ABSTRACT
When asked about her rehearsal work on Samuel Beckett’s Rockaby (1980), actress Billie Whitelaw stated: ‘I am beating time the whole time. Also, even if at first the script is not fully understood I know that if I get the rhythm and music of it right it works’.1 Whitelaw’s reference to Beckett’s writing in terms of a particular rhythm and as a music score should come as no surprise in view of the playwright’s striking awareness of and sensitivity to timing, repetition, durational patterns, pulse, tempi and those elements in drama which border on music and which Beckett meticulously specified in his dramatic work, more strikingly so in the minimalist plays written after the early 1960s. Beckett seems to have been intrigued by the ‘ghastly grinning on’ of time,2 which he attempted to organize musically and carve out in rhythm, holding time back in repetitive patterns or dragging it on in hurried, animated staccatos. An emancipated rhythmic text thus resounds in his writings, ‘on-beat, off-beat, between-beat, delaying, dragging, precipitating, syncopating’.3
