To the Protestors:

When Wole Soyinka wrote that we, as his audience, needed to perceive his play in a particular way (or more accurately, when he said we couldn’t view it is a specific way), I was upset. I don’t feel that an author, regardless of the medium, should be allowed to determine what his/her audience should think. A lot of people have had a difficult time with the notion that Samuel Beckett (and the shadowy entity known as his estate) would presume to control not only the integrity of the script, which most would agree is within their rights, but to also claim jurisdiction on the production elements. I, however, don’t have an issue with Beckett and his estate controlling these elements. For, though I see Soyinka trying to act as God, I only see Beckett trying to act like a true playwright.

If a playwright wants that control (or doesn’t), then I believe that is within his or her rights. We tend to view playwrights who desire specific production elements to be, at best, meddling and, at worse, theater-ignorant. Why is it, though, that we see these playwrights as unknowledgeable of drama instead of understanding perhaps that these playwrights are extremely aware of the entire process of theater? What I mean is, too often we seem to assume that writers just fell into the medium of scripts. Yet a playwright chooses to write scripts, to write plays. Authors don’t simply construct sentences, pick characters, and decide plots. They also carefully choose their mediums/genres (poetry, novel, essay, short story, script), weighing the pros and cons of each carefully. The choice of genre, of medium, is just as conscious of a decision as is any other element of a writer’s work.

So, when a writer chooses to write a play, he or she is choosing a medium that usually includes a production in the same way that a writer who chooses to write a poem is choosing a medium that includes, amongst other things, a formal recognition of stanzas and lines. Thus, a poet’s work is always printed in the same structure. One doesn’t print two lines together or add a word from line two up to line one; we acknowledge, instead, that meaning can be found in the poet’s stanza and line choice. Why then, understanding that a playwright is aware of her medium, would we be upset when she demands specifics that fall within the realm of her medium; when she acknowledges that script and stage are parts of the same coin of a production?

Thus, if Samuel Beckett wants his plays to always be the same, then isn’t that his prerogative as playwright? Ignoring the issue that if someone doesn’t like his demands then they don’t have to produce his plays, there is another thought to consider. Christine suggested that Beckett would have been a better maker of film because no one wants to see the same play, the same way every time. Why not? We watch the same film over and over, knowing that nothing will be different in what we see. And yet, every time it is different. We, the audience, are different. We have different experiences with which to understand the film by; we see and hear new and different elements that we ignored previously. Why not be able to have that same experience with a play? To know that all production elements are the same as the last time we saw the piece but our experience is still different: that is what Beckett seemed to have desired. That is, I believe, what Beckett seemed to know when he stated that every element has a meaning, a purpose that can not be ignored in our attempt to understand.

Beckett chose to write Endgame as a play so that he could explore various themes using all of the components inherent to the medium of theater, not just some of them. Do we then have any right to protest?