Jonathan Bignell - Beckett on Screen

Beckett on screen

JONATHAN BIGNELL

Copyright Jonathan Bignell 2009

The right of Jonathan Bignell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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First published 2009

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I would like to record the contribution of some of the people who encouraged my initial interest and enthusiasm for Becketts work many years ago, especially Peter Coulson and Iain Wright. In more recent times, I have benefited from the wisdom and experience of Michael Bott, Mary Bryden, Daniela Caselli, Julian Garforth, James Knowlson, Anna McMullan and John Pilling, each of whom I encountered first at the University of Reading where the different contexts of teaching graduate students, participating in research seminars and learning about the Samuel Beckett Archive have been very helpful to the development of my own ideas. Conversations with actors and television directors have added valuable insights to my work, and I would especially like to thank Walter Asmus in this regard. I am equally grateful to the staff of the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading, England, for providing access to original BBC documents and assisting me on this project as well as several others. Unfortunately it has not been possible to include illustrations from television productions in this book. While the principles of fair dealing extend to academic use of photographic stills in the USA, under British law it is still necessary to clear copyrights and pay high fees to rights owners, and I hope readers will understand and sympathise.

This book is intended as a contribution to academic work on the history and theory of television drama, as well as being a study of the presentation of Becketts dramatic work on television and in Film. I am grateful to the many television academics I have worked with, who are too numerous to name but some of whose work is discussed in this book. The Centre for Television Drama Studies at the University of Reading, and the research programmes funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council that I have led there, have provided vigorous contexts in which to test ideas, and I am grateful for the support which my colleagues and the funding body have given me. The research on which this book is based was carried out largely while working at the University of Reading, and I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Film, Theatre and Television for the remarkable fellowship and the culture of excellence for which the Department is justly renowned. Some of the initial work for the book was done in my previous post at Royal Holloway, University of London, and I am also grateful for the intense and fruitful experience there that had a significant influence on my approach to television in the context of media arts. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of a research award from The Leverhulme Trust which released me from teaching duties during the period when I conducted archival research on the BBC television productions of Becketts dramas and began the drafting of the book. The discussions I had with Christina Adamou during the writing of her PhD thesis on Becketts television dramas have contributed greatly to the clarification of my approach to the material I have written about here, and similarly, work by Alastair Hird for an MA by Research and PhD research by Katherine Weiss and David Foster have assisted me in developing my approach to Becketts work. I am also grateful for encouragement and suggestions made by participants in the seminars run by the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading, including some of the people already named here. I have published some of the ideas in this book in earlier articles and essays, each of which is listed in the bibliography of this book, and I am grateful for the opportunity to present preliminary versions of material discussed here, and also to Manchester University Press for enabling me to develop this research project in book form. Early versions of parts of this book were presented at conferences organised by the Society for Cinema Studies, the journal Screen, postgraduates at Royal Holloway, University of London, the University of New South Wales and the Beckett International Foundation. I am grateful to the organisers of these events and to the delegates whose questions and comments have assisted in developing my ideas. Extracts from Samuel Becketts unpublished manuscripts, Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, and but the clouds, and from his letter to the BBC of 27 November 1976, are reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London. Finally, I would like once again to thank Lib Taylor for her encouragement, support and love throughout the lengthy process of completing this book.

This book primarily addresses Samuel Becketts television dramas broadcast in Britain, from Eh Joe in 1966 to Quad in 1982. The broadcasting of Becketts theatre work on British television has a long history that runs parallel to his writing specifically for the television medium. For this reason the book includes comparative discussion of some broadcasts of television adaptations of theatre plays written by Beckett, including the Beckett on Film series of adaptations of each of his theatre plays, which were made for Channel 4 and the Irish channel RTE and first screened in Britain in 2001. The book also discusses the versions of his television plays produced and broadcast in the 1980s in Germany, where conditions of production in a context of Public Service Broadcasting connect with those at the BBC and exemplify Becketts European significance as a writer for television. Despite the main focus on television in this study, there is an extended analysis of Becketts only cinema work, Film (1964, 1979) made for the cinema in two different versions. The film was originally conceived as a television drama (Knowlson 1996: 451), was first made shortly before Becketts earliest foray into television and provides an opportunity to assess thematic, formal and audience reception issues that reflect on the television plays. These audio-visual texts are considered in relation to the evolving critical discourses about television and film, and the historical conditions of production and reception at the time the dramas were made. The television plays are analysed in relation to television production practices, broadcasting contexts, institutional constraints, the significance of authorship in television, intertextual meanings deriving from film, radio, theatre, television and visual art, and audience reception and critical commentary. In addition to critical analysis of the television plays as broadcast, the project emphasises the significance of their production and reception in the television culture in which they were made and watched. This book argues that the concerns of television theory fruitfully reshape the understandings of Becketts television work that are in circulation in the discourses of Beckett scholarship. My aim is therefore to contribute to the academic analysis of television drama, which has so far paid little attention to Becketts television work, and also to debates and dialogues in Beckett studies by offering a critical, historical and cultural framework for the television plays and Becketts work in related media.