Ohio Impromptu
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Ohio Impromptu is a short play by Samuel Beckett. Written in English in 1980, it began as a favour to Stan Gontarski, who requested a dramatic piece to be performed at an academic symposium in Columbus, Ohio in honour of Beckett’s seventy-fifth birthday. Beckett hesitantly agreed and began work on the play at the end of March and the first week of April, 1980.
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[edit] Synopsis
Two identical black clad characters with long white hair (a Reader and a Listener) sit at a table. The Reader reads from a small book (described as "a sad tale"), and the listener, never speaking, prompts him to stop, start and repeat with knocking on the table. The play ends when the Reader finds that there is "no more to tell" from the book.
[edit] Interpretation
Some critics speculate that the reader and the listener are in fact the same person (the play specifies they have near identical appearances) and that "he "is reviewing an event in his life, the "sad tale". Beckett was obsessed by a desire to create what he called a "literature of the unword", and this, perhaps, represents one of the best examples of this effort. Beckett would often take a biographical event in his own life and strip away all the biographical details, leaving the barest minimum of language and theme. In this case, he began with the play's origin (see above), and stripped away until he had the very basic plot of a man reading to another man. The subject of the play could then be read not as the storytelling to accomplish "the right story", but the act of reading for the interpretation of one's life.
[edit] Beckett on Film
In the Beckett on Film project, modern technology allowed Reader and Listener to both be played by Jeremy Irons, following the interpretation that the Listener and Reader are the same person.
[edit] Online references
- Beckett's dying remains: The Process of Playwriting in the Ohio Impromptu Manuscripts
- Dramatic Texts of Samuel Beckett
| The Plays of Samuel Beckett |
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| Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Breath, Catastrophe, Come and Go, Eleutheria (posthumous), Endgame, Film (screenplay), Footfalls, Happy Days, Krapp's Last Tape, Not I, Ohio Impromptu, A Piece of Monologue, Play, Rockaby, Rough for Theatre I, Rough for Theatre II, That Time, Waiting for Godot, What Where |
