Content deleted Content added
Citation bot (talk | contribs) Alter: pages. Add: s2cid, jstor, pages. Removed URL that duplicated unique identifier. Removed parameters. Formatted dashes. | You can use this bot yourself. Report bugs here. | Suggested by AManWithNoPlan | All pages linked from cached copy of User:AManWithNoPlan/sandbox2 | via #UCB_webform_linked |
m convert special characters found by Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss (via WP:JWB) |
||
| (10 intermediate revisions by 7 users not shown) | |||
Line 2:
{{Use dmy dates|date=July 2020}}
'''''... but the clouds ...''''' is a television play by [[Samuel Beckett]]. Beckett wrote it between October–November 1976 "to replace a film of ''[[Play (play)|Play]]'' which the [[BBC]] had sent [him] for approval (and which he had rejected)"<ref>{{cite book |editor1-first=C. J. |editor1-last=Ackerley |editor2-first=S. E. |editor2-last=Gontarski |date=2006 |title=The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett |___location=London |publisher=Faber & Faber |page=77 |isbn=978-0-5712-2738-9}}</ref> due to "the poor quality of the film". [[Donald McWhinnie]] directed [[Billie Whitelaw]] and [[Ronald Pickup]]. It was first broadcast on 17 April 1977 as part of a programme of three Beckett plays entitled 'Shades' on [[BBC2]]. It was first published in ''Ends and Odds'' (Faber) 1977. An early title for the piece was '''''Poetry only love'''''.
==Synopsis==▼
The play opens in darkness
In summary, the play begins with M in darkness, seen in a recurring pose at his invisible table. We hear M's thoughts as he reminisces about encountering the woman, while M1 acts out these recollections in the circle of light. M reflects on the cause of her appearance, his routine, and his continuous cycle of summoning her at night and leaving at dawn.
The voice lists the three instances listed above where the woman has appeared to him in the past. When he reaches the third one the camera cuts to the woman's face, "reduced as far as possible to eyes and a mouth",<ref name="multiref4"/> which mouths silently along with the voice, "...clouds...but the clouds...of the sky..."<ref name="ShorterPlays261">{{cite book |first=Samuel |last=Beckett |date=1984 |title=Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett |___location=London |publisher=Faber & Faber |page=261 |isbn=978-0-5711-3040-5}}</ref> The man then realises there is a fourth case, but not really a fourth ''{{linktext|per se}}'' because so much of the time,
We see M1 prepare for the road again and leave. The voice says, "Right," then the woman's face appears once more and the voice repeats the final four lines of Yeats's poem. This time, however, the woman does not mouth the words. Her face dissolves, we are left with the man sitting at his invisible table where we began and
==Title==
The title comes from a phrase from the last verse of [[W. B. Yeats|W. B. Yeats's]] near-[[Solipsism|solipsist]] poem,▼
''[[The Tower (poem)|The Tower]]'':
▲The title comes from a phrase from the last verse of [[W. B. Yeats|Yeats's]] near-[[Solipsism|solipsist]] poem,
::: Now shall I make my soul,
Line 34 ⟶ 46:
==Structure==
===Characters===
The director, Sidney Homan, defines the four 'characters' in this work:<ref name="Homan68">{{cite book |first=Sidney |last=Homan |date=1992 |title=Filming Beckett's Television Plays: A Director's Experience |___location=Lewisburg |publisher=Bucknell University Press |page=68 |isbn=978-0-8387-5234-0}}</ref>
Line 43 ⟶ 54:
===Stages===
Unlike ''[[Quad (play)|Quad]]'', which utilises a single fixed camera throughout, there are a total of sixty camera shots in this piece, "the shape of an hour or a minute",<ref name="multiref3">{{cite book |first=Enoch |last=Brater |chapter=Intertextuality |editor1-last=Oppenheim |editor1-first=Lois |date=2004 |title=Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies |___location=London |publisher=[[Palgrave Macmillan]] |page=37 |isbn=978-1-4039-0352-5}}</ref> which can be organised into four groups or stages. There are only two televisual techniques used throughout the play: fade and dissolve.
====Stage 1====
('''Directions 1-19'''): The first stage focuses on the past, those times when the woman did appear and M could be creative as a consequence.
====Stage 2====
('''Directions 20-26'''): The second stage examines where the poet is presently. There are three areas, just offstage in the darkness.
* West is the outside world in which he spends his days wandering.
* East is his closet where he exchanges his greatcoat for his robe.
* North, to the rear of the stage, is his
====Stage 3====
('''Directions 27-52'''): In the third stage the poet lists four possibilities:
* The woman can appear and then vanish immediately.
* The woman can appear and linger.
* The woman can appear and 'speak' to him, i.e. inspire him. He uses the example where she mouths the words, "but the clouds
* The woman can fail to appear at all, the most common scenario.
====Stage 4====
('''Direction 53-60'''): In the final stage, the poet actually "finds success, almost as an ironic consequence of his despair. The woman appears and, this time, V is able to [recite] all four lines from Yeats's poem, rather than the truncated and hence frustrating single line of the television play's title."<ref name="Homan68" />
▲==Synopsis==
▲The play opens in darkness. It fades up to a shot from behind of M, a "man sitting on [an] invisible stool and bowed over [an] invisible table."<ref name="multiref4">{{cite book |first=Samuel |last=Beckett |date=1984 |title=Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett |___location=London |publisher=Faber & Faber |page=257 |isbn=978-0-5711-3040-5}}</ref> He is wearing his [[nightshirt|gown]] and [[Nightcap (garment)|nightcap]]. This is the only way we ever see him in the present, bowed over his table. The camera returns to this image fifteen times throughout the play.
▲We hear a voice and assume it belongs to the man we are looking at, at least it is his thoughts we hear. He is remembering the circumstances under which he has seen the woman in the past. While he remembers we see M1, his remembered/imagined self, go through the motions described, at least what little actually takes place in the circle of light. He changes his mind about what causes her to appear. At first he says, "When I thought of her..."<ref>{{cite book |first=Samuel |last=Beckett |date=1984 |title=Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett |___location=London |publisher=Faber & Faber |page=259 |isbn=978-0-5711-3040-5}}</ref> but he realises that is inaccurate; the woman simply ''appears'' to him, and always at night. He goes over his routine, carefully starting from his return home after walking the roads since daybreak:<ref>Both in his biography of Beckett (''Damned to Fame'' p.634) and in a chapter within his book ''Frescoes of the Skull'' (p.261), James Knowlson draws a parallel with this man and the type of characters written by [[John Millington Synge|Synge]].</ref> he enters, goes to the closet and swaps his [[greatcoat]] and hat for a nightgown and cap, then he enters his sanctum and tries to summon her, always without joy, whereupon at dawn he dresses again and heads out on the road.
▲The voice lists the three instances listed above where the woman has appeared to him in the past. When he reaches the third one the camera cuts to the woman's face, "reduced as far as possible to eyes and a mouth",<ref name="multiref4"/> which mouths silently along with the voice, "...clouds...but the clouds...of the sky..."<ref name="ShorterPlays261">{{cite book |first=Samuel |last=Beckett |date=1984 |title=Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett |___location=London |publisher=Faber & Faber |page=261 |isbn=978-0-5711-3040-5}}</ref> The man then realises there is a fourth case, but not really a fourth ''{{linktext|per se}}'' because so much of the time, by far the greatest amount of the time, nothing happens, the woman never even appears.
▲Although from the opening scene it seems like he spends every night willing the woman to appear, this isn't the case. Sometimes he grows weary and occupies himself with other things that are "more ... rewarding, such as ... [[cube root]]s"<ref name="ShorterPlays261" /> or sits absorbed with nothing – which he describes as a mine – like the man in ''[[Film (film)|Film]]''.
▲We see M1 prepare for the road again and leave. The voice says, "Right," then the woman's face appears once more and the voice repeats the final four lines of Yeats's poem. This time, however, the woman does not mouth the words. Her face dissolves, we are left with the man sitting at his invisible table where we began and everything fades to black.
==Interpretation==
In a number of other works Beckett has felt the need to split an individual into separate aspects of that character, e.g. ''[[Words and Music (play)|Words and Music]]'', where the writer, his words and his emotions are all represented by separate characters. "In ''... but the clouds ...'', however, Beckett is concerned not with fragments of the self, but the whole person. The [[protagonist]], M, sees himself whole, (as at the end of ''Film'') held in the light circle of the imagination ... The action of ''... but the clouds ...'' consists of M reliving past experience with such intensity that he can see himself performing his daily routine."<ref>{{cite book |first=Rosemary |last=Pountney |date=1978 |title=Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett's Drama 1956-1976 |___location=Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire |publisher=Colin Smythe |page=204 |isbn=978-0-3892-0776-4}}</ref>
Line 93 ⟶ 86:
Not all of Krapp's actions take place at his table, we hear him pouring drinks and attempting to sing in the darkness surrounding his stage as a means of distracting himself from the task in hand; in ''Quad'', the players' only reality is within the lighted square as is the case with the women of ''[[Come and Go]]'' but in ''... but the clouds ...'' all the real action takes place in the darkness, the central circle of light is a place of transition only.
The fact that the woman may well have been real, rather than some [[Stereotype|stereotypical]] projection of M's ideal woman, is suggested by the line, "With those unseeing eyes I so begged ''when alive'' to look at me."<ref>{{cite book |first=Samuel |last=Beckett |date=1984 |title=Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett |___location=London |publisher=Faber & Faber |page=260 |isbn=978-0-5711-3040-5}}</ref> The camera focuses on the woman's face while these lines are spoken. Enoch Brater argues that "what he longs for is not the beloved but the image of his beloved, the evocative [[metaphor]] he has made of her. His is an exquisite despair. In his secret ceremony Beckett's male figure all but revels in it."<ref>{{cite journal |first=Enoch |last=Brater |title=Billie Whitelaw's TV Beckett |date=2003 |journal=Assaph: Studies in the Theatre (Samuel Beckett Issue) |number=17 |editor1-last=Ben-Zvi |editor1-first=Linda |publisher=Tel Aviv University |page=193 |issn=0334-5963}}</ref> Because the old man realises he cannot physically recall his beloved, he makes do with [[simulation]]; he torments himself with memories of what it was like when she came before. M is not only trying to remember, he is trying "to remember the way in which he used to remember
"For Beckett and for Yeats, there is a difference between remembering and not remembering, but both writers remind us that not remembering does not necessarily equal forgetting. That which is not consciously 'remembered' by an individual can still return to impose itself is a variety of ways, one of which both Yeats and Beckett qualify as a kind of haunting."<ref name="multiref1"/> This makes one viewer's comment as to the nature of W all the more interesting when they call her "the character who appears but isn't really there – she only gives the appearance of an appearance."<ref name="multiref2"/>
Line 108 ⟶ 101:
::: Mrs Mallet: I saw her lips move.<ref>{{cite book |first=W. B. |last=Yeats |date=1966 |title=The Collected Plays of W B Yeats |___location=New York |publisher=Macmillan |page=385 |isbn=978-0-3330-0747-1}}</ref>
"As [[Katharine Worth]] has pointed out, in Yeatsian terminology 'shades' [the final word of Yeats's poem] necessarily conjures up thoughts of
[[John Calder]] in his review of the three plays shown on BBC2 had this to say about ''... but the clouds ...'':
: "The man would appear ... to be immersed in guilt towards a missed opportunity, a dead love, a regretted course of action, as in ''[[Eh Joe]]'', but with a flatter style. [[Irony]] is subdued, [[stoicism]] more matter of fact, [[self-pity]] almost entirely absent, illusion excluded. The man is concerned with concentration, a [[Merlin]] conjuring up a ghost in his memory."<ref>{{cite journal |url=http://www.english.fsu.edu/jobs/num02/Num2Calder.htm |first=John |last=Calder |date=Summer 1977 |title=Review: "The lively arts": three plays by Samuel Beckett on BBC 2, 17 April 1977 |journal=[[Journal of Beckett Studies]] |number=2 |publisher=Edinburgh University Press |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070416100908/http://www.english.fsu.edu/jobs/num02/Num2Calder.htm |archive-date=2007-04-16}}</ref>
Clearly the process in this play is open to interpretation. Is the process wholly internal, the man remembering someone real from his past or is he trying to conjure up some external manifestation of her, her ghost? And what is his motive for trying to evoke her? Is it simply to satisfy memory, to wallow in the moment awhile as Krapp does, or is she in some way his muse, an enabling force that makes the words come? Either way it is clear that he cannot control events directly, by the power of his [[Will (philosophy)|will]], things take place at best, as a byproduct almost of his actions, but more likely they are entirely out of his control and all he can do is wait on them.
| |||