Beckett & Nietzsche

As a director, the moment a play is hovering in my consciousness, it becomes the filter for the whole world. All the input flowing towards me is somehow in dialogue with the text (or textlessness) of the project I'm working on. Slightly paranoia-inducing at times, it can feel like everything in the world is speaking directly to me.

I suppose since I'm working on Beckett, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Nietzsche seems to be telling me how to direct the play. Nietzsche did, after all, announce the death of God and Beckett put his characters in endless limbo waiting for his return. They are both poets of the void. Bards of the ceaseless cycle. Cynics whose philosophies of emptiness seem at odds with their heartsick love for humanity.

Beckett's short play "Words and Music," which I'm directing next week, concerns the two titular characters (otherwise known as Joe and Bob) who struggle with each other as they strive to create music and words that will please their lord and master, Croak. Reading Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, I stumble across his notions of the "Apollonian" and the "Dionysian." Suddenly the duality embodied in the figures of Beckett's play seem to dance together on Nietzsche's page.

The Apollonian creative drive is the quest for image, form, and the meaning that coalesces around clear lines and boundaries. It concerns the individual and his or her comprehensible vision of self. It's aligned with the arts of sculpture and epic poetry and the aesthetics of distance and clarity.

The Dionysian drive is the aesthetic urge towards excess, creative destruction, and the loss of ego that comes with drinking, fucking, and joining voices together in song. It is the formlessness to Apollo's form, always threatening to unravel.

While he's clearly a Dionysian spirit, Nietzsche does not privilege one drive over the other, but rather describes the task of the artist as the attempt to get the two into a productive relationship with each other.

This is the story of Beckett's play as well. Words/Bob speaks to Croak, and fails, Music/Joe plays for Croak, and it fails. "Together!" he intones. "Together!" They begin to link their forms, putting words and music together in unison and in canon. They lead each other and follow, weaving the twin beauties of words and music together until their creation is actually too successful, and Croak shuffles off, unable to bear it.

Nietzsche described the successful intertwining of the Apollonian and the Dionysian as “the supreme goal of tragedy, and indeed all art.” Tragedy is both hard to do and hard to bear. Beckett doesn't always provide the cathartic emotional release that makes the pain feel, for a moment, worthwhile. Sometimes after the music ends, all that's left is the sound of feet shuffling off into the darkness.