Rockaby and the Art of Inadvertent Interpretation

Abstract

Eclipsed among the millions of critical words that have been lavished on Samuel Beckett is an uncomfortable and frequently avoided question: on what level can spectators be expected to understand his theater? Some critics have tried to address this issue by pointing out parallels between the dilemmas of Beckett's characters and those of his audiences, with limited success, but I want to shift the field of inquiry by discussing affinities between the actor's process of creating characters in rehearsal and the spectator's process of apprehending plays in performance. I focus predominantly on Rockaby, because Billie Whitelaw's extraordinary performance is well documented and also because there is an important article by Charles Lyons about the process of perceiving this play. Lyons's essay, which has application to Beckett 's other works as well, is to my knowledge unique in its detail concerning perception, yet strangely it does not mention Whitelaw at all despite the fact that her kind of acting figures hugely in the process described.