Staging Beckettian Minds: Umwelt and Cartesian Stage Space in Beckett’s Plays

While working on his production of Endgame in the Schiller Theater in 1967, Samuel Beckett outlined his view of theatre work to his production assistant Michael Haerdter: ‘One turns out a small world with its own laws, conducts the action as if upon a chessboard’. This ‘small world’ could be described as an Umwelt, drawing on biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s early twentieth-century concept of the Umwelt as ‘an organism’s model of the world’. Our article contends that a central aspect of Beckett’s theatre Umwelt is the proscenium stage, which frames so many of his stage images. Such a framing device is present from Beckett’s early writing for the theatre: on the first page of his first compositional notebook for his first completed play Eleutheria, he sketched a diagram of a box set (HRC SB MS 3/2, 01r), a performance space that played an ever-present role in his theatrical imagination. What affordances did such a stage space offer Beckett as playwright and theatre director? This article contends that Beckett’s progressive subversion of the proscenium in his late theatre is key to his questioning of Cartesian mind-world dualism. Undoubtedly, the mind-world nexus is one of the key features of Beckett’s oeuvre in general, and of his stage plays in particular. His engagement with – and subversion of – such dualist philosophy of mind must be seen in terms of his career-long struggle with the Cartesian subject-object relationship, the struggle that also marks his aesthetics in prose and that received due attention in his critical writings and letters. On both levels, a gradual yet consistent departure from Cartesian subject-object and mind-world dualism will be noted and illustrated by chronologically arranged case studies from 1. Quoted in Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre: The Author as Practical Playwright and Director, from Waiting for Godot to Krapp’s Last Tape (London: John Calder, 1988), 231.