ABSTRACT
Samuel Beckett's resistance to productions of his plays which depart from the precise stage directions indicated in the texts has attracted public and critical attention through a number of legal disputes between Beckett and a director or company who has flouted the author's directions. 1 The best documented of these is JoAnne Akalaitis' production of Endgame in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1984, for the American Repertory Theater. The dispute was settled out of court, but both sides presented their case in statements to the audience. Robert Brustein of the American Repertory Theatre argued that
Beckett's statement, however, insisted that
I do not intend here to evaluate the respective rights of author and director, but to explore the paradox which these disputes uncover at the heart of Beckett's dramatic practice as author-director. On the one hand, the increasingly precise stage directions of Beckett's later dramatic work, as well as the decision to prosecute in individual cases, indicates a desire to exercise almost absolute control over the execution of his plays. On the other, the failure or parody of attempts to impose authorial meaning and control is a predominant feature of Beckett's drama. In Play, for example, the Light at first seems to control the appearance and speech of the three heads, as if
trying to create a coherent narrative out of their fragmented utterances, but the repetition of the text suggests that it is as trapped in the theatrical mechanism as the heads. In this essay, I intend to place Beckett's strategies as director in the context of the struggle between power and powerlessness, mastery and failure, which recurs throughout the text and texture of Beckett's plays.
