only "finish" him. Hamm himself provides
an alternative: "You can make a raft and the currents
will carry us away, far away, to other ... mammals." (34)
Hamm, the artist, is, in some ways, entitled to his
eccentricities; madness is his strange birthright; and we
83
have a vague feeling of certainty that he is describing
himself in the following:
I once knew a madman who thought the end of the
world had come. He was a painter— and engraver.
I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and
see him, in the asylum. I'd take him by the hand
and drag him to the window. Look! There! All
that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of
the herring fleet! All that loveliness!
(Pause)
He'd snatch away his hand and go back into his
corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes.
(Pause)
He alone had been spared.
(Pause)
Forgotten.
(Pause)
It appears the case is ... was not so ... so
unusual. (44)
As the play progresses towards its endgame, Clov
takes down the picture which has been hanging face to the
3 2
wall and hangs in its place an alarm-clock. The clock,
which earlier in the play Clov had proposed to be a signal
to Hamm, informing Hamm whether or not he had left Hamm or
simply died in his kitchen, is now a prop in the Endgame.
To Hamm's question, "What are you doing?" Clov puns,
"Winding up." In one sense, time [like the millet grains]
has run out. In another sense, time and art are
interchangeable in Endgame. The Keatsian axiom, Beauty is
Truth and Truth is Beauty, is being replaced by Beckett's
own romantic paradox, Time is Art and Art is Time. The
Endgame is symbolic, even in its etymology, of this
dualism, for end implies time, while game suggests art.
84
As long as Hamm is alive, he continues to perform, play,
sing, invent. Only at the end does he discard the props
of his life's game, his gaff, his whistle, his black toy
dog with three legs. His final gestures, the covering of
his face with his handkerchief, the lowering of his arms
to his armrests, bring him once again to the same
motionless position he assumed at the beginning. His last
words, "Old stancher 1 (Pause) You ... remain," (84) are
an apostrophe not only to the handkerchief, but to Clov,
too, who, unknown to Hamm, remains on stage as well. Clov,
dressed for all kinds of weather, "halts by the door and
stands there, impassive and motionless, his eyes fixed on
Hamm, till the end. Hamm gives up." (82) Whether or not
Clov does leave remains ambiguous, even at the end.
Significantly, the choice of the apostrophe, stancher.
has multiple relevant meanings. The verb, to staunch,
means to render water-tight or weather proof (thus Clov
dressed in panama hat, tweed coat, raincoat over his arm,
umbrella, and bag); to quench thirst, hunger, and desire;
to repress; to extinguish appetite, hatred, and anger; to
allay pain (no more painkiller); to put an end to strife;
to cease from violence; to stop bleeding (the large blood
stained handkerchief which covers Hamm's face at the
3 3
beginning and at the end); to come to an end. As Clov
prepares to leave, Hamm asks "a last favor": "Cover me
85
with the sheet. (Long pause.) No? Good. (Pause) Me to
play. (Pause. Wearily) Old endgame lost of old, play
and lose and have done with losing." (82) The words, "Me
to play," are the first words Hamm speaks in the play.
They are his last request of Clov as well!
2. The thematic or metaphoric level.— The
importance of the game of chess as the key metaphor in the
34
play has been observed by many critics. Eastman, for
example, notes that there is a color contrast between the
players, similar to the contrast between the pieces in a
game of chess:
Hamm and Clov have "very red" faces; the faces of
Nagg and Nell are "very white." Hamm sits in his
armchair like a Red King, helpless, immobile, but
central. Like a chess piece, Clov has his own
limitations of movement; he is stiff-legged and
bound to serve the center-piece.35
Hugh Kenner makes an extensive and illuminating
analogy between the game of chess and the "metaphors of
this jagged play":
It is a game of leverage, in which the significance
of a move may be out of all proportion to the local
disturbance it effects. ("A flea! this is awful!
What a day!") It is a game of silences, in which
new situations are appraised: hence Beckett's most
frequent stage direction, "Pause." It is a game of
steady attrition; by the time we reach the endgame
the board is nearly bare, as bare as Hamm's world
where there are no more bicycle wheels, sugarplums,
pain killers, or coffins, let alone people. And
it is a game which by the successive removal of
screening pieces constantly extends the range of
86
lethal forces, until at endgame peril from a key
piece sweeps down whole ranks and files.36
Kenner summarizes the play's action in terms of the
mobility of its characters, the pieces in the game:
The king is hobbled by the rule which allows him to
move in any direction, but only one square at a
time; Hamm's circuit of the stage and return to
center perhaps exhibits him patrolling the inner
boundaries of the little nine-square territory he
commands. . . . His knight shuttles to and fro,
his pawns are pinned. No threat is anticipated
from the audience, which is presumably off the
board. . . . He sacrifices his last mobile piece,
discards his staff and whistle, summons for the
last time a resourceless knight and unanswering
Pawn, and covers his face once more with the
handkerchief somehow in check.
While one metaphoric view, the one with which I
have been mainly concerned, likens the action of the play
to the final moments of a game of chess, a second critical
stance sees a resemblance between Hamm's end and the passion
of Jesus, while a third critical interpretation draws some
enlightening parallels to Shakespeare's The Tempest.
(Still another critic points out a different Shakespearian
38
parallel, observing King Lear as playing the "endgame." )
John J. Sheedy, noting the similarities and
contrasts between the passion of Jesus and the suffering of
Hamm, summarizes this second critical point of view:
Jesus was crucified at a skull-shaped place called
Golgotha. . . . In Endgame. the closed world of the
shelter that is the place of Hamm's passion is also
the place of the skull. Like Jesus, Hamm says,
"It's finished," calls "Father! Father," wears his 39
veronica, suffers and dies in the place of the skull.
87
Sheedy observes also the ironic contrasts between
Hamm and Jesus:
Unlike King Jesus, Hamm's suffering and death occur
in a constricted, insular field of play and are no
more significant than the endgame struggles and
checkmate of a chess king— which is how the play
also presents them.40
Ruby Cohn calls our attention to a third level of
meaning, the "broad parallels" and "ironic contrasts"
between Endgame and Shakespeare's The Tempest. First, she
notes the similarity between the deposed Duke Prospero and
the helpless player-king Hamm: Hamm, "paralyzed in his
wheel chair that ironically reveals Prospero's dual throne,
powerless with his gaff that physically resembles Prospero's
magic staff" is, like Prospero, at the center of his
41
play. Secondly, she points out the resemblance between
Hamm's companion-servant, Clov, and the supernatural and
grotesque companions of Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban:
Like the "savage and deformed slave" of The Tempest.
Clov has a "stiff, staggering walk." . . . Prospero
punishes Caliban because he is inimical to virtue
and order, whereas Hamm constantly interferes with
Clov's trivial efforts "to create a little order."
But though Clov may resemble Caliban physically and
mentally, he is also the only Ariel that Hamm has,
and Hamm alternately menaces and bribes him.42
Thirdly, she points out that, although we never see
Hamm and Clov playing chess as we do Ferdinand and Miranda
in Act V of The Tempest, we are nevertheless very much aware
of Hamm's consciousness of games:
88
Hamm's opening line is "Me to play"; he summons
Clov with his whistle, that also punctuates many
games. As Prospero makes recurrent reference to
his magic powers, Hamm makes recurrent reference
to his play as a game or a play: he declares that
he will never stop playing. . . . The last move
is towards stillness; the Endgame that opened with
the word "Finished" is nevertheless played through
to the end of the game.43
3. The absurd or existential level.— Martin Esslin
has described the "existential experience" in Beckett's
plays as "a succession of attempts to give shape to the
void." Since there is no "final, definitive reality, we
enter a world of games, of arbitrary actions structured to
give the illusion of reality." Hamm and Clov structure
their existence in such a way. Their awareness of games,
their story-telling, their questions and answers, their
self-consciousness, all achieve this arbitrary reality:
There is an infinite number of possibilities for
such games and series, such patterns of experience.
While none of them can lay claim to meaning anything
beyond itself, they nevertheless are worth our
attention; they may not express reality in terms of
something outside itself, but they are reality,
they are the world to the consciousness which has
produced them and which in turn jls what it
experiences.44
That is why the question of whether or not Hamm is inventing
characters "like the solitary child who turns himself into
children, two, three, so as to be together, and whisper
together, in the dark," (70) is an irrelevant one: "For
games, however arbitrarily their rules are drawn up, are
89
by no means devoid of value in a cognitive process."
Esslin draws a parallel to mathematics which deals with
"mere patterns of the mind, without any direct reference
to observable reality," mathematics as a form of
"intellectual game":
A mind that has, quite arbitrarily, constructed a
space with different numbers or dimensions, will,
by dint of having journeyed that way, return with
a firmer grasp of the two-dimensional world; in
the same way Beckett's limit-situations . . .
could be described as a kind of differential and
integral calculus of the human consciousness.
Again and again Beckett plays the game of imagining
the two extreme limits of the human situation
itself: the position of a consciousness before
the moment of birth, and in the hour of death and
even beyond it— on the one extreme limit, the
unimaginable case of a consciousness that cannot
yet conceive of the fact of its own existence; on
the other, the consciousness that cannot become
aware of its non-being.45
John J. Sheedy comes to the same conclusion:
Since extensions into political or natural worlds
outside are no longer possible, action in this
private realm can have no meaning beyond itself;
in the utterly private realm, that is, life can
only be a game, limited in space and duration,
with no meaning, consequence, or relevance beyond
its own space and duration.46
90
References
■*"Ihab Hassan, The Literature of Silence: Henry
Miller and Samuel Beckett (New York: Knopf Publishers,
1967), pp. 174-175.
^Ibid.. p. 198.
3
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York:
Grove Press, 1954). All citations in my text are to this
edition.
4 '
Richard Schechner, "Godotology: There's Lots of
Time in Godot," Modern Drama. December, 1966, p. 270.
^Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden
City, New York: Doubleday, 1961), p. 13.
^Schechner, "Godotology," pp. 274-275.
7
Frederick J. Hoffman, Samuel Beckett: The Language
of Self (New York: E. P. Dutton^ 1964), p. 152.
Q
The barefoot Gogo compares himself to Christ who
also, he maintains, was barefoot, page 34.
^Schechner, "Godotology," p. 273.
■^Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press,
1957) , pp. 2-3.
'*''*'Hassan, Literature of Silence, p. 129.
~ ' ~ ^The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford, 1958), p. 81,
quoted by Hassan, Literature of Silence, p. 129.
13
Beckett, Proust. pp. 46-47.
14
Hoffman, Samuel Beckett, p. 140.
■ * " ^Schechner, "Godotology," p. 276.
16Ibid.. p. 270.
17
Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, pp. 18-19.
91
■^Schechner, "Godotology," p. 274.
19
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play
Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), p. 13.
20
Richard Schechner, "Approaches to Theory/
Criticism," Tulane Drama Review. Summer, 1966, p. 31.
^Schechner, "Godotology," p. 270.
22
Hoffman, Samuel Beckett, p. 150.
23
Edith Kern, "Drama Stripped for Inaction,
Beckett's Godot." Yale French Studies. Fall, 1954, p. 47,
cited in Hoffman, Samuel Beckett, p. 144.
24
R. Lamont, "Death and Tragi-comedy: Three Plays
of the New Theatre," Massachusetts Review. VI (Winter,
1965), 390.
^Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 22.
26Ibid.. p. 27.
27
Richard M. Eastman, "The Strategy of Samuel
Beckett's Endgame," Modern Drama. May, 1959, p. 37.
28
Samuel Beckett, Endgame: A Play in One Act
(New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 69. All citations in my
text will be to this edition.
29
Richard N. Coe, Samuel Beckett: A Critical
Study (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968),
p. 89, attributes the source of the heap of millet
metaphor to the Greek philosopher, Zeno, who propounded the
following: "Take any finite quantity of millet, and pour
half of it into a heap. Then take half of the remaining
quantity, and add that to the heap. Then half the
remaining quantity again . . . and so on. In an infinite
universe, the heap could be complete; in a finite universe,
never, for the nearer it gets to the totality, the slower
it increases."
30
John J. Sheedy, "The Comic Apocalypse of King
Hamm," Modern Drama. December, 1966, p. 317.
31
Hamm relates an anecdote which contains the
following punchline: "But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look—
92
(disdainful gesture, disgustedly) at the world— (pause) and
look— (loving gesture, proudly) at my TROUSERS!" (22-23)
32
Sheedy, "Comic Apocalypse," p. 312, views the
picture with its face to the wall as "a sign of mourning,"
a custom still practiced in many European communities. He
sees the replacement of the picture by the alarm-clock as
the agreed-upon signal that Clov is actually preparing to
leave. In his view, neither Hamm nor Clov knows that the
other has decided to end, but "they have simultaneously
renounced the game of life, and each gesture diminishes the
other," p. 314.
33
See James A. H. Murray, et al.. The Oxford
English Dictionary. X (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961),
798.
34
Richard N. Coe, for example, Samuel Beckett,
p. 96, says that "what is new (apart from the condensation
of the material). . . is the fact that the play itself has
become a game."
William York Tindall, Samuel Beckett (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 42, observes that
"hints of chess in the play are confused by others of
cards and tennis. Playing in general may be intended; for
all games are play and life is a play. We must play the
game to the end."
"^Eastman, "Strategy," p. 37.
Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968) , p"! 157.
37Ibid.. pp. 158-159.
3 8
See Jan Knott, "Le Roi Lear autrement dit Fin de
partie." Les Temps Modernes. July, 1962, pp. 48-77.
39
Sheedy, "Comic Apocalypse," pp. 316-317.
4( 3Ibid. . p. 317.
41
Ruby Cohn, "Tempest in an Endgame," Symposium.
Winter, 1965, p. 330.
43Ibid.. p. 331.
43Ibid.. p. 333.
93
44
Martin Esslin, ed., Samuel Beckett:
of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Hall, 1965), p. 9.
45
Ibid.
46
Sheedy, "Comic Apocalypse," p. 316.
Collection
Prentice-
CHAPTER III
JEAN GENET'S THE MAIDS: A CEREMONIAL-
RITUAL-GAME
"Are you offering me the dreary exile of your
imagination?"
Claire
— The Maids
The Maids (Les Bonnes) is Genet's second play.'*'
His first play, Deathwatch (Haute Surveillance) was written
before but produced after The Maids in the same year,
1949. The revised version of The Maids on January 13,
1954, in a revival at the Theatre de la Huchette,
2
established the definitive version.
I will not undertake a long discussion of the
literary influences on Genet. They include Alfred Jarry's
revolutionary play, Ubu Roi. Antoine Artaud's theater of
cruelty, Bertolt Brecht's "epic theater" and the
"Alienation-effect" it produces on the spectator, and the
ritualistic Greek and Oriental theaters. Bettina Knapp
notes similarities to the dramas of Racine, Claudel,
3
Beckett, and Pirandello.
The Maids is a game-play which employs the dramatic
4
technique of a game, on the three levels I have outlined
94
95
for such plays: the structural or formal, the thematic or
metaphoric, and the absurd or existential. While Genet
explores the concept of role-playing and the theme of
illusion-reality in his later plays, notably The Balcony
and The Blacks, they are not game-plays, as I define them,
because game does not replace plot-structure and because
the game as metaphor is restricted only to specific scenes.
The game in The Maids consists of a nightly
ceremonial-sacrificial-ritual (un jeu), invented and
played by two maids who are sisters. Each night, while
their mistress is out, they assume imaginary roles; one
poses as Madame, the other plays the role of the maid who
is pretending to be Madame. By the rules of their game,
the sister who plays the role of maid must try to "kill"
the sister who plays Madame before the real Madame returns
home. The game, which begins in the first movement of the
play while Madame is out, is completed in the last movement
when Solange/Claire "kills" Claire-Solange/Madame.
1. The structural or formal level.— The Maids and
Deathwatch, Genet's first two plays, are immediately
distinguishable from his later plays, The Balcony. The
Blacks. and The Screens, by the tightness of their
5
structure. For the purpose of discussing the formal
aspects of game in The Maids. I have adopted Oreste F.
96
g
Pucciani's division of the play into five movements, a
structure which he compares to the five-act division of
neoclassical tragedy of Racine.
If a diagram of the play's "open form" following
Pucciani's five-part division were drawn, it would resemble
Figure 4.
Death of the
" fa ls e * Madame
Departure
of Madame
Arri val
of Madame
te lephone
Ring of the
alarm-clock
SOLANGE CLAIRE
Fig. 4.— Pucciani's Division of The Maids
Claire and Solange are the two individuals in
conflict. Their "life-rhythms" make an "open form" of
increasing tension, explosion, and return to the original
situation. There is no resolution to their plight; while
Solange/Claire kills Claire-Solange/Madame within the
context of the game, she still has not succeeded in killing
97
the "real" Madame, who will shortly return.
In The Maids, game rules have replaced the plot or
story-line of traditional drama. Richard Schechner
summarizes these changes:
A single game, or a series of related games, usually
of a rhythmic-explosive nature is played. Instead
of an action being "completed," permutations on a
given set are explored. The story yields to the
game as the matrix of the theatrical situation. . . .
This is a radical change because it decreases our
interest in character (people follow set patterns
rather than invent ways around or through difficult
situations) and psychological motivation.7
At the beginning of the first movement, Claire is
0
playing the role of Madame, and Solange, that of Claire.
Claire/Madame begins the tirade against her servant,
9
Solange/Claire: "Those gloves! Those eternal gloves!
I've told you time and again to leave them in the kitchen.
You probably hope to seduce the milkman with them." (35)
Although the audience is not aware that a game is taking
place, Claire/Madame indicates her own consciousness of it
and signals its start: "Make yourself quite at home.
Preen like a peacock. And above all, don't hurry, we've
plenty of time. Go!" (36) The maids' consciousness of
set time is present throughout the entire play,
particularly in relation to playing the game.
Symbol, gesture, posture, tone, clothing, even
color, provide the necessary "equipment" for the
metamorphosis from maid to Madame. Clothing is used "to
cover up real identities. After the gloves are returned
to the kitchen, the costumes and jewels are brought out:
"Get my necklacei But hurry, we won't have time. If the
gown's too long, make a hem with some safety pins." (42)
Solange/Claire is positioned menially; she "squats on the
rug, spits on the patent-leather slippers, and polishes
them"; she is "on her knees." Claire/Madame regally "primps
in front of the mirror." (37) Levels of reality and
appearance are further blurred by the complex mirror-image
which Genet develops in this scene, producing a fourfold
reflection of the pair: Solange/Claire's image is
reflected back at her in the shoes she is polishing, while
Claire/Madame looks at herself in the mirror. Solange's
loathing is a contempt both for Claire as Madame and for
herself playing the role of Claire. Just before the ring
of the alarm-clock ends the masquerade, Claire/Madame sees
herself in the mirror "more beautiful than everl" (45)
She also sees her two maids in the glass embodied in the
reflection of Solange/Claire. Solange/Claire addresses
the illusory Madame in the mirror:
Now, here are the two maids, the faithful servants!
They're standing in front of you. Despise them.
Look more beautiful.— We no longer fear you. We're
merged, enveloped in our fumes, in our revels, in
our hatred of you. (46)
Even the exaggeratedly tragic tone in which
Claire/Madame has been speaking is dropped and she reverts
99
back, for a brief sentence, to her real identity as Claire,
merging her identity with that of her sister, providing a
puzzling moment for the astute viewer: "A ridiculous young
milkman despises us, and if we' re going to have a kid by
him— (37)11
Color, too, provides symbolic-religious overtones
to the game. White is the pure color of the Virgin; red,
the color of communion wine, and black, as Solange notes,
the color of mourning. Color also enters the struggle for
domination of one sister over the other. Although Solange
knows the propriety of the situation: "Your widowhood
really requires that you be entirely in black," she
nevertheless insists: "Madame will wear the scarlet
velvet dress this evening." (38) Claire/Madame defies
her: "You force your colors on me I" (39)
Sometimes the maids refer to scenes in the
ceremonial game which are not enacted, but which,
presumably are played on other occasions. For example,
Claire/Madame decides: "Let's skip the business of your
prayers and kneeling. I won't even mention the paper
flowers." (40)
The game reaches a sadistic peak as hostilities
and insults accumulate. Claire/Madame does not even want
Solange/Claire to touch her. Solange/Claire, frightened
at the intensity of Claire's anger, interrupts the game:
100
"There's no need to overdo it. Your eyes are ablaze."
(42) But Claire rejects her alternative: "Are you
offering me the dreary exile of your imagination?" (43)
The climax of the game is the counter-attack.
Here, the roles are reversed and it is the maids' turn to
denounce their Madame:
I'm tired of being an object of disgust. I hate you,
too, I despise you. I hate your scented bosom.
Your ... ivory bosoml Your ... golden thighsi
Your ... amber feet. (44)
In the midst of her attack on Madame, Solange suddenly
vents her anger at Claire, interrupting the mock anger of
their game by dredging up the real hostility in their
lives:
You think you can always do just as you like—
you think you can deprive me forever of the
beauty of the sky, that you can choose your
perfumes and powders, your nail-polish and silk
and velvet and lace, and deprive me of them?
That you can steal the milkman from me?
. . . Admit about the milkman. For Solange says:
the hell with you! (44)
Her last line indicates her unconscious rejection of the
role she has been playing as Solange/Claire. On an
unconscious level, her attack has been aimed at Claire all
the while, aroused, in part, by her jealousy that Claire
(one would hardly suspect Madame) has designs on Solange's
fantasized lover, the milkman. Claire/Madame is panic
stricken by her outburst. She calls to her sister by both
her real and make-believe names: "Claire, Solange,
101
Claire." (44) Solange returns to the game-playing,
realizing that she is supposed to be playing the role of
Claire, the maid, in their nightly ceremonial. She
corrects herself: "Ah! Yes, Claire, Claire says: to hell
with you!" The first Claire functions as a direct address
to Claire/Madame; the second Claire denotes her
acknowledgment of her pretended role as Claire.
The game comes abruptly to a halt with the ringing
of the alarm-clock. The two maids huddle together. The
audience, which may have suspected from earlier innuendoes,
is now certain that a game is in progress.
The second movement consists primarily of
recriminations and counter-recriminations. Solange rebukes
Claire for not getting to the end of the game; Claire
offers a sexually suggestive excuse: "We waste too much
time with the preliminaries." (47)
Claire's counter-attack is aimed at her older
sister's attempts to dominate her. Recriminations about
the make-believe ceremonial game lead to further
hostilities; Solange mocks Claire for her private
fantasies:
SOLANGE: Don't worry, you'll be able to go on
playing queen, playing at Marie Antoinette,
strolling about the apartment at night.
CLAIRE: You're mad! I've never strolled about
the apartment.
102
SOLANGE: (ironically) Oh, no. Mademoiselle has
never gone strolling! Wrapped in the curtains or
the lace bedcover. Oh, nol Looking at herself in
the mirrors, strutting on the balcony at two in
the morning, and greeting the populace which has
turned out to parade beneath her windows. Never,
oh no, never. (50-51)
When Solange threatens to end their game, she, in
effect, undercuts "the payoff," the secondary gratification
they both derive from interchangeably playing the game of
killing Madame. Such undercutting of the payoff is the
sure proof, or "existential validation," as Berne calls it,
that this is a game:
SOLANGE: . . . D'you think I'm going to put up with
it that I'm going to keep playing this game and then
at night go back to my folding-cot? The gamel Will
we even be able to go on with it? And if I have to
stop spitting on someone who calls me Claire, I'll
simply choke! My spurt of saliva is my spray of
diamonds.12 (5 2)
Solange's reluctance to continue playing the game occurs
again frequently until the end of the play.
Each of the sisters tries to get the better of the
other. Claire, who proves the stronger of the two, attacks
Solange's masquerade of Madame; the game-terminology is
obvious:
Go on, start it! You hit first. It's you who're
backing out, Solange. You don't dare accuse me of
the worst: my letters . . . I invented the most
fantastic stories and you used them for your own
purposes. You frittered away my frenzy. Yesterday,
when you were Madame, I could see how delighted you
were at the chance they gave you to stow away on the
Lamartiniere. to flee France in the company of your
lover--. ("53-54)
103
The real reason for Claire's anger, however, is masked by
her fear that Solange's hatred of Madame is a ruse, a
trick, a strategy in the game, to kill her (Claire), and
thus free them both from their servantdom: "Through her,
it was me you were aiming at. I'm the one who's in danger.
When we finish the ceremony, I'll protect my neck." (55)
Solange admits the schizophrenia of her motives:
"I wanted to free you. . . . Had I killed her, you'd have
been the first to denounce me. You'd have turned me over
to the police, yes, you." (55-56) To paraphrase, had
Solange killed Claire/Madame, Solange/Claire would have
been the one to inform the police of it. But Solange is
unable to carry out the murder in much the same way that
Clov is unable to finish off Hamm, or Gogo is unable to
leave Didi; the pairs are symbiotic, and, to a certain
extent, sadistic; they feed on the misery and sado
masochism of their relationship, cherishing all the while
the possibility of its end. Solange has tried to kill
Claire/Madame in her sleep, but she failed; instead, she
sav; only the real Madame whom she feared and loved: "She
turned over in her sleep. (Rising exaltation) She was
breathing softly. She swelled out the sheets: it was
Madame." (56)
When Claire is confronted by the failure of her own
plan, the letters to the police, she rejects Solange's
104
excuse for not killing Claire/Madame in the game: "Since
you're so clever, you should have managed your business
with Madame. But you were afraid. The bed was warm. The
air thick with perfume. It was Madame!" (58)
Claire is playing the ritual-game once again. She
urges Solange to have done with the killing of Madame,
since she is obviously not successful at it, and to "think
what comes after." Solange is bored with the afterplay,
with her fantasized repentance and suffering: "Nothing
comes after. I'm sick and tired of kneeling in pews. In
church I'd have had the red velvet of abbesses or the stone
of the penitents, but my bearing at least would have been
noble." (56) She envies the grief she imagines Madame
will feel for her lover. For Solange, the glory of killing
Claire/Madame would have far outweighed the guilt— or
repentance— of her deed.
The ring of the telephone interrupts their
fantasies and marks the start of the third movement. Like
the well-made plays of Scribe and Sardou, technicalities
and contrived complications (letters, the alarm-clock, the
telephone receiver which Claire accidentally leaves off the
hook) set the game in headlong motion and propel it towards
its inevitable finish.
One such contrived incident, the telephone call,
the climax of the play (the counter-attack is the climax
105
of the game), leaves some details unanswered. When Claire
answers the telephone, Solange and the audience hear only
what she says. In fact, when Solange tries to listen,
Claire pushes her away from the receiver. I would suggest
that perhaps Monsieur does not call at all, or perhaps he
does not say what Claire repeats, that he is free on bail.
If so, then Claire seizes the opportunity to gain the upper
hand in their game and to control the events which follow.
For it is after the climactic telephone call that Claire
begins to plot the death of the real Madame. Her plot
fails, however, and is realized only in fantasy in the
fifth movement.
The third bell, the ring of the doorbell, announces
the arrival of Madame, and the start of the fourth movement.
In this movement, the maids attempt to poison Madame with
her very own tea. The comic disparity of the scene is
almost farcical: while the maids are plotting to poison
Madame, she is renouncing her finery and worldly life, in
short everything that differentiates her life from that of
the maids, and is making presents of her furs and dresses
to them. Reality intrudes when Madame spies the telephone
receiver off the hook. While it is Claire who informs
Madame that Monsieur called, it is Solange who relays the
message (Solange, who, you will remember, did not hear the
message), that Monsieur is free on bail. Madame takes back
106
her furs, spots the alarm-clock out of place in the
bedroom, and finds it very strange indeed that "they
haven't dusted the dressing table." (76) She refuses the
tea one last time and hurries off to join Monsieur.
The fifth movement, from the departure of Madame
until the end, contains the resumption and completion of
the game. The sisters begin by hurling recriminations at
one another for not succeeding in their plot to kill the
real Madame. Claire is frightened that Madame will return
and hesitates to resume playing. She worries that Madame
suspects, she thinks they are being spied on, she feels
that "there's something here, Solange— something in this
room— that can record our gestures and play them back."
(83) Solange, however, is eager this time to return to the
game because it is her turn to be Madame. Claire, however,
assumes the role by insisting simply: "I'm used to it."
(82) Both actresses and audience are now very much aware
that a game is under way.
A change of clothes accomplishes once again the
necessary transformation of Claire from her role as maid
to that of Madame. She puts on a white dress over the
black one she is wearing. For the sake of irony, as Genet
indicates in the stage directions, the black sleeves remain
showing; they afford the fake detail which Madame Irma
describes in The Balcony:
107
Yes, yes, I know, there's always the false detail
that reminds them that at a certain moment, at a
certain point in the drama, they have to stop, and
even withdraw. . . . But what if they're so
carried away by passion that they no longer
recognize anything and leap, without realizing it,
into ....
The Chief of Police supplies the last-word answer, which
defines the division between game and life, art and nature:
"You mean right into reality?" (50)
When Claire emerges from behind the screen, she
signals the start of the game:
CLAIRE: (appearing, all in white, with an
imperious voice) Begin 1
SOLANGE: (ecstatically) You're beautifulI
CLAIRE: Skip that. You said we're skipping the
prelude. Start the insults.
SOLANGE: I'll never be able to. You dazzle me. (85)
Claire then takes the initiative, hurling a series of
insults at Solange. When she has exhausted herself and
reached a sexual-emotional climax, as it were, she
confesses, like a spent lover, that she can no longer
"think of anything." She thus prepares Solange for the
reversal of roles, Solange/Claire's tirade against Madame:
SOLANGE: Stop. I've got there. It's my turn.—
Madame had her billing and cooing, her lovers, her
milkman .... (87)
As the game continues, Claire's fear increases. In
fact, "the more dangerous the game becomes, the greater is
the sisters' excitement and the more intense their
13
sadomasochistic orgy." Claire screams for help. Solange
108
takes pity and drops the role-playing: "Are you really
ill? Claire, are you really feeling ill?" (91) Then she
escorts Claire comfortingly off the stage, suggesting dire
consequences as she does so: "I have such sure ways of
putting an end to all suffering." (91)
When Solange returns to the stage alone, we are in
doubt as to whether or not she has disposed of Claire/
Madame. Her first words belie her actions: "Madame ...
At last! Madame is deadl ... laid out on the linoleum ...
strangled by the dish gloves." (91) Her long soliloquy is
a rambling, hallucinatory confessional during which she
imagines certain characters to be present on stage and
addresses them: Madame: "Madame may call me Mademoiselle
Solange"; Monsieur: "Monsieur's laughing at me? He's
smiling at me. Monsieur thinks I'm mad" (92); the
Inspector: "No, Inspector, no. . . . I won't talkl I
won't say a word. I refuse to speak about our complicity
in this murder. . . . The dresses? Oh, Madame could have
kept them" (92); the Hangman: "The hangman's by my side]
Now take your hand off my waist. He's trying to kiss me!
Let go of me] Ahl Ah!" (94)
Toward the end of Solange's long monologue, Claire
returns to the stage and they resume the game. Solange can
no longer define the border between madness and sanity,
game and reality: "And in spite of my forbidding it,
109
Madame continues to stroll about the apartment. She will
please sit down ... and listen to me. . . . (To CLAIRE)
Claire ... we're raving!" (95) Claire, however, is
determined to carry the game through to its end; she
resumes her role, forcing Solange to resume the role of
Claire: "You're talking too much, my child. Far too much.
Shut the windows. (SOLANGE shuts the window.) Draw the
curtains. Very good, Claire!" (95) Solange again
objects: "It's late. Everyone's in bed. . . . We're
playing an idiotic game." (95) But Claire signals with
her hand for silence and begins the finale:
CLAIRE: Claire, pour me a cup of tea.
SOLANGE: But ...
CLAIRE: I said a cup of tea.
SOLANGE: We're dead-tired. We've got to stop.
CLAIRE: Do as I tell you. I'm going to help you.
I've decided to take the lead. Your role is to
keep me from backing out, nothing more. (95-96)
Claire then proposes to complete their fantasy-game once-
and-for-all: "Nothing exists but the altar where one of
the two maids is about to immolate herself— ." (96)
Edith Melcher raises a question as to the validity
of the game at this point, believing that there must be "a
clear distinction between reality and pretense, otherwise
the game would no longer be a game. The masquerade can be
interrupted at any moment, and the players can quickly
14
assume their 'normal' personalities." Claire and Solange,
110
however, have become "so carried away by passion" that they
make that "leap into reality," which Madame Irma and the
Chief of Police describe. Claire's insistence to carry
the game through to its inevitable end by drinking the
poisoned tea intended for Madame blurs any "clear
distinction" between reality and pretense, assuming, of
course, that such distinctions were possible at all.
Critics differ widely about the meaning of the
play's end. Joseph McMahon sees the end as "a prelude to
a real action," the destruction of Madame, "which they have
not yet had either the courage or the opportunity to bring
15
off." Jacques Ehrmann views the ending as a departure
"from the meaning that originally had been attributed to
the ceremony":
Instead of make-believe issuing into reality, it has
to be endowed by Claire and Solange with a fictitious,
an illusory reality. They start the ceremony anew,
but now they experience it as a trace, as a vertigo
which, without any underpinnings in reality, has no
other aim than itself. And thereby make-believe
ceases to be make-believe. There is no return from
this alienation. Claire no longer plays at being
Madame, she _is Madame and forces Solange to Joe
Claire. And Claire dies from drinking the poisoned
linden-blossom tea.16
I would disagree with both of these interpretations of the
play's ending. When Claire drinks the tea, the game may
end, but the make-believe does not. Claire's action is no
more real than anything else we have witnessed in the play.
As David I. Grossvogel points out, it is "a murder performed
Ill
17
only in the spectator's intimation of it."
On one level, call it the level of reality, the
spectator knows that the maid is an actress pretending to
be a maid who pretends to be Madame, who, in turn, pretends
to drink tea which is not really poisoned. On another
level, call it the level of game, both spectator and
actress choose to believe this theatrical illusion by their
own "willing suspension of disbelief." It is helpful to
recall the horizontal relationship among the "performance
activities" of play, ritual, game, and theater, to under
stand that this is a murder that takes place night after
night, performance after performance, ceremony after
ceremony, game after game, in theater after theater.
Genet compares this willingness to believe in the
theatrical illusion to the symbolism of the Mass:
On a stage not unlike our own, on a platform, the
problem was to reconstitute the end of a meal. On
the basis of this one particular which is now barely
perceptible in it, the loftiest modern drama has
been expressed daily for two thousand years in the
sacrifice of the Mass. The point of departure
disappears beneath the profusion of ornaments and
symbols that still overwhelm us. Beneath the most
familiar of appearances— a crust of bread— a god is
devoured. I know of nothing more theatrically
effective than the elevation of the host: when
finally this appearance appears before us— but in
what form, since all heads are bowed, the priest
alone knows; perhaps it is God himself or a simple
white pellet that he holds at the tip of his four
fingers— or that other moment in the Mass when the
priest, having broken the host on the paten in order
to show it to the faithful puts it together again and
eats it. The host crackles in the priest's mouth.18
112
Claire's act of ceremonially, ritualistically drinking the
tea is comparable to that of the believer who takes the
19
wafer believing it to be the body of Christ. Who would
deny that the miracle of Claire/Madame1s death and her
nightly resurrection is not accomplished by her act of
drinking a cup of tea which she believes is poisoned?
Genet describes the miracle of the theatrical illusion: "A
performance that does not act upon my soul is vain. It is
vain if I do not believe in what I see, which will end—
20
which will never have been when the curtain goes down."
Solange delivers the final monologue, proclaiming
not Claire's death, but her freedom, her own as well as
Claire's, from the tyranny of "madamedom." Simultaneously,
in a schizophrenic fantasy, Solange envisions the death of
Claire/Madame with the return of the real Madame to the
house:
Madame steps into the car. Monsieur is whispering
sweet nothings in her ear. She would like to smile,
but she is dead. She rings the bell. The porter
yawns. He opens the door. Madame goes up the
stairs. She enters her apartment— but, Madame is
dead. Her two maids are alive: they've just risen
up, free, from Madame's icy form. (99-100)
In the psychological universe of Jean Genet,
"communication is only possible . . . on the level of the
role. . . . The lie must be accepted as the truth cannot
be perceived. The more we attempt to distinguish the truth
— about a theatrical performance or about our own
113
21
identities— the more deluded we become." From the
Pirandellism of Genet, we move closer to the multiplicity
of personality in the plays of Harold Pinter.
2. The thematic or metaphoric level.— On a thematic
level, the game-metaphor illustrates three themes, all of
which are interdependent on one another. The first is
that of illusion-reality; the second is the interdependence
of opposites; the third is the metamorphosis from servitude
22
to freedom. The game, which is a make-believe fantasy
based on their real-life situations, is itself an
illustration of the theme of illusion-reality. Their wish
to change from their roles as servants to the role of
Madame dramatises the second theme, the interdependence of
opposites: the judge cannot exist with the thief (who
23
would there be to judge?), the criminal without the
saint, nor Madame without her servants. It follows, if
the maids succeed in killing Madame, they destroy their
mirror-opposite, and free themselves from their
"servantdom." The game provides this resolution,
fantasized though it may be, to their plight. The
metamorphosis from maid to Madame realizes a third theme,
a transformation from servitude to freedom, from
wretchedness to "beauty, joy, drunkenness, and freedom."
On the level of make-believe, which is the level of game
in the play, Claire and Solange do become Madame for the
114
period of time when Madame is not at home, plan to destroy
her, and rise up from her corpse free and victorious, all
of which must be done before the ring of the alarm-clock
24
signals the end of their fantasy-game.
3. The absurd or existential level.— Is The Maids
an absurdist drama in the sense that it presents a vision
of an absurd world? It does demonstrate one of the
existential precepts of the Absurdists by showing that the
absurdity of the world can be mitigated by the free choice
of an individual, in this case, by the decision of the two
maids to carry out the ritualistic-sacrificial murder of
Madame. Yet the play has seemed, to some, to have been
mislabeled. While it has been classified as a landmark in
The Theater of the Absurd because of techniques "common to
the circus and the music-hall, to Ionesco and Arrabal and
the rest of the avant-garde," while it has been linked to
the Absurd movement because of its emphasis on fluctuating
identities, it offers a symbolism beyond the level of game
25
and beyond the level of the absurd. One critic, Joseph
McMahon, rejects the label of absurdism attached to Genet,
by rejecting the total movement itself:
The poverty of ideas which has given birth to the
absurd in the theatre does not serve well either
exponents of these ideas or their art. . . .
Neither the artist nor his art can grow if either
is constricted by a priori acceptance of a limited
register of expression.26
115
The label of absurdism attached to Genet involves
not so much a contradiction or a "poverty of ideas," but
rather a misunderstanding of the term as Martin Esslin
originally conceived it (and which he later revised in an
attempt to clarify the apparent contradiction). Esslin
proposed that absurdist writers had in common "not an
ideological position but rather their bewilderment at the
absence of a coherent and generally accepted integrating
27
principle." The Maids is an absurdis.t drama because
of its emphasis on internal reality, fantasies,
hallucinations, and the like. The game of "playing Madame"
is the center of the dramatic experience; theme,
characterization, final solution, all are dependent on it.
In truth, the ritual-game gives "meaning and direction"
to the "otherwise tawdry existence" of Claire and
c i 28
Solange.
116
References
"''Citations of the play in my text are taken from
Jean Genet, The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays by Jean
Genet, trans. by Bernard Freehtman (New York: Grove Press,
1954).
2
Joseph H. McMahon, The Imagination of Jean Genet
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 153-154,
compares the 1954 version to the earlier one: "From the
opening moments of the 1954 version the power of Solange's
intransigent point of view, as the most appropriate means
of masterminding these particular revels is evident, and
the audience has . . . a clear center upon which to fix
its attention. The new version has its weaknesses: the
more explicit lesbianism and the accumulation of apparently
irrelevant anecdotes make it unnecessarily diffuse. But
it has its strengths: the more intelligent deployment of
necessary ambiguities between the two sisters, expressed in
the carefully planned shifting of personal pronouns from
me to us and the exclusion of Solange from psychological
involvement with Monsieur. . . . The similarities and
contrasts between the two sisters are more pronounced."
3
Bettina Knapp, Jean Genet (New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1968), p. 6.
4
There are many critics who have cited the device
of the game as a technique for the development of the plot
and theme in The Maids. Among them, Edith Melcher, "The
Pirandellism of Genet," French Review, XXXVI (October,
1962), 33, calls it a play in which Genet treats "with
fresh complexity and tragic poignancy the game of 'Let's
pretend.' Le Balcon and Les Negres are based entirely on
that game, which is in large measure not only the subject
of each play but also its essence: since life and theater
are both pretense, the two can be fused in a unity that is
the work of art." (Italics mine.) Bettina Knapp. Jean
Genet, p. 110, posits as the reason for their game-playing
their alienation from the real world, an alienation which,
she believes, is shared by Madame as well: "They have not
been able to function in it [the real world] and so have
resorted to living a game in a dream world."
117
5
There are blatant similarities in the
characterization and plot structure of Deathwatch and The
Maids. The two criminals, Maurice and Lefrance, are
comparable to the two maids. Green Eyes, the murderer and
master-criminal has his counterpart in The Maids in the
character of Madame. He is loved and feared by the lesser
criminals as Madame is loved and feared by her maids.
Finally, there are two lovers in each play, Snowball and
Green Eyes' girl, Monsieur and the milkman, although
neither of the two pairs ever actually appears on the
stage.
^Oreste Pucciani, "Tragedy, Genet and The Maids.1 1
Tulane Drama Review. VII (1963), 42-59, outlines the
division: the first movement occurs from the beginning of
the play to the ringing of the alarm-clock. (Movements
two, three, and four end with the ringing of a bell.) The
second movement takes place with the ringing of the alarm-
clock to the ringing of the telephone. The third movement
begins with the ring of the telephone and ends with the
arrival of Madame. The fourth movement, signaled by the
ring of the doorbell, begins with Madame1s return and ends
with her departure. The fifth and final movement continues
from the departure of Madame to the end of the play.
7
Richard Schechner, "Approaches to Theory/
Criticism," Tulane Drama Review. Summer, 1966, p. 4-7.
g
Genet in Our Lady of the Flowers suggests, "If I
were to have a play put on in which women had roles, I
would demand that these roles be performed by adolescent
boys." Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr,
trans. by Bernard Frechtman (New York: G. Braviller,
1963), pp. 611-612, comments that Genet's essential reason
for doing so was to make "feminine stuff itself . . .
become an appearance, the result of a make-believe. It is
not Solange who is to be a theatrical illusion, but rather
the woman Solanqe. . . . We would see before us the
effort, at times admirable and at times grotesque, of a
youthful male body struggling against its own nature."
9
Sartre, Saint Genet, p. 620, points out that "this
cruel game provides the rigorous demonstration . . . one
can not want to be what one is in the imaginary. . . . In
order to change herself into a maid by her own will,
Solange plays at being Solange. She can not want to be
Solange the servant, because she i_s Solange. She therefore
wants to be an imaginary Claire so as to acquire one of the
chief characteristics of this Claire, which is to be a
servant."
118
"^Knapp, Jean Genet, p. 113.
^1 talics mine.
12
In the French version (Les Bonnes and Comment
Jouer Les Bonnes [n. p.: L 1Arbal&te, 1948J, p. 34),
Solange also uses the word game. 1e jeu: ”Et tu crois gue
je vais en prendre mon pari, continuer ce jeu et, le soir,
rentrer dans mon lit-cage. Pourrons-nous m&me le
continuer, le jeu: Et moi, si je n1ai plus a cracher sur
quelqu'un qui m'appelle Claire, mes crachats vont
m'etouffer! Mon jet de salive, c'est mon aigrette de
diamants.
13
Knapp, Jean Genet, p. 114.
1 4
Melcher, "The Pirandellism of Genet," p. 33.
15Page 147.
^Jacques Ehrmann, "Genet's Dramatic Metamorphosis:
From Appearance to Freedom," Yale French Studies: New
Dramatists. Spring-Summer, 1962, pp. 37-38.
17
David I. Grossvogel, The Blasphemers: The
Theater of Brecht. Ionesco. Beckett. Genet (Ithaca.New
York: Cornell University Press, 1962), p. 151.
18
Cited in Knapp, Jean Genet, pp. 89-90.
19
Sartre, Saint Genet, p. 620, describes this
inverted ritual as a "Black Mass."
20
Cited in Knapp, Jean Genet, p. 90.
21
Thomas B. Markus, "The Psychological Universe of
Jean Genet," Drama Survey, III (1964), 392.
22
Josephine Jacobsen and William R. Mueller,
Ionesco and Genet: Playwrights of Silence (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 145, suggest these three major
themes in The Maids.
23
Genet illustrates this ideological concept m
The Balcony, trans. by Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove
Press, 1960), p. 19: "My being a judge is an emanation of
your being a thief. You need only refuse— but you'd
better not I — need only refuse to be who you are— what you
are, therefore who you are— for me to cease to be . . . to
: ii9
vanish, evaporated. . . . You won't refuse to be a thief?
That would be wicked. It would be criminal. You'd
deprive me of being 1
24
In The Maids. there are examples of the three
variations of performance time which Richard Schechner,
"Approaches to Theory/Criticism," pp. 28-29, has described:
the alarm-clock provides an example of set time: the game
of playing Madame ends at a set moment signaled by the ring
of the alarm-clock, whether or not the "ceremony," the
killing of Madame, has been completed. The conflict
between the activity and the clock comprises an "agonistic
contest." The second variation, event time. is the time
it takes for the event to be carried out, the killing of
Madame. The third time variation, symbolic time.
;encompasses both set time and event time and consists of
!the time it takes to perform the play, a slightly longer
ispan of clock time, in this case, than the event time.
i 05
Richard N. Coe, The Vision of Jean Genet (London:
Owen, 1968), pp. 213, 240.
I o ^
McMahon, Imagination of Jean Genet, pp. 8-9.
27
Martin Esslin, Reflections: Essays on Modern
Theatre (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969) , p~. T84.
28
Leonard C. Pronko, Avant-Garde: The Experimental
Theatre in France (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1962), p. 145.
CHAPTER IV
HAROLD PINTER: THE MULTIPLICITY OF PERSONALITY
I feel that instead of any inability to
communicate there is a deliberate evasion of
communication.
— Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter (1930- ) began writing plays in
1957. He has been called an experimentalist,'*' an
2 3
absurdist, and a comic ironist. His plays have been
4
classified "comedies of menace." His literary
indebtednesses have been traced to Pirandello,^ Kafka,^
7 8 9
Brecht, Genet, and Beckett.
His first play, The Room (1957), establishes both
the typical setting (a room) and the theme (the conflict
for its possession), with slight variations, for his later
works. Thus, theme and setting are dependent on each other
and one cannot examine the one without considering the
other in a Pinter play. The room represents the safe
retreat from the unknown, hostile forces of the world
outside;'*'^ it is a dark womb-like area from which his
characters are reluctant to emerge:
The menace comes from outside, from the intruder
whose arrival unsettles the warm, comfortable
120
121
world bound by four walls, and any intrusion can be
menacing, because the element of uncertainty and
unpredictability the intruder brings with him is in
itself menacing.
Within the brief canon of his works, Pinter has
written three dramas, all for television, which I have
classified as game-plays. There are certain differences
in both style and tone between the plays written for
television and the ones that preceded them:
The wit grows more elegant, the comedy more purely
comic, and sex becomes a fully developed part of
the Pinter world. In a sense television marks the
liberation of Pinter.12
I shall discuss these three plays, The Collection. The
Lover. and The Basement, by analyzing them on the three
levels I have previously outlined for the game-play: the
thematic or metaphoric, the structural or formal, and the
absurd or existential.
In two of the plays (The Collection and The Lover),
the games are played by a husband and wife. This device
of playing marital games had been employed previously,
successfully, and by now infamously (due to the notoriety
of Virginia Woolf) in Albee1s Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? John Osborne has also utilized game-playing between
husband and wife in the second of his Plays for England.
Under Plain Cover. In this play, the married couple must
create illusions in order to maintain a lustful intrigue
within the bounds of their married state. These characters
122
consent to pretend, to misrepresent, to abide by certain
preconceived and predetermined rules; in Len's words, they
13
participate in "a joint pretense." A game readily lends
itself to mutual pretense and often draws into it an
unsuspecting third party who may become an unwilling (or
willing) participant in the game.
The Collection: Games of Evasion
What on earth's the matter with you? I'm not
going to kill you. It's a game, that's all.
We're playing a game.
J ames
— The Collection
In The Collection. Pinter examines the "joint
pretense" on which two couples' relationships hinge, Stella
and James, a husband and wife, and Harry and Bill,
probably a homosexual couple. The games in this play are
essential to the dramatic structure of the play, to its
theme of joint pretense, and to the basic definition of the
world which games suggest.
The obvious purpose of the games which the four
play is to try to uncover whether or not Stella and Bill
slept together at a dress designers' convention in Leeds.
The situation is complicated even further by the fact that
the convention took place before the start of the play;
James and Harry, therefore, are thwarted not only because
Bill and Stella try to prevent them from learning the
truth, because they (Harry and James) do not really want to
know the truth, but also because that truth no longer
exists— or has changed retrospectively. As Walter Kerr
points out in his existential interpretation of Pinter's
plays, "nothing human is fixed, everything human is mobile.
The same woman can be a whore in a hotel room and an
innocent playing with her kitten at home while remaining
14
the same woman, without contradiction."
The setting of The Collection has ostensibly
changed from the safe room of the earlier plays to an
elegantly furnished house in Belgravia and to James' flat
in Chelsea. The stage is divided into three separate areas
providing the audience with a split view of the two flats.
A third area, up stage center, contains a telephone box.
Nevertheless the element of menace is present from
the very beginning as the intruding voice of the telephone
caller breaks into the safety of the room:
HARRY: Hullo.
VOICE: Is that you, Bill?
HARRY: No, he's in bed, who's this?
VOICE: In bed?
HARRY: Who is this?
VOICE: What's he doing in bed?
Pause.
HARRY: Do you know it's four o'clock in the
morning?
VOICE: Well, give him a nudge. Tell him I want
a word with him.
124
The suspense is maintained by a second call in
which the Voice warns Bill he will be right over. Bill,
frightened, puts on his coat and leaves. When the doorbell
rings, Harry confronts the caller:
HARRY: You're not the man who telephoned last
night, are you?
JAMES: Last night?
HARRY: You didn't telephone early this morning?
JAMES: No ... sorry ...
HARRY: Well, what do you want?
JAMES: I'm looking for Bill.
HARRY: You didn't by any chance telephone just now?
JAMES: I think you've got the wrong man.
HARRY: I think you have.
JAMES: I don't think you know anything about it. (49)
The third time the telephone rings the audience is
conditioned to associate something ominous with its ring,
and is relieved to discover, along with Harry and Bill,
that it is a wrong number. Comic relief, for the moment at
least, has replaced the impending menace.
The comic effects (this is a comedy of menace) are
sustained by a combination of absurd dialogue and action.
For example, James takes a grape and asks: "Where shall I
put the pips?" (52) Bill replies: "In your wallet."
(52) The straight answer provokes a laugh which is further
sustained by James' doing just that: "He takes out his
wallet and deposits the pips." (52)
1. The structural or formal level.— The incidents
of plot are constructed around five separate "games of
evasion." According to the rules of the game, Harry and
125
James try to discover whether or not their "mates" have had
a sexual relationship with one another, at the same time
never allowing a confrontation between all of them to take
place. The play can be viewed as "an elaborate manoeuvre,
a highly serious game" by the rules of which, clearly
"every possible combination of the principals is permitted
except that of the two people, Bill and Stella, who were
16
actually present on the occasion in question." In the
first game, the players are Stella and James; in the second
game, the players are Harry and Eill; in the third game,
the players are Bill and James; in the fourth game, the
players are Harry and Stella; and in the fifth game, the
players are Harry, Bill, and James.
Early in the play we suspect the "evasion of
communication" between Stella and James; this is the game
between Stella and James:
STELLA: What are you going to do?
He looks at her, with a brief smile, then away.
Jimmy ...
Pause.
Are you going out?
Pause.
Will you ... be in tonight?
JAMES reaches for a glass ashtray, flicks ash,
regards the ashtray. STELLA turns, leaves the
room. The front door slams. 1*7
When James returns after his first visit to Bill, he is
obviously irritable because he has not been able to obtain
verification of Stella's story from Bill. To comfort him,
126
Stella offers James biscuits which he rejects. The
biscuits, in this instance, as Hinchliffe has noted, are
part of "an extensive system of food references with sexual
18
implications . . . to reflect failure of communication."
James scores by pretending that Bill has "entirely
confirmed" her story, adding his own version to it, that
Stella was the one who led Bill on. James' lie causes
Stella to cry, but otherwise provides no resolution to his
dilemma of discovering the truth.
The second game is played between Harry and Bill,
the other couple in the play; in this game, Harry clearly
indicates his dominance over Bill, and provides Bill and
the viewer with motivation for his "game of evasion":
HARRY: I'm sick and tired of that stair rod. Why
don't you screw it in or something? You're
supposed to be able to use your hands.
Pause.
BILL: What time did you get in? (46)
Bill rebels against Harry's tyranny by conquering or, at
least, pretending to conquer another man's wife. Whether
or not he has succeeded in doing so is not as important as
convincing Harry (and James) that he did succeed. The
committing of such an act, even though Bill, at first,
denies it, makes Harry very jealous, as evidenced in
Harry's reaction to the mysterious telephone caller:
HARRY: Did you meet anyone last week?
BILL: Meet anyone? What do you mean?
HARRY: I mean could it have been anyone you met?
You must have met lots of people.
127
BILL: I didn't speak to a soul.
HARRY: Must have been miserable for you.
BILL: I was only there one night, wasn't I? (47)
After James has visited Bill and finds he is not at
home, Harry's jealousy is increased even further as his
humorously hostile and absurd description of James
indicates:
BILL: What did he look like?
HARRY: Oh ... lemon hair, nigger brown teeth,
wooden leg, bottlegreen eyes and a toupee.
HARRY: Aah. Well, that's why you didn't notice
his wooden leg. I couldn't help seeing it myself
when he came to the front door because he stood
on the top step stark naked. Didn't seem very cold
though. He had a waterbottle under his arm
instead of a hat. (62-63)
Game three is played between Bill and James. Bill's
hidden motive in playing a game of evasion with James may
be to prevent him from learning the truth about him, that
he is "a slum boy," just as his obvious reason is to
prevent James (and Harry) from learning the truth of what
happened in Leeds. (The chief characteristic of a game,
as Berne has defined it, is its ulterior quality which
accounts for its basically dishonest nature.) In their
very first meeting, Bill tries to make a favorable, and
false, impression on James: "I'm expecting guests in a
minute, you know. Cocktails, I'm standing for Parliament
next season." (54)
One form the game Bill and James play takes is
that of "verbal oneupsmanship":
128
JAMES: You knew she was married ... why did you
feel it necessary ... to do that?
BILL: She must have known she was married too.
Why did she feel it necessary ... to do that?
Pause.
[With a chuckle.] That's got you, hasn't it? (55)
Sometimes the game is a play on words, another form of
verbal oneupsmanship:
BILL: You think I'm a wow, do you?
JAMES: At parties I should think you are.
BILL: No, I'm not much of a wow really. The
bloke I share this house with is though.
JAMES: Oh, I met him. Looked a jolly kind of chap.
BILL: Yes, he's very good at parties. Bit of a
conjurer.
JAMES: What, rabbits? (57)
Bill's description of Harry as a conjurer implies that he
fabricates some, if not all, of the details of his
relationships with women. James' retort, rabbits, refers
to the way Harry fabricates tall tales— like a magician
pulling rabbits from a hat.
As James becomes more and more frustrated in his
attempts to obtain verbal verification from Bill, he
19
proposes a contest of a physical nature, a mock duel,
which provides an ironic commentary on the earlier verbal
games: "I get a bit tired of words sometimes, don't you?
Let's have a game. For fun." (74) Bill is skeptical, but
James reassures him: "What on earth's the matter with you?
I'm not going to kill you. It's a game, that's all. We're
playing a game." (75)
129
During the "mock duel" James throws a knife at
Bill's face. Bill raises his hand to ward it off,
catching it in his hand and cutting it. James notes the
mark of verification: "Now you've got a scar on your
hand. You didn't have one before, did you?" (75) The
knife leaves proof of a physical kind and emphasizes the
sarcasm of Bill's earlier comment: "Surely the wound
heals when you know the truth, doesn't it?" (74)
Harry initiates game four between himself and
Stella by deciding to pay her a visit. His reasons,
presumably, are similar to those of James for finding
Bill. Harry wants Stella to deny that an affair took
place at all. Secondly, he is curious, just as James was,
about the kind of woman Bill would be attracted to.
Neither James nor Harry wants to learn the truth of what
happened in Leeds; the difference between them, however,
is that Harry makes the truth conform to his preconception
of it, while James remains in doubt.
One purpose of Harry's visit to Stella is to tell
her the truth that he has told to James about Bill, thus
demolishing Bill's credibility and Stella's attraction to
him:
There's a certain kind of slum mind which is
perfectly all right in a slum, but when this kind
of slum mind gets out of the slum it sometimes
persists, you see, it rots everything. That's
130
what Bill is. There's something faintly putrid
about him, don't you find? (78)
He compares Bill to a slug, crawling "all over the walls of
nice houses, leaving slime." (78) He even prepares an
excuse for Bill's behavior at the same time that he defends
his own: "He confirms stupid sordid little stories just to
amuse himself, while everyone else has to run around in
circles to get to the root of the matter and smooth the
whole thing out." (78)
Stella's first reaction to Harry's revelation is to
deny that she knows Bill at all; next, she admits that he
knows _of him. At last, she pretends that her husband
invented the entire story. There is no element of menace
in Harry's visit to Stella as there was in James' visit to
Bill. Rather there is a certain seductive quality about
it. In the end, she denies the affair took place because
she is concerned with her image— which would clearly suffer
from an association with a slum boy, instead of a liaison
with a collector of precious Chinese vases.
The last game is played by all three male
characters: Harry, James, and Bill. As in Pinter's play
The Basement, the men fight for possession of the woman
(real or imagined possession) as in earlier plays the
characters fought for possession of the safe room. Harry
has succeeded or won his game by getting Stella to deny
131
that her affair with Bill took place. He has won because
he has chosen to believe that she is telling the truth,
because he has made the truth he has been seeking conform
to his preconception of it:
Your wife ... you see ... made a little tiny
confession to me. I think I can use that word.
What she confessed was ... that she'd made the
whole thing up. She'd made the whole damn thing
up. For some odd reason of her own. They never
met, you see. Bill and your wife, they never even
spoke. This is what Bill says, and this is now
what your wife admits. (77)
2. The thematic or metaphoric level.— The theme of
the play, which is developed by these five games, is the
deliberate evasion of communication, or the "joint
pretenses" of the character-players. On the one hand, the
"let's pretend" nature of any game contributes to the
development of this theme; on the other hand, the fact that
reality is in a state of flux and changes from one moment
to the next contributes also. John Russell Taylor observes
that the truth James is looking for is not the truth of
what happened in Leeds, but the truth about Stella: "He
will know more about her if he gets to know the man she
has found attractive enough to go to bed with ^t first
meeting."^
132
3. The absurd or existential level.— On the
absurd level of the play, which is also the existential
level, the truth which Harry and James seek cannot be
verified because it exists retrospectively. The "absurd"
purpose of the games has been to evade the discovery of a
truth which was impossible to attain in the first place.
While Bill and Stella have presumably known the truth from
the beginning, Harry is satisfied that he has discovered
it. In fact, Harry triumphs where James does not, in
getting Bill to corroborate Stella's story:
HARRY: Isn't that so, Bill?
BILL: Oh, guite so. I don't even know the woman.
Wouldn't know her if I saw her. Pure fantasy. (77)
But we know, of course, that Harry is not telling the whole
truth either, for what Stella really told him was that
James made the whole thing up.
In the end, James alone confesses his insecurity as
he confronts Stella with what he believes is the truth:
"You didn't do anything did you?" (80) Her response to
his half-rhetorical query is "neither confirming nor
denying. Her face is friendly, sympathetic."
The "mirror scene" between James and Bill gives us
a clue to the irony of this final scene between Stella and
James. In the earlier scene, James had told Bill: "I
don't think mirrors are deceptive." (69) The pun, of
course, is on deceptive. It is people, Bill, Stella,
133
Harry, even James himself, who are the real deceivers; a
mirror, at least, gives a truer image of Bill (and
presumably of Stella, too), than James will secure from
Bill, Harry, or Stella. Verification of truth depends not
on its reality, on capturing it immobile like a butterfly,
but on how it is reflected, perceived, even distorted, by
the human mirrors of consciousness, who are the players in
this game of life.
The Lover: Marital Games Revisited
MAX: A game? I don't play games.
SARAH: Don't you? You do. Oh, you do.
Usually I like them.
MAX: I've played my last game.
The Lover
— Harold Pinter
21 22
The Lover. a short, one-act play, first
televised in March, 1963 and six months later adapted to
23
the stage, is a "rather enigmatic drawing-room comedy,"
of relatively minor stature within the canon of Pinter's
24
plays. The play has been criticized for its brevity,
for its resemblance to the revue sketches which preceded
it. Ronald Hayman, comparing it to The Collection, finds
it "thinner in texture" and "the idea dragged out to
25
greater length than it really warrants." In defense of
The Collection and The Lover. Walter Kerr sees them as "a
great deal more than revue sketches: but here the scales
134
are tipped to favor what is funny in our inability to
26
define one another, or ourselves." As for Pinter
himself, he has remarked that he sees "no real difference"
between his sketches and his plays:
In both I am interested primarily in people: I
want to present living people to the audience,
worthy of their interest primarily because they
are, they exist, not because of any moral the
author may draw from them.27
George Wellwarth calls the play "Pinter's bitterest, most
cogent, and most expertly written statement of his belief
that the tragedy of people today is their 'deliberate
28
evasion of communication'."
1. The structural or formal level.— The plot of
The Lover is constructed around a series of "interlocking
29
semisadistic fantasy scenes," or games invented by a
30
husband and wife. These interlocking scenes comprise a
game, a "joint pretense" on the part of both husband and
wife that they each possess (not an imaginary child as in
Virginia Woolf) an imaginary lover. By the rules of this
game, they permit each other to carry on their affairs, so
long as they do not mention their spouses to their "lover-
spouses," that is, to the spouse pretending to be the
lover.
A third character in the play, the milkman, plays a
minor but important role. He rings the bell when Sarah is
135
expecting her lover and offers her some cream. At first,
we mistake him for the lover she has been expecting. She
declines the cream. This refusal tends to eradicate her
later claim to her husband-lover that she has had many
31
lovers:
Do you think he's the only one who comes! Do you?
Do you think he1s the only one I entertain? Mmmnn?
Don't be silly. I have other visitors, all the
time, I receive all the time. Other afternoons,
all the time. When neither of you know, neither
of you. I give them strawberries in season. With
cream. Strangers, total strangers.32
Sarah's infidelities, unlike Martha's in Virginia Woolf, are
would be ones, in that they exist only in fantasy; they do
not take place on a physical level between another man and
herself.
The second time the doorbell rings, Sarah's lover-
husband, Max-Richard enters-. He goes to the hall cupboard,
takes out a bongo drum, and plays an erotic prologue to
their games which Pinter sensuously describes in the stage
directions:
He begins to tap the drum. Her forefinger moves
along drum towards his hand. She scratches the
back of his hand sharply. Her hand retreats. Her
fingers tap one after the other towards him, and
rest. Her forefinger scratches between his
fingers. Her other fingers do the same. His legs
tauten. His hand clasps hers. Her hand tries to
escape. Wild beats of their fingers tangling.
Stillness. (19-20)
The movement of the play forms a pattern of advance-
retreat. The first game takes place in a park reminiscent
136
of the park in Albee's The Zoo Story, where Peter and Jerry
play out their ritual-game. Sarah, waiting for her husband,
is suddenly accosted by a stranger; at first, she is
frightened— and we are too, by Max's attack. Suddenly,
Max switches roles and becomes the parkkeeper who rescues
her from the molester. The menace has been removed: "A
sensation of giddiness overwhelms us: what has frightened
us shouldn't have, it is absurd that we should have
responded so disproportionately; we have participated in an
incongruity."33
The play continues in an advance-retreat pattern,
or as Hinchliffe describes it, "the positions change
rapidly from domination to dominated, from modesty to
shameless immodesty." The games separate not only "the
respectable husband-wife relationship (with a yet finer
. 34
distinction between mistress and whore)," but also
separate the passive-aggressive roles of first, lover, and
then mistress. For example, Sarah, feeling secure after
her rescue, confides to Max: "I never imagined I could
meet anyone so kind." (22) Sarah then advances toward
him physically, tracing her fingers along his thigh. He
lifts them off. Suddenly the roles are reversed again.
Max is now the frightened one: "Now look, I'm married.
. . . My wife's waiting for me." (22)
With a quick change of names, a favorite Pinter
137
35
device to indicate a change in roles as well, Max is
again the aggressor, cueing Sarah to the next game by
calling her Dolores: "You can't get out, darling. The
hut's locked. We're alone. You're trapped." (23) Sarah
takes cover behind the respectable, and ironical (since
marriage in the play is viewed as a trap), guise of
matrimony: "Trapped. I'm a married woman. You can't
treat me like this." (23)
Their erotic manoeuvers move toward a culmination
in a game called "teatime," a euphemism, if you like, for
their "sexual refreshment." The interlude provides a
turning point in the play. Although Richard had indicated
a certain uneasiness in his awareness that Sarah had a
lover ("Does it ever occur to you that while you're
spending the afternoon being unfaithful to me I'm sitting
at a desk going through balance sheets and graphs?" [9]),
it is Max who changes the rules of their game by asking
3 6
those questions which had been taboo. Max's question,
"Where's your husband?" (23) is at once unexpected and
disconcerting to Sarah because it is not part of the rules
of their game: Sarah reacts: "Why are you suddenly
talking about him? I mean what's the point of it? It
isn't a subject you normally elaborate on." (24)
Max-Richard justifies his alteration of the rules.
He has decided to end their games since he can no longer
138
deceive his wife into thinking he has a whore when the
truth is he has a "full-time mistress, two or three times a
week, a woman of grace, elegance, wit, imagination— ." (26)
The climactic order of nouns is not to be overlooked,
since it is the powers of the imagination, Max’s as well as
Sarah's, which are responsible for their games.
Sarah's reaction to Max's decision is a mixed one;
clearly, she does not realize that his proposal to end
theii games, indeed his very alteration of the rules, is a
compliment of sorts and the beginning of yet another
37
game. At first, Sarah denies that Max's wife cares:
"She doesn't mind." Then she is annoyed, even angry, "I
wish you'd stop this rubbish, anyway." Next, she tries to
make him feel guilty: "You're doing your best to ruin the
whole afternoon." Finally, in her most imaginative ploy,
she rationalizes: "Darling, you don't really think you
could have what we have with your wife, do you? I mean,
my husband, for instance, completely appreciates that I— ."
( 26)
In terms of Berne's theory of game-playing, Max is
undercutting the payoff— Sarah's secondary gratification,
her pretension (and Richard's too), that she has a lover.
Her anxiety that the game will end and her bewilderment at
the obvious change in Max's strategy cause her to plead:
"Stop it? What's the matter with you? What's happened to
139
you? (quietly) Please, please stop it. What are you
doing, playing a game?" (27) The game which Max is now
playing is one in which she does not receive her customary
"payoff," her fantasied lover. Such undercutting of the
payoff provides "existential validation," according to
Berne, that a game is being played, despite Max's
protestations to the contrary:
MAX: A game? I don't play games.
SARAH: Don't you? You do. Oh, you do. Usually I
like them.
MAX: I've played my last game.
SARAH: Why?
MAX: The children.
Pause.
SARAH: What?
MAX: The children. I've got to think of the
children.
SARAH: What children?
MAX: My children. My wife's children. Any
minute now they'll be out of boarding school. I've
got to think of them. (27)
Max's strategy has the familiar ring of Martha's
in her description of George as the man "who keeps learning
the games we play as quickly as I can change the rules."
(191) Although Max vows that he has played his last game,
and some critics have interpreted his statement as
38
sincere, I think that it is an overture to the next game.
In light of the play's ending, there is no reason to
believe that the children are any more real than the lover
39
himself. Moreover, when this excuse proves unacceptable
to Sarah, Max quickly supplies another: "You're too bony.
140
That's what it is, you see. I could put up with everything
if it wasn't for that. You're too bony." (28)
When Richard returns home that evening, following
Max's afternoon visit, he is the irate husband, ostensibly
angry at not finding a hot dinner on the table, but more
probably angry at his wife's "unfaithfulness." In a scene
40
similar to the one between Sarah and Max, Richard
explains, in a wry suburban paradox, that he has come to
an "irrevocable decision" in the "traffic jam on the
bridge." His decision is that their life of depravity and
"illegitimate lust" must end, the "traffic jam" being
symbolic of the stagnant, sterile lives that he and Sarah
have been leading.
Sarah, frightened by Richard's decision, retreats
once again, offering him food, i.e., the gratification for
which he is asking: food, in this instance, acts as a
41
substitute for sexual gratification:
Listen, I do have dinner for you. It's ready.
I wasn't serious. It's Boeuf bourgignon. And
tomorrow I'll have Chicken Chasseur. Would
you like it? (36)
Sarah was only pretending she didn't have time to prepare
a hot dinner for Richard. She was playing another game.
Richard joins her, acting out their ritualistic games of
the afternoon not as her husband, but as her lover. Sarah
balks as he calls to her: "Adulteress." (36) But he goes
141
to the closet, removes the bongo drum, a prop of their
42
erotic games, and, in quick succession, repeats the cues
of their afternoon games:
Got a light? Pause. Got a light? She retreats
toward the table, eventually ending behind it.
Come on, don't be a spoilsport. Your husband
won't mind, if you give me a light. You look
a little pale. Why are you so pale? A lovely
girl like you. (38)
As an ultimate threat, Richard finally bars her
lover's entrance from the house. Here is the typical
Pinteresque situation: the possession and safety of the
room, and by extension, Sarah herself, is jeopardized.
Like Rose in The Room or Stanley in The Birthday Party.
Sarah remains inside the living room where she entertains
her lover in what Richard has described as "utterly
43
sterile" surroundings. As a sardonic alternative to the
room's safety, Richard suggests: "Take him out into the
fields. Find a ditch. Or a slag heap. Find a rubbish
dump. . . . Buy a canoe and find a stagnant pond.
Anything. Anywhere. But not in my living room." (35)
Sarah, who at first rejects the suggestion that
they continue to play their games in the evening, reverses
her position as she perceives the new game-ritual which
Richard is initiating:
It's a very late tea. Isn't it? But I think I
like it. Aren't you sweet? I've never seen you
before after sunset. My husband's at a late-night
conference. Yes, you look different. Why are you
142
wearing this strange suit, and this tie? You
usually wear something else, don't you? Take off
your jacket. Mmmmnn? Would you like me to
change? Would you like me to change my clothes?
I'll change for you, darling. Shall I? Would you
like that? (39-40)
Richard's answer is a double entendre, suggesting
that Sarah change not only her clothes, but her attitude
toward the separation in her roles as mistress-whore-wife:
Yes.
Pause.
Change.
Pause.
Change.
Pause.
Change your clothes.
Pause.
You lovely whore.
They are still kneeling, she leaning over him.
Pinter has prepared us for this concept of the
multifaceted personality of woman in his creation of other
44
female roles: in Flora's fantasies m A Slight Ache, m
Sally's dual role in Night School, in the characters of
Albert's mother and the prostitute in A Night Out, in
Meg's and Lulu's aggressiveness in The Birthday Party, and
finally, in Stella's "infidelity" in The Collection. Bill,
in The Collection, has suggested that a woman, changeable
by nature, can very well be both wife and mistress, but she
usually separates their function along with their role:
Every woman is bound to have an outburst of ...
wild sensuality at one time or another. That's
the way I look at it, anyway. It's part of their
sensuality of which you yourself have never been
143
the fortunate recipient. What? (He laughs.)
That is a husband's fate, I suppose. Mind you,
I think it's the system that's at fault, not
you. Perhaps she'll never need to do it again,
who knows.
Rather than abandoning the games of the afternoon,
Sarah and Richard have chosen to extend them into their
46
lives m the evening. Though neither experience an
emotional or internal growth, there is, at the same time,
not the emotional despair which accompanies the painful
growth of Martha and George. In the end, we smile at the
clever integration of role (wife) and function (whore)
which Richard semantically, if not actually, envisions in
the purposeful oxymoron of his, and the play's, last line:
"You lovely whore." (40)
2. The thematic or metaphoric level.— If we keep
in mind a theme of Pinter's earlier plays, Night School and
The Collection, we find The Lover proposes, as a
corollary to their themes of the difficulty or
impossibility of verifying the truth, that of the necessity
of maintaining illusion: "Illusion and lies, always part
of the Pinter strategy . . . are now used as an instrument
for achieving or maintaining a relationship of a sexual
47
kind with another person." Both husband and wife pretend
to have a lover in order to maintain a lustful excitement
in their married relationship. Thus, the game, an illusion,
144
becomes a necessity for maintaining their real state.
In The Lover. Pinter will elaborate on the idea that
a woman cannot only be both wife and mistress-whore, but
both to her husband. The lover, Max, is in actuality, the
husband, Richard, who comes home in the afternoon. In this
way, Sarah can act out her sexual fantasies on her lover-
husband. The game which is both a device for revealing the
plot and a means of expressing the theme, the necessity for
maintaining "illusion," allows Richard and Sarah to
revitalize their sexual relationship (they have been married
for ten years) through a "joint pretense" that each has a
lover.
3. The absurd or existential level.— On the absurd
or existential level of the play, the games provide a means
of coping with the "seriousness" of marriage. In Pinter's
view, the imaginary lover is not really an intruder, but a
necessary ingredient to a romantic triangle "within
marriage." While game-playing is not a substitute for
living, it does pose an alternative to the absurdity— and
danger— of a real romantic triangle. Sarah is able to keep
her fantasized lover in the game, which, in reality, surely
her husband would deny her. What is perhaps more important,
unlike the sacred ritual of marriage, the game is a secular
ritual. One can break the rules, i.e., one can commit
145
adultery within the context of game-playing without the
fear, however tenuous it remains, of breaking God's
commandment.
The Basement: Pinter's "Notes from Underground"
LAW: You were unbeatable.
STOTT: Your style was deceptive.
LAW: It still is.
LAW laughs.
STOTT: Not any longer.
— The Basement
The Basement, originally written as a film script,
was presented on B.B.C. television in February, 1967. It
is Pinter's latest and most episodic work to date. It
utilizes the medium of television to its fullest with its
continual shifting from summer to winter, night to day,
interior to exterior, thus achieving "a new freedom of
movement in time and space.
I have classified the play, for the purposes of my
dissertation, as a game-play. As Ronald Hayman points out,
"It's not just a matter of the characters playing a game.
The whole play joins in the game, and one game creates the
49
next." These games or contests are essential to the
play's dramatic structure, the development of its theme,
and to the basic definition of the world which they suggest.
The Basement actually comprises a series of games, or
"ritualized contests of strength," between two male
146
antagonists, Law and Stott. Stott "uses his ownership of
50
the woman to fight for possession of the room." Law, on
the other hand, hopes to retain the room and win the woman.
He uses various means to win the game. First, he tries to
outwit Stott; next, he tries to dissolve Stott's trust in
Jane— in part, he succeeds; and finally, in the milkbottle
scene, he resorts to sheer brute force.
1. The structural or formal level.— A prelude to
the actual games or contests takes place in the restaurant
scene between Law and Stott where they sentimentally discuss
the good old days:
STOTT: This was one of our old haunts, wasn't it,
Tim? This was one of our haunts. Tim was always
my greatest friend, you know. Always. It's
marvellous. I've found my old friend again—
Looking at JANE.
And discovered a new. And you like each other so
much. It's really very warming.
Stott, of course, is speaking tongue-in-cheek. The early
friendship between them no longer exists, the room they
once shared in Chatsworth Road is a memory not to be
recaptured by this menage a trois.
Stott scores a point, as Hayman observes, "by
changing to Campari after Law has told the waiter that
52 . .
they all want the same again." Next, Stott reminisces
about their "intellectual bouts":
147
STOTT: Remember those nights reading Proust?
Remember them?
LAW: (Jto JANE) In the original.
STOTT: The bouts with Laforgue? What bouts.
LAW: I remember. (102)
Then, their memories shift, and by the process of free
association, they turn from "intellectual bouts" to physical
ones:
STOTT: The great elms they had then. The great
elm trees.
LAW: And the poplars.
STOTT: The cricket. The squash courts. You were
pretty hot stuff at squash, you know.
LAW: You were unbeatable.
STOTT: Your style was deceptive.
LAW: It still is.
LAW laughs.
STOTT: Not any longer. (102)
These memories foreshadow the first game or contest
of the play, a race between Law and Stott. The scene is
set in a field on a winter evening; Jane is one hundred
yards across the field, holding a scarf:
LAW: (shouting) Hold the scarf up. When you
drop it, we run.
She holds the scarf up.
LAW rubs his hands. STOTT looks at him.
STOTT: Are you quite sure you want to do this?
LAW: Of course I'm sure.
JANE: On your marks I
STOTT and LAW get on their marks.
Get set!
They get set.
JANE drops scarf.
Go!
LAW runs. STOTT stays still.
LAW, going fast, turns to look for STOTT: off
balance, stumbles, falls, hits his chin on the
ground. Lying flat, he looks back at STOTT.
LAW: Why didn1t you run? (102-103)
148
Law had set up the rules of the game; clearly Stott chose
not to play according to those rules. Hayman suggests that
one answer to Law's question may be that "Law— true to what
his name suggests— plays the competitive games according to
53
the rules, which puts him at a disadvantage." On the
contrary, I would propose that Law has admitted to Stott
that his style was, and still is, deceptive; thus Law may
not be playing fair at all. (There is another association
which the perceptive reader might make between Law's name,
the Persian love manual which he is reading when Jane and
Stott arrive, and Pinter's affinity to Kafka: In The Trial,
the books of the Law, after which K. searched, were found,
in the end, to be pornographic books. Likewise, in Pinter,
the character, Law, who appears to be an honest man, may
not be what he seems.)
As the three live together, each tries to undermine
the relationship which exists with the other in order to
gain a physical (and material) superiority. Jane, after
making love to Stott in Law's bed, betrays him. As the
relationship between Jane and Law progresses, Stott slowly
gains possession of the room. He begins his usurpation
by first removing a single painting from the wall;
eventually, he changes all the furnishings of the room
(except the bed— the one acquisition which, in a sense,
they all share), until the room is virtually unrecognizable.
149
Law is perhaps the most deceptive character in the
play because he attempts to undermine not only Stott's
relationship with Jane, but Jane's relationship with Stott.
He is the familiar (and pitiful) Pinteresque character—
both victim and victimizer. He first deceives Jane,
claiming that he has known Stott longer (and therefore
better) than she does:
LAW: Have you know him long?
JANE: No.
LAW: I have. Charming man. Man of great gifts.
Very old friend of mine, as a matter of fact. Has
he told you?
JANE: No.
LAW: You don't know him very well?
JANE: No. (97-98)
Law is implying, in his snide remark, that if Jane knew
Stott well at all, she would, of course, know that he and
Stott were very old friends. He concludes his intimate
revelations about Stott in a superb example of
understatement: "How pleased I was to see him. After so
long. One loses touch ... so easily." (98)
Next, Law continues to undermine Jane's and Stott's
relationship by intimidating Stott, baiting him for his
poor choice of woman:
LAW: Who is she? Where did you meet her?
STOTT: She's charming, isn't she?
LAW: Charming. A little young.
STOTT: She comes from a rather splendid family,
actually.
LAW: Really?
You don't find she's lacking in maturity? (100)
150
But as Law becomes more intimate with Jane, he appeals to
Stott on the seemingly contrary bases of logic and
morality:
Listen. Don't you think it's a bit crowded in that
flat, for the three of us? . . . To look at it
another way, to look at it another way, I can
assure you that the Council would object strenuously
to three people living in these conditions. The
Town Council I know for a fact, would feel it
incumbent upon itself to register the strongest
possible objections. And so would the Church.
(103-104)
In the end, Law, like Stott, must resort to trickery. (The
basic characteristic of the game, according to Berne, one
remembers, is its dishonest nature, which is indicated by
the presence of a "snare" or "gimmick.") Therefore, Law
attacks Jane's integrity. Although he has cause for his
attack, his motives for doing so are, by no means, clear-
cut. Hayman believes that Law "turns down the chance of an
alliance" with Jane and "betrays her betrayal to Stott, whom
54
he still treats as a friend." It is far more likely, I
think, that Law's motives are strictly those of self-
interest as the remainder of the play indicates. His
attack on Jane is thus a premeditated ruse to gain sole
possession of her and of the room:
LAW: (whispering very deliberately) She betrays
you. She betrays you. She has no loyalty. After
all you've done for her. Shown her the world.
Given her faith. You've been deluded. She's a
savage. A viper. She sullies this room. She
dirties this beautiful furniture. She dirties it.
151
She sullies the room.
STOTT turns slowly to regard JANE. (106)
(Law's confession to Stott recalls Harry's similar
disclosure to Stella about Bill, a "slug" who crawls "all
over the walls of nice houses, leaving slime." [78])
The second game or contest between Law and Stott
(the first contest was the race between Law and Stott)
occurs in scene forty-two where Pinter, using "only a
minimum of words in the dialogue," lays "down in his stage
directions detailed and well-judged instructions about the
55
set, which virtually becomes a character in the play."
The set, much more elaborate than when the play began, is
changed a second time. The Scandanavian tables and desks,
the large bowls of Swedish glass, the Indian rug, and
parquet floors have been replaced by walls hung with
tapestries, an oval Florentine mirror, an oblong Italian
master. The floor is marble tiles. There are marble
pillars with hanging plants, carved golden chairs (instead
of tubular ones), a rich carpet along the room's centre.
The scene is not without regal overtones. Stott
can be viewed as king, Law and Jane his servants, flute
player and fruit bearer. Stott is sitting in a chair (a
throne, perhaps); Law is playing the flute. Jane advances
toward Stott with a bowl of fruit. He selects a grape,
bites into it, and then tosses the bowl across the room,
152
scattering the fruit in all directions, while Jane rushes
to collect it.
As a parallel to this action, Stott selects a
marble from a tray containing large marbles. He glances
across the room at Law, playing the flute, and preparing
to bow, gives the first command: "Play!" (107) He then
bowls the marble which crashes into the wall behind Law.
Law's first reaction is to take "guard with his flute."
(108) Stott continues to bowl marbles at Law for five
successive times. The first four times he misses Law.
The fifth time the marble crashes into Law's forehead and
he falls down. Hayman sees Law in this scene responding
"by pretending to bat with the recorder. But it is not
until after Stott has bowled a marble— which crashes into
the wall behind Law— that he takes guard with the flute.
In fact, Stott's repeated commands for Law to "play" are
met by Law's refusal to play, a stubborn mimickry of
Stott's previous refusal to run, not as Hayman suggests,
by Law's ready response to bat with the recorder.
The milk bottle scene (scene forty-four) is the
climactic confrontation between the two primary
antagonists and is acted totally in pantomine. Stott and
Law advance toward one another with broken milk bottles
extended, while Jane obliviously and nonchalantly is making
instant coffee. Once again the setting of the room
153
is changed; the room, stripped bare of all its furniture,
contains only the three characters in the play, Jane and
the two male antagonists, stripped bare to their waists,
in a fight for possession of the room and Jane.
As the broken milk bottles smash together, the
record on the turntable plays "Debussy's "Girl with the
Flaxen Hair," an answer perhaps to Law's earlier question,
"Who is she?" (100) The answer which the play provides
is that she is the prize, cunning and betraying in her own
right, yet the eternal feminine, the archetypal symbol of
woman, over whom men have always fought.
The structure of the play following Schechner's
57
description of open form, ends circularly the way it
began. The doorbell which had announced the arrival of the
invading couple, Stott and Jane, rings again to announce
the arrival of Law and Jane, who have come, presumably, to
invade the room which is now Stott's.
2. The thematic or metaphoric level.— The theme of
the play, man's struggle for domination, encompassing
Pinter's earlier theme of the "safe room," is played out in
the struggle for possession of Law's room, the basement
flat. The invaders are Stott and Jane. The fight for
possession of the room becomes, by extension, a fight to
possess Jane as well; the room and Jane thus symbolize the
154
prize which the winner will secure.
3. The absurd or existential level.— The absurdity
of The Basement is a situational one. Surely we do expect
that Law and Stott will share harmoniously Jane or the
room; man's struggle for domination is a reoccurring,
endless, vicious cycle; in the menacing, unstable,and
absurd world of Pinter's plays, man cannot possess room or
woman for very long— only as long as he plays the game in
the "deceptive style" which he must in order to win. In
Freudian terms, one cannot have both the security of the
womb and the pleasures of sexual gratification: when Law
possesses the room, Stott possesses Jane, and vice versa.
It is the painful paradox which most of Pinter's male
characters must resolve. If, as Ronald Hayman has proposed,
The Basement is an extension of the games played in The
58
Lover. then there is no end to the games of evasion, of
deceptiveness, or of the absurd hope which man cherishes,
of living with his fellow man in peace— at least not in
the vision which Pinter's dramaturgy presents.
155
References
^George Wellwarth, The Theater of Protest and
Paradox: Developments in the Avant-Garde Drama (New ^ork:
New York University Press, 1964), pp. 196-197, classifies
Pinter and N. F. Simpson among the "new English dramatists"
as experimentalists. He also points out that Pinter is the
only major English dramatist who follows the principles of
avant-garde technique so widely used in France by Beckett,
Genet, Ionesco, and Adamov.
2
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden
City, New York: Doubleday, 1961), p. 198.
J. L. Styan, The Dark Comedy (London: Cambridge
^University Press, 1962T"] pp. 234-235.
4
The phrase was coined by David Campton as the
subtitle for his play, The Lunatic View (1957), cited by
Arnold P. Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter (New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1967), p. 40.
5
Robert Brustein, The Theater of Revolt: An
Approach to Modern Drama (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962),
p. 316, illuminates the affinity between Pinter and Genet
by suggesting Pirandello as their common source; Pirandello
anticipated Pinter in his approach to the conflict of
truth and illusion and Genet "in his concept of man as a
role playing animal." See also V. E. Amend, "Harold
Pinter— Some Credits and Debits," Modern Drama. Summer,
1967, pp. 165-174.
g
John Russell Taylor, The Angry Theatre: New
British Drama (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969), pp. 328-
329, notes the kinship between Kafka's The Trial and
Pinter's The Birthday Party: "We do not know what K. is
accused of and we do not know who has sent Goldberg and
McCann." See also V. E. Amend, "Harold Pinter."
7
Amend, "Harold Pinter," p. 166, observes that
Pinter, like Brecht, "seeks to alienate . . . his
character from the spectator in order that the spectator
will become involved rationally in what is happening on
stage."
156
Q
George Wellwarth, Theater of Protest and
Paradox, p. 211, compares the role-playing in The Lover
to that in the opening scenes of The Balcony but
distinguishes Pinter's purpose from Genet's: "Genet's
characters indulged in their sadistic fantasies to give
themselves the illusion of being someone, whereas Pinter's
indulged in them in order to achieve sexual potency."
9
Among critics who point out Pinter's debt to
Beckett are Ruby Cohn, "The World of Harold Pinter,"
Tulane Drama Review. VI (March, 1962) , 55-68; Bernard
Dukore, "The Theatre of Harold Pinter," Tulane Drama
Review. VI (March, 1962), 43-54: "Dukore sees Pinter's
plays as products by Maxim Gorky out of Charles Addams
with Samuel Beckett as midwife"; and V. E. Amend, "Harold
Pinter."
"^Taylor, Angry Theatre, pp. 326-327, notes that
"it is surely not entirely without significance that
Pinter, himself a Jew, grew up during the war, precisely
the time when the menace inherent in such a situation
would have been, throughout the medium of the cinema or
of radio, most imaginatively present to any child, and
particularly a Jewish child."
11Ibidi, p. 326.
■^Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter, p. 110.
■^Harold Pinter, The Dwarfs in Three Plays: A
Slight Ache The Collection. The Dwarfs (New York: Grove
Press, 1962), p. 29. All citations in my text are to this
edition.
■*"^Walter Kerr, Harold Pinter (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1967) , p. 32.
■^Pinter, The Dwarfs, p. 43.
16
Taylor, Angry Theatre, p. 349.
17Pp. 44-45.
1 f l
Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter, p. 111.
19
The mock duel is reminiscent of the climactic
"knife scene" in Albee's The Zoo Story.
20
Taylor, Angry Theatre, p. 348.
I
i 157
21
Harold Pinter, The Lover. Tea Party, The
Basement: Two Plays and A Film Script (New York: Grove
Press, 1963), p. 37. All citations in my text are to this
edition..
22
In the Grove Press edition, The Lover is printed
as a one-act play. Many critics, Wellwarth for one,
however, refer to it as a two-act play, perhaps because
the television version was in two acts, or perhaps because
of the natural break which occurs in the play following
the "tea time scene" between Sarah and her lover. See
Wellwarth, Theater of Protest and Paradox, p. 211.
23
Wellwarth, Theater of Protest and Paradox,
p. 208; Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter, p. 120, finds it
."reminiscent of Restoration comedy. . . . Serious only in
the light of the information given us at the end of the
act."
24
Robert Brustein, The New Republic. CL (Pall,
1964), 28, found it "a feeble anecdote, only barely
rescued from pure stage trickery." Edith Oliver, The New
Yorker, XXXIX (January 11, 1964), 69-70, called it "a
slightly curdled parody of both 'Private Lives' and 'Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'" Richard Gilman, Commonweal,
LXXIX (January 24, 1964), 484-485, criticized it as "too
schematic— Pinter's periodic curse— and too underdeveloped."
David Pryce Jones, Spectator. CCXI (September 27, 1963),
386, viewed it as "an exposition of the most gripping of
all commuter-myths, that no sooner are the suburban
husbands off to their offices than their wives turn
hell-bent to adultery."
25
Ronald Hayman, Contemporary Playwrights: Harold
Pinter (London: Heinemann^ 1968), p. 55.
“ ^Page 28.
27
Statement of Pinter quoted by Taylor, Angry
Theatre, p. 335. Taylor, pp. 350-351, concludes that The
Lover "represents to date Pinter's further exploration of
human nature in its irrevocably fragmented form; his most
wholehearted acceptance of the idea first clearly
formulated in The Dwarfs that the fall of man is more like
Humpty-Dumpty's than Adam's and Eve's, resulting in a
situation where nobody, oneself or another, can hope to
put all the pieces together again in a perfect and
coherent whole."
158
28
Page 211. Wellwarth is quoting a statement of
Pinter's in an interview with Kenneth Tynan.
29
Wellwarth, Theater of Protest and Paradox, p.
211. Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter, p. 122, suggests that the
sado-masochism in the games "should not be accounted as too
unusual," basing his conclusion on the following passage
from Anthony Storr's Sexual Deviations (n. p.:
Harmondsworth, 1964), p. 40: "It is only when sado
masochism is extreme or divorced from sexual intercourse
that it can be counted a deviation. For countless couples
engaged in minor sado-masochistic rituals which serve the
purpose of arousing them erotically. . . . Such games may
seem remote from the followings of a deSade or the
humiliation of a Sacher-Masoch, but both spring from the
same fundamental roots."
30
Hinchliffe and Taylor have compared The Lover to
John Osborne's Under Plain Cover (the second of the Plays
for England). Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter, p. 123, finds
Osborne's play "less concerned with the games played by
the young (and unfortunately incestuous) couple than with a
personal diatribe on press intrusion in the name of public
service. Under Plain Cover becomes only a cheaply
sensational story of the kind it purports to be protesting
against. The incest is an extra twist necessary for the
major theme, since the games played privately would not
constitute a reason for press intrusion. The games in
Under Plain Cover are also more physically perverse,
involving, as the title implies, a great deal of equipment
of a fetishistic nature. In The Lover, actual 'equipment1
is kept minimal."
Taylor, Angry Theatre, p. 350, believes that the
situation in The Lover is "explored far more deeply; it is
not just a game for keeping the marriage fresh and
exciting, but an acceptance of the inescapable fact that
each person is 'the sum of so many reflections'."
31
Ronald Hayman, Contemporary Playwrights, p. 56,
criticizes this scene as superfluous: "It was written in
to give Richard time to change his clothes in order to be
Max the lover." Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter, p. 122, on the
contrary, finds it significant because the earlier scene
with the milkman makes this assertion of Sarah's
"probably not true, but Richard-Max cannot be sure."
32
Pinter, The Lover, p. 37.
33
Kerr, Harold Pinter, p. 28.
159
34Pp. 122-123.
35
In The Room. Rose is called Sal; m The Birthday
Party, Nat is called Simey.
O £
Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter, p. 120, observes that
their games which have been "clearly defined by custom"
are now threatened by these questions which Max-Richard
asks.
37
The ending of the play where Richard does not
press to end the games, but rather to continue them in the
evening, tends to justify this interpretation.
38
Taylor, Angry Theatre, p. 350, argues that Sarah
and Richard have been married for ten years with real
children at boarding school who are growing older, and must
stop playing these games for their sake.
39
Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter, p. 123, also doubts
the very existence of the children.
40
Hayman, Contemporary Playwrights, p. 57,
criticizes the repetition which Richard voices in his role
as lover because it is "too much like the preceding
conversation before we knew that he was the lover." On
the contrary, it seems to me, such repetition illustrates
the frustration which Richard feels in his dual role as
husband-lover. It restates the problem from the point of
view that the husband is, to use John Pesta's terms, both
usurped and usurper.
41
References to food which carry sexual implicatxons
are numerous in The Collection and are used to reflect a
failure of communication, cf. pp. 51, 61, 46.
42
Ruby Cohn, "World of Harold Pinter," points out
that the "different symbolic techniques of Beckett and
Pinter are in most graphic evidence" in "their respective
use of that innocuous prop, a pair of shoes." In Godot,
the shoes are a "metaphysical symbol; in The Caretaker, it
becomes increasingly evident that "no shoes will ever fit."
In The Lover, the pair of shoes (high-heels) represents
part of the costume which Sarah wears only for her lover,
an erotic prop.
160
43
The setting of the play is expanded, as m A
Slight Ache, from the shabby one-room surroundings of
earlier Pinter plays in winter, to the luxurious elegance
of a "detached house" near Windsor in summer.
Functionally, however, the house, particularly the living
room, with its blinds drawn to keep out the sun, provides
the safe retreat from the hostile and unknown forces
outside it.
44
Arnold P. Hinchliffe, "Mr. Pinter's Belinda,"
Modern Drama. September, 1968, p. 173, questions Pinter's
ability to create women characters. As examples, he points
out that The Collection is really about three men; The
Lover is dominated by the husband (a questionable
interpretation, I think); Tea Party is told from Disson's
point of view; and The Homecoming shows Ruth as a catalyst
for five men.
45
Pinter, Three Plays, p. 74.
46
Wellwarth, Theater of Protest and Paradox, p.
211, feels that "the husband tries to break out of this
vicious circle where illusion equals sexual potency equals
mutual understanding equals illusion, but the wife is too
far gone and frantically appeals to him to continue the
game. In the end he yields, and they drift off into their
fantasy life again."
47
Hinchliffe, "Mr. Pinter's Belinda," p. 173.
48
Hayman, Contemporary Playwrights, p. 74.
49
Ibid.. p. 73.
50
Ibid.. p. 74.
p. 101.
51
Pinter, The Lover. Tea Party. The Basement.
52
Hayman, Contemporary Playwrights, p. 76.
53Ibid.. p. 73.
54,.,
Ibid.
55
Ibid.
56Ibid.. p. 74.
161
57
See Introduction, page 12.
58
Pinter emphasizes this evasive-deceptive
characteristic of relationships: "I feel that instead of
any inability to communicate there is a deliberate evasion
of communication. Communication itself between people is
so frightening that rather than do that there is continual
cross-talk, a continual talking about other things rather
than what is at the root of their relationship." Quoted
by Taylor, Angry Theatre, p. 334.
EPILOGUE
It's only
A game, you know....We seem to be forgetting
It's only a game....A pretty serious game
It's getting to be, when one of us is willing
To let the sheep go thirsty for the sake of it.
Aria da Capo
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
While I have limited my study of the game-play to
Absurdist theater, the use of game as a structural device
and/or as a partial metaphor for theme is not restricted to
Absurdist plays. Other playwrights have employed the
device of a game on one, or both, of these levels without
incorporating the existential philosophy or specific
techniques of the Absurd movement into their plays. By way
of suggesting other uses of the game in drama, I shall
briefly discuss three plays which, I think, have made
noteworthy use of game as a structural and/or thematic
device, but whose authors are not considered Absurdist
writers. The reader will, I hope, be stimulated to supply
his own examples of game-techniques in twentieth-century
drama.
An early example of the thematic and structural use
of game in twentieth-century drama is Edna St. Vincent
162
163
Millay's Aria da Capo (1921).^ The play is one of mixed
genres: a verse play written in the form of a harlequinade,
it draws its stock character, the zany servant or harlequin,
from the commedia dell 'arte. (Martin Esslin also links
Absurdist drama to the commedia dell 'arte.) The play
begins as a plotless comedy, but contains a play within a
play which takes the form of a pastoral tragedy. Aria da
Capo is a song which, after a certain development in the
music, repeats from the beginning until that point in the
score marked fine. The title of the play is suggestive of
a characteristic of Schechner's "open form,1 1 a circularity
or return to the original situation or statement.
The game-play or device of a game is employed in
the play within a play. The game is essential to the
dramatic structure of the play within a play, since the
incidents of the plot are constructed around it, and to the
theme of the play, the potential seriousness of games
played to win at any cost without regard for the rules
which define them as games. The two players are shepherds,
Corydon and Thyrsis; they decide to build a wall of colored
crepe-paper ribbons, "a wall a man may see across, / But
not attempt to scale." (87) By the rules which they set
up, Thyrsis determines, "Over there belongs to me, / And
over here to you I" (87) Corydon agrees, but qualifies the
rules: "Why, very well. / And say you may not come upon
164
my side / Unless I say you may!" (87)
The object of their game, as of any game, is to
"lay a plot whereby / We may outdo each other." (87)
Thyrsis, who devised the game, makes the first move by
pretending to mock the game: "It is a silly game. I'd
much prefer / Making the little song you spoke of making."
(87) But Corydon is suspicious: "How do I know this isn't
a trick / To get upon my land?" (88) Then Corydon moves,
inventing a ruse of his own: "Oh, Thyrsis, just a minute!
All the water / Is on your side the wall, and the sheep are
thirsty." (88) But Thyrsis now suspects a trick: "But
how do I know this isn't a trick / To water your sheep,
and get the laugh on me?" (89) Corydon answers sincerely
and pleadingly:
You can't know, that's the difficult thing about it,
Of course— you can't be sure. You have to take
My word for it. And I know just how you feel.
But one of us has to take a risk, or else,
Why— don't you see?— the game goes on forever! (89)
Thyrsis is willing to relent if Corydon will call the game
off: "I'm willing / To drop it all, if you will! Come on
over / And water your sheep! It is an ugly game." (89)
But the "excellent wall" which the shepherds have
built, merely of crepe paper, has become a barrier between
them: "This wall is actually a wall, a thing / Come up
between us shutting you away / From me." (89) Corydon
now refuses to water his sheep because he fears still
165
another trick, that Thyrsis will mix his sheep with his
own and keep them. Corydon moves again devising his own
scheme as he stumbles on a bowl of colored confetti and
2
colored paper ribbons on his side of the wall and
pretends: "Red stones— and purple stones— / And stones
stuck full of gold! The ground is full / Of gold and
colored stones 1" (90) Thyrsis now is willing to bargain:
"I'll give you all the water that you want, / For one of
those red stones— if it's a good one." (91) But Corydon
is one jump ahead: "Wouldn't I be a fool to spend my time /
Watching a flock of sheep go up a hill, / When I have these
[the stones] to play with?" (91)
Thyrsis is now angry at Corydon for refusing to
give him the stones and for refusing to allow the sheep a
drink of water. He hits upon a new— and more deadly— plan:
"I find no jewels .... But I wonder what / The root of
this black weed would do to a man / If he should taste it
.... I have seen a sheep die, / With half the stalk
still drooling from its mouth." (92)
On the surface they come to an agreement. One
agrees to trade his finest stones, while the other will
provide a drink of water; but, underneath, they each have
devious schemes in mind: Thyrsis poisons the water, while
Corydon makes a necklace of jewels with which to strangle
Thyrsis. When they meet at the wall, there is the final
166
realization, though it comes too late, that their game has
oeen in earnest; it is no longer play as Huizinga has
defined it, "a free activity standing quite consciously
outside 'ordinary' life as being 'not serious,' but at the
3
same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly."
The following is the recognition scene:
THYRSIS: (drops bowl) You're strangling me! Oh,
Corydon! It's only a game!— and you are strangling
me I
CORYDON: It's only a game, is it? Yet I believe
You've poisoned me in earnest! (Writhes and pulls
the strings tighter, winding them about Thyrsis'
neck)
You've poisoned me in earnest. . . . I feel so cold.
So cold. . . . This is a very silly game. . . .
Why do we play it? Let's not play this game
A minute more. . . . Let's make a little song
About a lamb. . . . I'm coming over the wall,
No matter what you say— I want to be near you. (95)
When the outer play, the comedy, resumes,
Cothurnus, the Masque of Tragedy, who has been seated
throughout the play within a play at the back of the
stage, suggests a way to hide the bodies of the shepherds
lying under the table: "Pull down the tablecloth/ On the
other side, and hide them from the house, / And play the
farce. The audience will forget." (96) Like the
characters who forget the "let's pretend" nature of their
game and let it go too far, till it is no longer a game,
the audience, too, will forget the lessons of the house of
illusions as they exit laughing. For them, and for us,
167
tragedy, like a game, is a make-believe happening: we
scoff at the chance of its being serious stuff.
A second notable example of the use of game and
its serious nature in twentieth-century drama is found in
a short story by Frederick Diirrenmatt, Die Panne (The Blow-
Out) ; the story, written mostly in dialogue form, was
translated and adapted to the stage under the title, A
4
Dangerous Game. The game, "holding court," is played
nightly by four retired men, a judge, a prosecutor, a
counsel for the defense, and an executioner. They re-enact
famous historical trials such as the trial of Socrates,
or that of Jesus, or that of Joan of Arc. But when
chance happens to bring them a traveler one night whose
car suffers a blow-out, they can play the game with a
"real"trial. Since the game lacks only one player, that
of defendant, and since the other posts reguire "knowledge
5
of the subject and of the rules of the game," the
traveler, Alfredo Traps, assumes the role of defendant.
The pun on his name is significant, recalling Berne's
reguirement that a game contain a snare or trick. In this
game, Alfredo traps himself by the gradual confession of
his guilt. (The plot is similar to that of Kafka's The
Trial. where Joseph K. is arrested without knowing why,
and, by the end of the novel, admits to his guilt.)
168
At first, Alfredo finds the game intriguing,
although he does not heed the good advice of his defense
counsel who advises him not to go on "playing innocent."
Instead, Alfredo decides that it is the prosecutor's
business to find the crime in this game. The prosecutor,
by carefully soliciting information from the defendant,
unravels the crime: Traps was a playboy who callously
seduced his boss' wife, knowing that his boss suffered
from heart disease and that he would discover the affair
from a mutual friend. Throughout his "trial," Traps
provides the damning information which leads to his
conviction: "I must admit I didn't exactly play fair when
6
it came to cutting old Gygax's throat." But as the
evening wears on, and more food and wine are served, Traps
becomes uneasy:
My dear devoted counsel for the defense, . . . the
particular beauty of this game of ours— if I may be
allowed to give my opinion, when this is only the
first time I've played it— is the way it gets under
one's skin and gives one the shivers. The game
threatens to turn into reality.7
Traps' realization leads to his admission of duplicity:
0
"It was a low-down trick I played on the old crook." The
game, which for the retired men was a "fountain of youth,"
precipitates Alfredo's suicide.
The game has revealed the deception which had
sustained Alfredo; its reality was too terrible for him to
confront. Unlike Martha and George, Alfredo cannot exist
169
without the illusion; unlike Sarah, he cannot return to a
fantasy situation; for Alfredo, as for Hamm, as for
Corydon and Thyrsis, as for Claire, the conclusion of the
game means death. (In Claire's case, her death is not a
real one, since it is Madame who is dead, and Claire who
is alive I) Durrenmatt, like Millay, and to a certain
extent, like Albee in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
presents the deadly serious quality of games which no
longer reveal the absurdity of life, but which concern
game-playing when it is carried too far, when it no longer
remains "a free activity standing quite consciously outside
9
'ordinary' life as being 'not serious'."
Durrenmatt offers another, no less pleasant,
recourse in his play The Physicists where three scientists
commit themselves to an insane asylum. The plot, in brief,
involves two physicists who join a third: the two are
really spies who hope to learn the secret of the third
physicist who committed himself voluntarily in order to
save humanity from his terrible discovery. In order to
maintain their disguise of insanity, each of the three is
forced to murder a female attendant; thus the game of
"trying to discover Mobius' secrets" assumes deadly
serious proportions; by their act of murder, each dooms
himself to remain committed to an asylum because of his
irresponsible, insane act. The themes of madness-sanity,
X > x
170
illusion-reality, game-life merge. While the play's
themes and plot are reminiscent of Pirandello's Henry IV.
the game in this play of Durrenmatt's is not the central
metaphor; the disguise of madness is a more crucial
metaphor of the play. Only by pretending to be mad may
the sanity of the world be preserved. That is the wisdom
which Mobius offers at the plays' end in his new role as
"poor king Solomon": "Only in the madhouse can we be
free.
A third, more recent and glaring, example of the
use of game in twentieth-century drama is found in the
"climactic revelation" or discovery scene of Mart Crowley's
The Boys in the Band (1968) Crowley's borrowings from
other avant-garde playwrights are easily observed. Like
Pinter in The Birthday Party. Crowley sets his play at a
birthday party, and the party setting in both plays leads
quite naturally to game-playing. (In Pinter's The Birthday
Party. Stanley joins in a game of Blind Man's Buff.) Like
the game of Bringing Up Baby in Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?. the revelation in The Boys in the Band is
accomplished by the device of a game. In fact, Crowley
acknowledges his strong debt (perhaps too strong) to
Albee's play by mentioning both author and title in his
text.
171
The character-players in Boys suggest various
"party games," or parlour games as they are frequently
called such as Movie-star Gin, Likes and Dislikes, B for
Botticelli, Spin the Botticelli, The Truth Game, and
Murder (126-128). They are labeled in a colloquially
descriptive fashion so that we can intuit from their
titles what they are and/or how they might be played. Eric
Berne commends the "aptness" of such colloquialisms to
define the games people play:
Psychological truths may be stated for academic
purposes in scientific language, but effective
recognition of emotional strivings in practice may
require a different approach. So we prefer playing
"Ain't It Awful" to 1 1 verbalizing projected anal
aggression." The former not only has a more
dynamic meaning and impact, but it is actually
more precise.12
Michael, the play's protagonist, rejects the
suggested games of the other players and hits upon a game
of his own called The Affairs of the Heart, which he
describes as "a combination of the Truth Game and Murder—
with a new twist." (128) The object of this game is to
reveal the one person that each player has truly loved by
calling him/her on the telephone. While Michael insists
the gp.iie has no rules, he does devise a scoring system
which constitutes the basis for winning, "the goddam point
system":
If you make the call, you get one point.
If the person you are calling answers, you get
two more points. If somebody else answers, you
172
get only one. If there's no answer at all,
you're screwed.
You can get as many as ten points and as few as one.
The one with the highest score wins. (131-132)
Not all the characters in the play want to
participate in the game. Harold, in fact, flatly refuses,
and Michael rebukes him in specific game-terminology,
drawing an analogy between life and a game as well: "Well,
not everyone is a participant in life. There are always
those who stand on the sidelines and watch." (130)
Bernard, too, objects, revealing the popular misconception
that games should be fun: "I don't think this is fun."
(133) Larry and Hank agree to play the game. Hank, for a
total of seven points calls his answering service and
leaves a message: "The message is for Larry and it's from
me, Hank, and it is just as I said: I_ ... love ... you."
(155) Larry scores ten points by calling Hank on the
extension phone and telling him that "for what it's worth,
I love you." (156) But Alan, the last caller, the
uninvited guest and college roommate of Michael, provides
the most surprising revelation. After much harrassment by
Michael, who insists that Alan call Justin Stuart, a man
with whom he asserts Alan had a homosexual relationship,
Alan picks up the phone, dials it, and goes through the
game-ritual. But when Michael snatches the phone away
from Alan, fully expecting to find Justin Stuart on the
173
other end, he is speechless to discover that it is Alan's
wife whom he has called.
While Crowley's use of game-playing serves as an
example of the use of game in drama, Richard Schechner
would not define the activity as a game, but as play
because "the participant [in this case, Michael] sets his
own rules. A game has generally acknowledged rules.
Therefore, many of the activities transactional analysts
13
would call games I prefer to call play."
In summary, the playwright of the Absurd uses the
device of the game paradoxically to express and to provide
an alternative to the condition of Absurdity. The themes
of game-plays are revealed through the central metaphor,
or "the poetic image" as Esslin calls it, life is a game.
But, since form and content cannot be separated, the game
also functions as a substitute for the structural
framework of a traditional plot.
Whether we fantasize an imaginary lover, like
Sarah and Richard, or a make-believe child, like Martha
and George, or a make-believe murder, like Claire and
Solange, whether we build a shelter isolated from a world
that may no longer even exist, like Hamm and Clov, or wait
for a Godot we are not sure will come, like Gogo and Didi,
or seek to find a truth that has long since ceased to be,
like James and Harry, or fight to retain possession of a
174
room or a woman, like Law and Stott, we create games— and
rules by which to play them— to fill the chasm in our
souls, to structure the meaninglessness of our lives, and,
perhaps, to win a victory over the Absurdity of our world.
But, by the very act of playing a game, we are committing
ourselves in an existential way; we are making a positive
statement about life; not unlike the Sisyphus Camus
describes, we ceaselessly roll our game-rocks up a steep
hill, and, for the brief moment when we can watch them
roll back down, we, too, imagine ourselves happy and not
afraid of "Virginia Woolf"!
In conclusion, while Aristotle considered plot the
essential characteristic of drama, plays without plot
resist classification by genre in twentieth-century drama.
For this reason I have devised the term, game-play. to
describe certain plays of the Absurdist theater, and to
define a dramatic technique peculiar to this Age of
Gamesmanship. Specifically, game in Absurdist theater has
become a structural device which acts as a substitute or
replacement for plot itself.
What I have begun here will, I hope, stimulate
others to study the horizontal relationship among the
performance activities of game, sports, theater, ritual,
and play. Perhaps the transactional game-analyst or the
mathematical game-analyst will furnish more rewarding
175
results than those of the biographical hypothesizers or
the "influence" postulators. Perhaps our new critics will
be ones who will not dismay over the relationship between
science and art— or literature and psychology— but who will
pursue a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of drama.
As new playwrights utilize game-techniques more extensively,
or modify them, future critics will expand the concept of
a game-play and the methodology which I have described. Or
perhaps new playwrights will abandon the notion that games
can give meaning and substance to our lives. Perhaps only
the future literary historians can tell us whether the
games we have played in our twentieth-century dramas have
expressed the meaninglessness of life— or have provided
worthwhile alternatives to its Absurdity!
1
176 |
References
"'"Edna St. Vincent Millay, Aria da Capo (1921) in ;
115 American One-Act Plays, ed. by Paul Kozelka (New York:
Washington Square Press, 1961). All citations in my text
are from this edition.
2
As Richard Schechner, "Approaches to Theory/
Criticism," Tulane Drama Review. Summer, 1966, p. 31,
points out, these common objects help create the symbolic
reality in the theater: "The play element— the 'other
worldliness1— of these activities is enhanced by the
valuelessness of the objects used."
3
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play
Element in Culture (Boston! Beacon Press, 1950), pT 13.
^Frederick Durrenmatt, A Dangerous Game, trans. by
Richard Winston and Clara Winston (London: Cape Publishers,
1960). All citations to the text are from this edition.
5Ibid. .
P*
24.
6Ibid..
P*
36.
^Ibid. .
P-
49.
8Ibid..
P«
72.
9 . .
Huizinga, Homo Ludens,
■^The Physicists, trans.
p. 13.
by James Kirkup (London:
French Co., 1963) , p. 45.
"'"■''Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band (New York:
Dell Publishing Co., 1968). All citations in my text are
from this edition.
1 ?
Eric Berne, Games People Play: The Psychology of
Human Relationships (New York: Grove Press, 1964), pp.
71-72.
13
Schechner, ".Approaches to Theory/Criticism, "
p. 36, fn. 42.
A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
General Works
Abel, Lionel. Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1963.
Berne, Eric. Games People Play: The Psychology of Human
Relationships. New York: Grove Press, 1964.
Bishop, Thomas. Pirandello and the French Theater. New
York: New York University Press, 1960.
Brustein, Robert. The Theater of Revolt: An Approach to
Modern Drama. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962.
Caillois, Roger. Man. Play and Games. New York: Free
Press of Glencoe, 1961.
Esslin, Martin. Reflections: Essays on Modern Theatre.
Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969.
________ . The Theatre of the Absurd. Garden City, New
York: Doubleday, 1961.
Fowlie, Wallace. "The New French Theater: Artaud,
Beckett. Genet. Ionesco." Sewanee Review. LXVII
(1959), 643-657.
Gassner, John. "The Possibilities and Perils of Modern
Tragedy." Theatre in the Twentieth Century.
Edited by Robert W. Corrigan. New York: Grove
Press, 1963.
Grossvogel, David I. The Blasphemers: The Theater of
Brecht. Ionesco. Beckett. Genet. Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press, 1962.
Guicharnaud, Jacques. Modern French Theatre from
Giraudoux to Beckett. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1961.
Hinchliffe, Arnold P. The Absurd. London: Methuen, 1968.
178
179
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element
in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1950.
Jacobsen, Josephine, and Mueller, William R. Ionesco and
Genet: Playwrights of Silence. New York: Hill
and Wang, 1968.
Murray, James A. H.; Bradley, Henry; Craigie, W. A.; and
Onions, C. T., eds. The Oxford English Dictionary.
28 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961.
Nelson, Robert J. The Play within a Play: The Dramatist's
Conception of His Art: Shakespeare to Anouilh.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958.
Pronko, Leonard C. Avant-Garde: The Experimental Theatre
in France. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1962.
Schechner, Richard. "Approaches to Theory/Criticism."
Tulane Drama Review, Summer, 1966, pp. 20-53.
Shipley, Joseph T., ed. Dictionary of World Literature.
Paterson, New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams and Co.,
1962.
Styan, J. L. The Dark Comedy. London: Cambridge
University Press, 1962.
Suits, Bernard. "What Is a Game?" Philosophy of Science,
XXXIV (June, 1967), 148-156.
Sypher, Wylie. Loss of Self in Modern French Literature
and Art. New York: Random House, 1962.
Taylor, John Russell. The Angry Theatre: New British
Drama. New York: Hill and Wang, 1969.
Vos, Nelvin. Eugene Ionesco and Edward Albee: A Critical
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Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English
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Wellwarth, George E. The Theatre of Protest and Paradox:
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180
Selected Primary Works
Crowley, Mart. The Boys in the Band. New York: Dell
Publishing Co., 1968.
Durrenmatt, Frederick. A Dangerous Game. Translated by
Richard Winston and Clara Winston. London: Cape
Publishers, 1960.
_________. The Physicists. Translated by James Kirkup.
London: French Co., 1963.
Ibsen, Henrik. Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen. Translated by
Eva Le Gallienne. New York: Random House, 1957.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Aria da Capo (1921).
15 American One-Act Plays. Edited by Paul Kozelka
New York: Washington Square Press, 1961.
Pirandello, Luigi. Penguin Plays: The Rules of the Game.
The Life I Gave You, Lazarus. Edited by E. Martin
Browne. London: Penguin Books, Inc., 1959.
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York:
The New American Library, 19.47.
Edward Albee
Primary Works
Albee, Edward. A Delicate Balance. New York: Atheneum,
1966.
________ . Tiny Alice. New York: Atheneum, 1965.
________ . Two Plays by Edward Albee: The American Dream
and The Zoo Story. New York: New American
Library, 1961.
________ . Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? New York:
Atheneum, 1962.
Critical Works
Albee, Edward. "Which Theater is the Absurd One?" The
Modern American Theater: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Edited by Alvin B. Kernan. Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967.
181
Baxandall, Lee. "The Theatre of Edward Albee." Tulane
Drama Review. IX (Summer, 1965), 19-40.
Brustein, Robert. "Albee and the Medusa Head." Seasons
of Discontent: Dramatic Opinions 1959-1965. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1965.
Cohn, Ruby. Edward Albee. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1969.
Debusscher, Gilbert. Edward Albee: Tradition and Renewal.
Translated by Anne D. Williams. Brussels:
American Studies Center, 1967.
Dozier, Richard J. "Adultery and Disappointment in Who 1s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Modern Drama.
February, 1969, pp. 432-436.
Flasch, Joy. "Games People Play in Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?" Modern Drama, December, 1967,
pp. 280-288.
Harris, Wendall V. "Morality, Absurdity, and Albee."
Southwest Review. LXIX (1964), 250-255.
Gould, Jean. Modern American Playwrights. New York:
Dodd, Mead Co., 1966.
Lewis, Allan. "The Fun and Games of Edward Albee."
Educational Theatre Journal. XVI (March, 1964),
30-36.
Plotinsky, Melvin L. "The Transformation of Understanding:
Edward Albee in the Theater of the Irresolute."
Drama Survey. IV (Winter, 1965), 220-232.
Schechner, Richard. "Who's Afraid of Edward Albee?"
Tulane Drama Review. VII (1963), 8-9.
Schneider, Alan. "Why So Afraid?" Tulane Drama Review,
VII (1963), 10-13.
Trilling, Diana R. "The Riddle of Albee's Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?" Claremont Essays. Edited by
Diana R. Trilling. New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World Publishers, 1964.
182
Wellwarth, George. "Hope Deferred: The New American
Drama: Reflections on Edward Albee, Jack
Richardson, Jack Gelber, and Arthur Kopit."
Literary Review. VII (1963), 7-26.
Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. 3rd series
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Samuel Beckett
Primary Works
Beckett, Samuel. Endgame: A Play in One Act. New York:
Grove Press, 1954.
From An Abandoned Work. London: Faber, 1958.
Play and Two Short Pieces for Radio. London:
Faber and Faber, 1964.
Poems in English. New York: Grove Press, 1961
Proust. New York: Grove Press, 1957.
Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press,
1954.
Critical Works
Brick, Allan. "A Note on Perception and Communication in
Beckett's Endgame.1 1 Modern Drama. Summer, 1961,
pp. 20-22.
Coe, Richard N. Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.
Cohn, Ruby. "Endgame: The Gospel According to Sad Sam
Beckett." Accent. Autumn, 1960, pp. 223-234.
_________. "Play and Player in the Plays of Samuel
Beckett." Yale French Studies. Spring-Summer,
1962, pp. 43-48.
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Wagner, Marlene Strome
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Core Title
The Game-Play In Twentieth-Century Absurdist Drama: Studies In A Dramatictechnique
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Comparative Literature
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