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What Where is Samuel Beckett's last play produced following a request for a new work for the 1983 Autumn Festival in Graz, Austria. It was written between February and March 1983 initially in French as Quoi où and translated by Beckett himself.
Before the drama proper commences there is a quick run through of the action without words. The four characters enter and exit, as they will all do later, in a style more reminiscent of Quad than the two Act Without Words . Satisfied with this the Voice of Bam says, "Good,"Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 311 switches off the light and prepares us for the action.
The play follows a seasonal pattern. The voice tells us that it is spring and turns on the light. Bom enters from the north and is questioned by Bam as to the results of an interrogation. We do not learn who has been subjected to his ministrations – the assumption is Bum – only that he was given "the works", that he "wept", "screamed" and although he "begged for mercy" he still refused to "say anything".Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 312
The voice is dissatisfied with how this scene is playing out and makes them start again. This time Bam asks whether Bom got the man to "say it" and then wants to know if Bom attempted to revive the man. Bom claims that he couldn't at which point Bam accuses him of lying saying that he had been given the information and he would also be subjected to the same grilling until he confessed.
Bim appears and asks what information he needs to extract from Bom. Bam maintains he only wants to know: "That he said it to him."Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 313 Bim wants to make sure that is all he needs to obtain and then he can stop. Bam tells him, "Yes."Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 314 Bam's voice repeats "not good, I start again". Bim then asks what is he to confess. Bam tells him that he needs to confess that he said "it" to him. Bim asks if that is all and Bam says "and what". Bim asks again and Bam says yes. Bim then calls Bom to come with him and they both exit.
The same scene is now replayed only it is summer. The Voice of Bam tells us that time has passed but no effort is made to visually convey this fact; it is simply stated. Bim reappears and is questioned. Bam wants to know if he said "it" but the voice is again unhappy and makes them start again. This time Bim is asked if he managed to find out "where" from Bom which he had not as he had not been asked to. In the end Bem appears and is told to find out "where" from Bim. Bem and Bim both exit like before.
We are again informed that time has passed. It is now autumn and Bem returns to report he has been unable to extract "where" from Bim. The voice no longer needs to hear the complete interchange and jumps to Bam accusing Bim of lying and threatening him with "the works". Since there is no one left to carry out his orders Bam escorts Bem away himself.
The voice tells us that winter has now arrived. Bam appears from the west and waits with his head bowed. There is no one left to ask if he got the information or to accuse him of lying if he has proven as unsuccessful as the others.
The voice tells us that he is alone now, "in the present as were I still."Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, p 316 There are no more journeys to make and nothing to do apart from let time pass. He leaves the audience to try to make sense of things on their own and switches the light off.
From the time of his collection of stories More Pricks Than Kicks Bim and Bom appear periodically in Beckett's work. These were Russian of the 1920s and '30s, who for a while were granted permission by the Soviet Union authorities to Satire the shortcomings of the Sovereign state. There is a Wikipedia article on Bim Bom which treats the Russian clowns as if they were an individual. Time (6 December 1926) refers to "'Bim' and 'Bom' famed and beloved Russian clowns" Time.com as does the issue dated 30 April 1956. Time.com The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett has an entry for "Bim and Bom" (p 56) which also refers to them in the plural. James Knowlson in his biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, suggests that the names may echo Richard Aldington's Enter Bim and Bom, the epilogue to his 1931 novel The Colonel's Daughter, on an English football field to comment upon the degeneration of English society and "became for Beckett of human cruelty, disguised under a comic garb."Ackerley, C. J. and Gontarski, S. E., (Eds.) The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p 56 They first appear in the short story Yellow, then in Murphy (along with Bum), in draft passages deleted from Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Bom and Bem pop up in How It Is before finally bowing out in What Where.
It is possible that Beckett may have been inspired to name his characters from the sixth verse of the so-called "Ballad of Humpty Dumpty" in Finnegans Wake:
So snug he was in his hotel premises sumptuous
But soon we'll bonfire all his trash, tricks and trumpery
And'tis short till sheriff Clancy'll be winding up his unlimited company
With the bailiff's bom at the door,
(Chorus) Bimbam at the door.
Then he'll bum no more.James Joyce, ''Finnegans Wake'' (London: Faber and Faber, 1939. New York: Penguin Group, 1999) 46.5-11
Notice that, just as "Bum" is the only unspoken name in Beckett's "last five," so too is "Bem" the only vowel variant missing from Joyce's wordplay. More importantly, however, is the context that Joyce's combination of "bom," "Bimbam," and "bum" suggest. The percussive "bailiff's bom at the door," immediately followed by "Bimbam at the door," all suggest physical intimidation by agents of the state—something which could only have informed Beckett's choice in naming his characters, even if Joyce's work was not his only source of inspiration.
A political reading cannot be simply dismissed though since Beckett himself "briefly entertained making each character wear a tarboosh, fezlike headgear associated with ."Ackerley, C. J. and Gontarski, S. E., (Eds.) The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p 642 Even today "[Torture|[torture]] and ill-treatment in Arrest remain widespread in Armenia. Torture usually occurs in pre-trial detention with the aim of coercing a confession or evidence against third parties."Quotation from Human Rights Watch website HRW.org
Beckett is famously reported as saying of What Where: "I don't know what it means. Don't ask me what it means. It's an object." There is clearly a danger in taking this remark at face value. Beckett undoubtedly had something quite specific in mind as can be seen in the way he moulded his vision over the three productions in America, Germany and France detailed below. One significant remark he did make was that the Voice of Bam could be thought as coming from "beyond the grave".Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p 686
Beckett, in Proust, calls memory "some miracle of analogy;" he qualifies it in the preceding phrase as "an accident".Beckett, S., Proust (New York: Riverrun, 1989), p 72 The inability to remember, to get at the truth, is a focal point in much of his work. Beckett's characters (e.g. May in Footfalls, Mouth in Not I) seem doomed to repeat themselves, as much as the accidents or miracles of analogy allow them some momentary insight into their situations. For Beckett, memory is second-hand knowledge. You were not there. Another "you" was. Can you trust what he says he saw and heard?
This would not be the first time Beckett has fragmented an individual for dramatic effect (e.g. That Time or Ohio Impromptu). Beckett believes people to be in a continual state of flux, often finding it hard to relate to earlier versions of their own selves (e.g. Krapp: Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that.Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 62). With each passing day "we are other", Beckett notes in his monograph, "no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday."Beckett, S., Proust: And Three Dialogues, (London: Calderbooks, 1987) p 13 Bam is not wallowing in nostalgia though (like the women in Come and Go), rather he is trying to remember something – an "it", a "when", a "where" – that insists on remaining just out of reach.
Those "familiar with his preoccupation, themes, images, figures of speech … may assume that the 'what where' question is a kind of OedipusThe riddle: What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening? The solution: A man, who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two legs as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age. Morning, noon, and night are metaphors for the times in a man's life. and that the answer to it cannot be found, despite an obligation to ask the question."Kędzierski, M., 'Beckett and the (Un)Changing Image of the Mind' in The Savage Eye / L'Oeil Fauve : New Essays on Beckett's Television Plays, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995) (SBT; 4) pp 149-159 Rather than simply "What?" and "Where?" the full questions could easily be: "What is the meaning of life?" and "Where does it all come from?"
If Bam is trying to ascertain the details surrounding a particular crime, the question has to be asked: what crime? James Knowlson believes "that crime appears likely to be Calderón's 'original sin of being born', which Beckett had evoked at the beginning of his career in this essay Proust. Consequently, the overall perpetrator is unlikely ever to be known, let alone apprehended."Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p 687
"Reviewers … tended to concentrate almost exclusively on the play’s possible political resonance. Alan Schneider, commenting on this, wrote to Beckett: ‘ What Where most people keep wanting to interpret on the literal political level – I think it may suffer from coming after Catastrophe.’"
"The production was a dramatic distillation and transformation of the original, effectively a recreation."Ackerley, C. J. and Gontarski, S. E., (Eds.) The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p 640 Eric Brater contends that "On screen Beckett more clearly establishes that this is a story about Bam remembering … Torture becomes more explicitly self-inflicted, a function of memory, remorse and the relentless need to tell a story."Brater, E., Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in Theater (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p 159
"Instead of players in long gray gowns, their own undead suspect, the four figures of the revised, television What Where now appeared as floating faces dissolving in and out of … Neither representation of Bam then is corporeal, Beckett representing instead a spectre and its mirror reflection, and the rest of the figures of What Where are ghosts as well, all the more so as they are represented by the patterns of dots on the television screen. What characters, what bodies, finally exist in What Where are created by voice, less absent presences than present absences."Gontarski, S. E., 'The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theater' in Moorjani, A. and Veit, C., (Eds.) Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p 176
Beckett referred to the lit playing area in this production as the "field of memory".Quoted in Gontarski, S. E., 'Notes to What Where: The Revised Text, by Samuel Beckett' in Journal of Beckett Studies 2.1 (1992), p 12 "The clear indication is that what we are seeing is both a memory and a scenario: instructions come from the megaphone, the Voice of Bam controls what we see, puts the characters through their movements rapidly without words like a film running over its spools at rewind speed, and then starts again, occasionally stopping when Bam is not satisfied and a phrase is improved to add to the force of the theme. The shares many similarities with Ohio Impromptu, the identical characters in appearance and dress, the unwinding backwards of events and the stylization of image and movement in particular." With Krapp his memories have a certain degree of reliability. Not so with Bam. "The figures in What Where emerge from beyond the grave, ghosts of memories that never really were."Gontarksi S. E. and Uhlmann, A., 'Afterimages: Introducing Beckett’s Ghosts' in Beckett after Beckett, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006) They are given form as if they existed.See Beckett’s Production Notebook for Was Wo ( What Where) at the Studios of Süddeutscher Rundfunk, Stuttgart, June 1985, reprinted in facsimile with transcription in Gontarski, S. E., (Ed.) Shorter Plays: The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p 421-47
"In this version the difference between the two Bams was achieved mechanically."Gontarski, S. E., 'The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theater' in Moorjani, A. and Veit, C., (Eds.) Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p 175 "There was a slightly higher frequency in the of the younger Bam, and a lower deeper effect in the older Bam."Fehsenfeld, M. D., 'Everything Out But the Faces: Beckett’s Reshaping of What Where for Television' in Modern Drama 29.2 (1986), p 237 "'In his Stuggart notebook Beckett wrote that "S ( Stimme Voice) = mirror reflection of Bam’s face … S’s voice prerecorded. Bam’s but changed.' This enlarged and distorted death mask ... replaced the suspended 'megaphone at head level' of the original publication." The altered voices of Bam creates, as Walter Asmus suggests, "the ghost Bam, dead Bam, a distorted image of a face in a grave, somewhere not in this world any longer, imagining that he comes back to life in the world, dreaming and seeing himself as a … face on the screen."Fehsenfeld, M. D., 'Everything Out But the Faces: Beckett’s Reshaping of What Where for Television' in Modern Drama 29.2 (1986), p 238 "Jim Lewis, the Cinematographer with whom Beckett worked on the German TV production ... suggested that at least with regard to 'V' – 'Voice of Bam' it is a matter of being beyond death as this represents, 'The image of Bam in the beyond or beyond the grave or whatever you want to call it'".Quoted in Gontarski, S. E., 'Notes to What Where: The Revised Text, by Samuel Beckett', in Journal of Beckett Studies 2.1 (1992), p 11 The stage Bam is therefore an "historical projection" of the incorporeal voice emanating from the loudspeaker.Kędzierski, M., 'Beckett and the (Un)Changing Image of the Mind' in The Savage Eye / L'Oeil Fauve : New Essays on Beckett's Television Plays, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995) (SBT; 4), pp 149-159
"The original play had a substantial emphasis on eliciting 'where' from the victims, even where the victim said 'where'. Beckett ... eliminated that potentially confusing repetition, substituting a balanced 'He didn’t say what?’ 'He didn't say where?’ into each encounter. The emphasis on 'where' was decreased, many changed to 'it' and each 'where' followed by a 'what'."
The six performances took place at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris and featured David Warrilow as Bam. The revised text (known as What Where II) did away with the opening mime, Bam's interventions and the characters were again represented only as floating heads. " Je recommence" (I start again) was amended to " Ici Bam" (Here is Bam). "Because of technical difficulties, the French stage production replaced the enlarged and distorted reflection of Bam’s face with a halo, a ring of diffuse orange light. Chabert’s production note is as follows: ‘ rond lumineux = source de Voix,’" Additionally, "in place of the cowl-covered heads that created the impression of floating faces, Beckett substituted shaved skulls. The field of memory was now implicit ... On the stage the players appeared unrealistically high standing on a concealed two-foot platform, their heads aligned with the pulsing light that echoed the TV tube."
O'Donnell said in interview: "There is no set in the original play, but I argued that the whole play is about power and the abuse of power, and how information is power, so we used the library as a metaphor for somebody who has control of all the power and all the information. When it came to casting, I was looking for a particular type of actor – somebody who could bring a sort of menacing quality to the screen. There is a lot of menace in the play. What Where is about a brooding, palpable evil, which is a theme that occurs in Beckett's other work." Interview with Damien O'Donnell
Presented thus is it easy to see What Where as Beckett's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Online-literature.com At the end of Catastrophe there is a flicker of hope. Not so here. Just as Winston Smith is beaten into submission so are these characters. O’Donnell brings "the scene closer to realism and creates a dark, sinister atmosphere by homing in on the faces of the two actors … As he said, 'Filming allows you to show a close-up of a terrified man, bringing a different edge to the work.'"Worth, K. 'Sources of Attraction to Beckett’s Theatre' in Oppenheim, L., (Ed.) Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies (London: Palgrave, 2004), p 224
Before switching off for the last time Bam's voice instructs the audience: "Make sense who may"Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 316 but how do you make sense out of something senseless? And is any adjective used more often to describe violence? Beckett has left it up to the viewer to supply his own meaning.
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