Sharon Pollock, hard at work not being Samuel Beckett

by Sherrill Grace, author of Making Theatre: A Life of Sharon Pollock

I.

In her 1984 essay, “Aller à la mer,” Hélène Cixous asked how “we, as women, can go to the theatre without lending our complicity to the sadism directed against women” (546)? Cixous states flatly that she has “stopped going to the theatre” because “it is always necessary for a woman to die in order for the play to begin” (546) and because, she exclaims, “it was like going to my own funeral” (546). Writing in France in the 1980s she cites Shakespeare (specifically in Hamlet) as the villain, but she could well have been thinking of many other playwrights and one in particular who has had a major impact on 20th century theatre: Samuel Beckett. In my recent work on Pollock, Beckett has often come to my mind-the Beckett of All That Fall, Endgame, Not I, and especially Krapp’s Last Tape – because Pollock knows his work well, has acted in and directed it and because, as a biographer, I have been searching for theatre parallels and artistic influences and historical contexts within which to situate her work. But I have become increasingly uneasy with Beckett’s world, partly because of his representations of women (think of Maddy Rooney, Winnie, Mouth, Nell-dying in her can-and Krapp’s lost “she”), partly because of his, to my mind, radically life-denying vision of existence, and partly because of his reduction (amounting to erasure) of full-bodied/fully embodied lives. My uneasiness, of course, goes hand-in-hand with my acknowledgement of his influence-on my own growing up, on modern theatre, on Sharon Pollock- but this too has prodded me to look elsewhere in theatre for something more, other, and opposite to his vision, and what better place to look for all that is suppressed and excised in Beckett’s theatre than in Pollock’s?

A still from the film Back to God’s Country (1919) featuring
Nell Shipman and her loyal canine companion.

This afternoon I have no desire to use Sam Beckett as a whipping boy. I invoke him because I find sharp contrasts useful; they help me to see what I am looking at and to understand what I see in Moving Pictures. In what follows I will restrict myself to a few exploratory observations about Moving Pictures by way of Krapp’s Last Tape. Why Moving Pictures? Well, because that’s why we are here today at all, but also because I believe this play tells us an enormous amount about how Sharon Pollock sees life, why she writes plays, and why she creates the kind of theatre she does. And why Krapp’s Last Tape? Because this is Beckett in, perhaps, his most personal, revealing work. I see Krapp’s Last Tape as his version of Moving Pictures or, if you prefer chronological sequence, Moving Pictures as her answer to Krapp’s Last Tape: Krapp, c’est lui! Shipman, c’est elle! Everything the one is, the other is not, and yet they have a common core; they share a hard knot of painful, human concerns. Shipman, like Krapp, is remembering scenes from her life; Krapp, like Shipman, was an artist, a writer, who has failed; both are autobiographical story- tellers/liars/fictionalizers wrestling with the pronouns “I” and “me” and, thus, with the nature of the subject; both of them have rejected and hurt others; both are now profoundly alone-he with his tape-recorder and spools, she with her black and white film; both are at the end, facing death, in a present haunted by the past. Krapp is a “wearish old man” with “White face. Purple nose. Disordered grey hair. Unshaven” (55). Shipman is an “elderly has-been” (16) with “nothing to say” (18) who has just learned that she has an “incurable disease” (20). Each play opens in the darkness, a void occupied by motionless old people: Krapp, Shipman. Each play moves forward with a start/stop, play/interrupt, structure that presents a series of present/past juxtapositions. And I cannot stress this structure enough because it is the backbone of each play, the guy wire, so to speak, that controls the through lines of action and, thereby, the meaning of each play.

II.

Given this summary you might well imagine that I am describing very similar plays, however as each of these plays unfolds we are drawn into their decidedly different visions of the world and almost diametrically opposite theatrical experiences. It is what Beckett and Pollock do with their similar themes, characters, and structure that makes all the difference. But let’s go to the texts for an example of how differences are created. First, here’s a passage from Krapp’s Last Tape near the beginning when Krapp has begun to listen to “Spool five” from “Box Three’; he has just turned thirty-nine on spool five, and it is this thirty-nine year old voice that the old Krapp (and we) hear:

TAPE: [Strong voice, rather pompous, clearly Krapp’s at a much earlier time.] Thirty-nine today, sound as a bell, apart from my old weakness, and intellectually I have now every reason to suspect at the . . . [hesitates] . . . crest of the wave-or thereabouts. [. ..] Good to be back in my den, in my old rags. [. . .] The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness round me I feel less alone. [Pause.] In a way. [Pause.] I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to . . . [hesitates] . . . me. [Pause.] Krapp. (57)

Now Moving Pictures: also near the beginning as Shipman contemplates the bad medical news she has just received and “the implications of [Edison’s] words as they apply to her-a personal intimate statement of her failure” (19). Near her we see Nell, who gazes at a film projected in her mind’s eye, and Helen in her Lady Teazle costume studying her script. Nell has just commanded Shipman to “Play” and Shipman is resisting. Almost immediately the first in a series of arguments, which will build in anger, recrimination, and pain, breaks out:

SHIPMAN: So what are you doing now-considering sub-text?
NELL: I’m making something up.
SHIPMAN: You’re a lousy mother, make something of that.
NELL: I could.
SHIPMAN: So you’re writing. Alright. Here’s something. Are you listening?
NELL: Ah-huh.
SHIPMAN: I’m telling you something.
NELL: Ah-huh.
(A pause. After a bit the silence penetrates NELL’S consciousness. She looks at SHIPMAN. SHIPMAN says nothing.)
Well?… Have you told me yet?
SHIPMAN: You’re not that old, you’re not senile, have you been told something or not?
NELL: You told me (she thinks for a moment) I’m a lousy mother. Was that it?
SHIPMAN: No that’s not it! I said “telling” not “told.” This is it. You-have an incurable disease. The tests have come back and the doctor said you wanted to know.
NELL: Is this how he said to tell me?
SHIPMAN: Let’s say-he gave no directive. So. Make something of that.
NELL: Did he say how long?
SHIPMAN: No.
NELL: (She prepares to write, gets out paper. Pauses and looks at SHIPMAN.) Are you lying?
SHIPMAN: About the story line-or the time line?
NELL: Either.
SHIPMAN: Everything’s fiction. Isn’t that what you say? Do you think you could write a script about that?
NELL: About what?
SHIPMAN: About dying! Pay attention! Do you think you could write a script about dying?
NELL: If I’ve got the time. The question is . . .
SHIPMAN: Why bother. (19-20)

The finishing touches being put on Older Shadow, played by Samantha Leokadia Putko in Stonehill Theatre Company’s 2012 production of Moving Pictures

The differences here are so obvious that they probably don’t call for explication, but let me stress just a few. When we discover Krapp in his “old wearish” present, he is entirely alone in his dark “den”; his only connection with himself is through the machine and its “diaristic recording” (Aston and Savona, 162) of his disembodied voice from the past. Although he will speak in the present, react to his earlier self with irritation or despair, interrupt himself, reverse the tape or turn the machine off, there is no possibility for interaction with himself, no space for dialogue or argument, and no imaginative engagement with memory. By contrast, we discover a Shipman so haunted, so possessed by her past and her past selves that they immediately speak to her, first in whispers, then emphatically, and finally in loud argument. Moreover, these past selves are fully embodied and actively performative (by which I mean constitutive of a potentially changing identity). Nell is Shipman in her thirties, the “I” who is most culpable in old Shipman’s eyes; Helen is the eager teenager full of hope and promise, blind to the future and its consequences. They are, in performance, separate yet integral presences, so real to Shipman that they will argue with her, play with her, remember with her over the ensuing performance time. Shipman’s selves interact verbally, visually, physically in time and space, and emotionally and psychologically with each other in a performative playing out of identity recreation. Memories will be recounted, disputed, revised, in an, at times, exhausting, excruciating, tug-of-war or game of hide and seek. Appropriately, at this initial stage, the impetus of each play has been established: Krapp will go no where, his movements largely confined to switching the machine on and off from sound to silence; Shipman will go back, aggressively, relentlessly, and sometimes with humour, in order to come forward through the persistent motion of performance and dialogue to a present that is the same but different.

Before I get ahead of myself on conclusions, let’s consider two more moments from these plays. For Krapp’s Last Tape I want to go right to the end. Box three, spool five has replayed traces of several crucial memories just as, only as, they were recorded at age thirty-nine: thoughts about the women in his life (all lost or disparaged), bitter reflections on his “opus magnum” (58) that sold “Seventeen copies . . . eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries” (62), memories of his mother whose death he awaited “wishing she were gone” (59). But now the reel is running out:

TAPE: [. . .] I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.
[Pause. KRAPP’S lips move. No sound.]
Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.
[Pause.]
Here I end this reel. Box-[Pause.]-three, spool-[Pause.]-five. [Pause.] Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.
[KRAPP motionless staring before him. The tape runs on in silence.]
CURTAIN

And here’s how Pollock concludes the published text of Moving Pictures. Shipman has done her best-or worst-to drag every last story about her life into the light; she has, in a sense, confessed her selfishness, stupidities, betrayals, failures (with her mother and father, her son, her husbands, and her work), and she has experienced intense pain in the process. But she has also countered her skeptical remark to Nell at the beginning-“Why bother”- because she has confronted and learned from her past; she has indeed told a new story about her life. She has demonstrated how her past (Helen and Nell) produced her future (Nell and Shipman) and caught up with her in this present (Helen + Nell + Shipman), and she has answered Nell’s angry question, one that hovers over the entire play: “Who is this old woman? I can’t believe that it’s me!” (61) Now Shipman wants to stop, but Nell contradicts her: “Never stop,” she insists, “never stop, never” (95). Stubbornly herself, Shipman holds out-

SHIPMAN: The “fictional” news . . . (She looks up at the lighting booth.) Gooo-to black. (lights start to fade)
NELL: (to unseen techie in booth) Never! (lights bump back up)
SHIPMAN: Would you give me one moment’s peace? I’m an old woman you know. You’re an old woman!
NELL: We’re an old woman.
HELEN: Never!
NELL: Never? HELEN and NELL look to SHIPMAN.
SHIPMAN: Alright. You’ve got me. Never! So-Play! (96) At which point the closing stage instructions repeat key ones from the beginning of the play before “Blackout” and “The end.”

III.

Both Krapp’s Last Tape and Moving Pictures complete a circle. We leave Krapp where we found him-silent, alone, in the dark-except for the scrape of the tape-recorder; we leave Shipman almost where we found her, with her three selves “in hot pools of light” (96) facing out towards the audience as if watching a film. The journeys we have shared with these two old artists, however, are profoundly different, and the human truths or realities-or perhaps I should say their reactions to these so-called realities-approach being totally opposite. Certainly, the emotional and philosophical places where we leave this old man and this old woman feel worlds apart. Krapp is at a dead end, trapped in meaningless repetition, “alienated from his younger self” (Aston and Savona, 162), left with nothing but unalterable stories from which he cannot learn. His agency, and therefore his identity, are reduced to the barest minimum-a spool, his bananas, his dark den. Shipman is dying but she is not at an end . . . yet. She is not ready to accept an ending. Her mind and imagination are vitally alive, engaged, poised to start over but from a position of much greater self-awareness, understanding, even self-forgiveness. Where Krapp is static and solipsistic, turning in on himself and away from the world, Shipman is actively, often aggressively, engaged with the world (and here I stress that I mean Pollock’s “Shipman,” not the actual Nell Shipman). Krapp is a failure as a man, a son, and an artist, and he seems defeated by forces he will not confront; he is without hope, his silence, like his gestures, futile; he just stops as if acquiescing to his fate. The play ends on a dying fall of bleak, ontological meaninglessness. Shipman too has suffered losses and defeats, many brought on by her ambition and her failure to understand the film industry, but she is feisty, indomitable, and able to move beyond personal failures to seize new hope; she insists on continuing, on celebrating her desire to “Play,” and she ends her story on an upbeat of possibility. Krapp’s Last Tape ends in silence, withdrawal, and negation. Moving Pictures closes noisily with all three aspects of this woman vying for the last word, resisting silence and affirming art, life, and the self. If this is the way Shipman’s world ends, then it is with a bang, not, as Krapp’s does (or Hamm’s)-with a whimper. Krapp’s answer to the implied question-was it (my life, my work) worth it (the sacrifices)?-is more than no because the question is pointless in Beckett’s universe where “I” and “me”-the very notion of self-hold no more significance than the eating of another banana. Shipman’s answer to the question, which she puts directly and elaborates-if no one will produce your work and no one will see it, why bother creating anything? (20-21)-could scarcely be more contrary. Maybe no rational person would keep on battling but, goddamit, I tried; if I screwed up, never mind, because the meaning, joy, and affirmation of life and art lie in the trying and in the never giving up.

Equally important and inseparable from this contrast are the construction of self and the concept of identity illustrated by each play. Krapp is single, his identity fixed and monologic; his younger self is nothing but a mechanically recorded trace totally beyond his reach, closed off from dialogue, as are all those others in his life who have no voice or identity. Shipman, however, is multiple, her identity dialogic; her younger selves are both separate from and integral to her present existence. They and, therefore, she learn from this playing; they are still alive in the old woman, still pushing her on. Even some of the others with whom she interacted in the past come alive (as it were) on the crowded stage of her mind. In Beckett’s world, at least in Krapp’s Last Tape – and this, if we trust the title, is the last tape he made before giving it up and/or it is the last time he will listen to the tape-we are trapped in a narrow, minimal singularity, cut off from all others, finished. In Pollock’s world, judging from Moving Pictures, we are caught up in an endless battle with our multiple selves and with others to wrest meaning from existence, to develop, change, and understand; life like art is a process, precious and worth it all. Beckett’s world is virtually empty; Pollock’s is full-of bodies, relationships, noise, argument, tears and laughter. As I see it, Beckett leaves little or no room for an enabling performativity (but see Lane), whereas Pollock shows us performativity modifying identity.

Pollock and Beckett face many of the same philosophical challenges in these plays, but Pollock reverses Beckett’s dramaturgy to tell another kind of life-story, which begs the further question: why? How can I account for this radical difference? Is it a matter of historical moment (mid-versus late-20th century), of biography, of artistic temperament, ethical stance, or gender? The easy answer is to say all of the above, and I would need more time and space to consider each of these parameters carefully. Both writers started life in very comfortable, Protestant, middle-class homes that, nevertheless, harboured intense familial tension (notably between child and mother), but once they left those homes, physically, their lives were completely different, even though they both developed into demanding artists who, each in her/his own way, cares deeply about politics and social conditions. To my mind, however, the key, determining difference is gender, which brings me back to Cixous and why I wish she would return to the theatre. In “Aller à la mer” Cixous calls for a theatre that conveys “the living, breathing, speaking body” performing in scenes that take place “where a woman’s life takes place, where her life-story is decided,” in a play that illustrates the “movement of women towards life, passed on from one woman to another” (547). Such a play will be one in which just one woman goes “beyond the bounds of prohibition, experiencing herself as many, the totality of those she has been, could have been or wants to be” (547). Such a play, if Cixous only knew it, is Moving Pictures.

Pollock’s exposure to Beckett began in the mid-1960s, at the beginning of her career, and it has continued over the decades. She played Maddy Rooney in All That Fall and Nell in Endgame at the University of Calgary in 1968-69, and she could quote Beckett at length, from memory, and would build references from Beckett into the jokes and puns of everyday life-hence her scrap book became her krap book. Years later, she directed Krapp’s Last Tape for the 1991-92 season at Calgary’s Performance Kitchen. There are other comparisons between Pollock and Beckett that are worth exploring – Happy Days with Getting It Straight, and Endgame with Moving Pictures or Angel’s Trumpet, for example – but they are beyond the scope of this paper and would, I believe, only reinforce the distinctions I identify between Krapp’s Last Tape and Moving Pictures. Among other contemporary playwrights with whom Pollock bears rewarding comparison are Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepard, Michel Tremblay, and Edward Albee. Particularly interesting is the comparison between Albee’s Three Tall Women, which Gussow calls Albee’s version of Krapp’s Last Tape (368), and Moving Pictures. Albee’s women are much less interesting than Pollock’s and his portrayal less rich and nuanced, but one key point of similarity between them and with Krapp’s Last Tape is the way each author has displaced significant autobiographical material onto surrogate biographical creations. Tremblay’s five Albertines are more complex and more interwoven with his other plays than are either Albee’s “mother” or Pollock’s Shipman; but Shipman, like Albertine, is able to achieve a collective solidarity with her multiple selves and, thereby, hope for the future that is absent for Albee’s women. In making these comparisons, however, it is worth remembering that Krapp and Shipman are writers, but that Albertine and Albee’s women are not, and this artistic function adds other layers of significance to their stories.

Harold Pinter in Krapp’s Last Tape

Beckett’s biographer, James Knowlson, confirms that Krapp’s Last Tape contains “many personal elements” (444) in the form of patterned memories, but for a more precise analysis of Beckett’s uses of autobiography in his work, see Kelly and Lane. Kelly calls Krapp, like Hamm, Maddy, and Winnie, “autobiographers” or “fictionalizers” (122), but this categorization does not necessarily account for Beckett’s own life-story. Lane analyses Beckett’s “auto/biographical subject” from both a liberal humanist and a poststructural deconstructive perspective and argues for a third theoretical approach to the question of the subject in Beckett “where the creation of the auto/biographical subject . . . is not purely representation [but also] a lived experience for the actor” (ts 14). If Lane is correct in the stress he places on the “investment and projection” (ts 14) of the auto/biographical in performance, then there may be a modicum more of hope in Beckett’s plays, as performed, than I am allowing for. I have discussed Moving Pictures as an autobiographical representation of Nell Shipman in “Creating the Girl from God’s Country,” and in that article I alluded to the play’s personal resonances with Pollock’s biography: her crucial relationships with “mummy” and “daddy” (her terms for her parents), her own experience of marital abuse, her struggle with an arts industry (theatre instead of film) that too often treats art like an entertainment commodity, even her life-long devotion to animals. But Moving Pictures is not her autobiography in the same way that Doc is because in the former play her life-story is submerged and displaced to foreground her version of Nell Shipman’s story. Where Doc is primarily Pollock’s autobiography, transformed of course into art, Moving Pictures is primarily Pollock’s dramatized biography of Shipman.

R.H. Thomson and Carmen Grant in Doc (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

For the on-going debate about performativity and theatre, see Butler, Dolan, Sidnell, and Worthen; for discussions that include autobiography in the performativity/ theatre debate, see Postlewait and Grace (2005). In “Performing the Auto.Biographical Pact,” I suggest (by way of agreement with and response to Dolan) that “performance enacts the performative [when] the performer . . . modifies identity and life-story in the process of playing the part” and that as an audience we can see that “identities need not be prescribed, interpellated, and fixed” (000).

The contrast between this closing dialogue-“Never! Never? . . . Never! So-Play!” and the similar exchange between Clov and Hamm in Endgame is striking. Near the end of their tortured story-telling performance, Clov implores Hamm to “stop playing,” but Hamm insists “Never” before seeming to relent: “Then let it end! With a bang!” (130). But the end that does come is hardly dramatic or purposeful because Hamm is left alone in blindness, darkness, and a form of solitary confinement to “play and lose and have done with losing” (132) in motionless silence. If Pollock was consciously echoing the final moments of Endgame in Moving Pictures, then she was doing so to stress her radically different philosophical, and theatrical, position.

Maria Vacratsis and Eric Peterson in Soulpepper Theatre’s 2012
production of Endgame (Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

While I agree with Aston and Savona that the two Krapps can never meet or unite, I do not agree that the play “undermines the reader’s habitualized capacity to extrapolate a coherent and unified character from the two Krapps” (163). What Beckett gives us in Krapp is an image of the self that is so cut off from others, including his other selves, that it is finally unknowable to itself, except as a fixed, finalized, singular Self. With Shipman, however, the whole point of the performance is to better know the self by remembering and re-integrating others and other selves, and thereby, to recreate an ever-changing identity.

Although I am not arguing that Moving Pictures is a feminist play, such an argument could be made insofar as the play illustrates three of the four criteria for feminist theatre set forth by Josette Féral: no linear plot; an uncompleted text; portrayal of woman as multiple using a diversity and simultaneity of voices (558-60). Féral’s fourth criterion-the creation of “woman-talk” at the level of syntax (560) is not present in Moving Pictures, but a case could be made for its creation in Getting It Straight.

Works Cited
Albee, Edward. Three Tall Women. New York: Dutton, 1994.

Aston, Elaine and George Savona. Theatre as Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

Beckett, Samuel. Krapp’s Last Tape.1958. Samuel Beckett: Collected Shorter Plays. New York: Grove Press, 1984.

—-. Endgame: A Play in One Act. Trans. from the French by the Author. New York: Grove Press, 1958.

Butler, Judith. “Performative acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Ed. Sue-Ellen case. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. 270-82.

Cixous, Hélène. “Aller à la mer.” Trans. Barbara Kerslake. Modern Drama XXVII.4 (1984): 546-48.

Dolan, Jill. “Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Performance, and the Performative.” Theatre Journal 45.4 (1993): 417-41.

Féral, Josette. “Writing and Displacement: Women in Theatre.” Modern Drama XXVII.4 (1984): 549-63.Grace, Sherrill. “Creating the Girl from God’s Country: From Nell Shipman to Sharon Pollock.” Canadian Literature. 172 (Spring 2002): 98-117.

—-. “Performing the Auto/Biographical Pact: Towards a Theory of Identity in Performance.” Tracing the Autobiographical. Eds M. Kadar, L. Warley, S. Egan, and J. Perreault. Waterloo: Wifird Laurier UP, 2005. 65-79.

Gussow, Mel. Edward Albee: A Singular Journey. New York: Applause Books, 2001.

Kelly, Katherine. “The Orphic Mouth in Not I.” The Beckett Studies Reader. Ed S.E. Gontarski. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993. 121-28.

Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1996.

Lane, Richard. “Theorizing the Gendered Space of Auto/Biographical Performance via Samuel Beckett and Hans Bellmer.” Theatre and AutoBiography: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Writing and Performing Lives. Eds Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006. In press.

Pollock, Sharon. Doc. 1984. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003.

—-. Moving Pictures. 1999. Sharon Pollock: Three Plays. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2003.

Postelwait, Thomas. “Autobiography and Theatre History.” Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance. Eds Thomas Postelwait and Bruce A. McConachie. Iowa city: U of Iowa P, 1989. 248-72.

Sidnell, Michael. “Authorizations of the Performative: Whose Performances of What, and for Whom?” The Performance Text. Ed Domenico Pietropaolo. Toronto: LEGAS, 1999. 97-112.

Tremblay, Michel. Albertine in Five Times. Trans. John Van Burek and Bill Glassco. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1986.

Worthen, W. B. “Drama, Performativity, and Performance.” PMLA 113.5 (1998): 1093-1107.

This essay first appeared online for WWR Magazine in 2005.