Beckett and Television: Anachronism as Innovation

Beckett’s television dramas can be understood as reflexive analyses of television’s uneasy position as an ‘old’ and also a ‘new’ medium. The history of television can be written by describing processes of co-option of aesthetic features and processes deriving from ‘old’ media like theatre and figurative painting, which are visible in Beckett’s staging of dramatic action and his ideas for TV image composition. But television also differentiates itself from antecedent or competing media, offers a wide range of genres, modes and forms, and repudiates features associated with its competitors. This chapter analyses how Beckett’s TV dramas cite past forms anachronistically and innovate by refusing them. Their temporality of apparent liveness links the dramas to technologies for relaying live theatre, but none of the dramas is ‘live’. Beckett’s experience with filmmaking, on Film, connects his television work with cinematic concerns, such as framing and point of view, but the TV dramas disrespect conventions of filmic storytelling and the relationship of sound to image. By analyzing the aesthetic implementation of television technologies in Beckett’s dramas for TV the chapter argues that they innovate by processes of repudiation and displacement, going back to move forward.