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The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary
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Abstract: Peer’s Last Tape: Ibsen and Beckett in 2006. This paper examines the relationship between the plays of Ibsen and Beckett in the centenary year of their respective death and birth. It investigates the familiar claim that Ibsen is the "father of modern drama" and therefore an influence on even such unlikely forms as Theatre of the Absurd. However, Intertextual Theory and Performance Theory both persuade modern comparative scholarship to consider the possibility of bi-directional influence: in other words, to acknowledge that our reading of Beckett may influence the ways in which we read Ibsen one hundred years later. The test-case for this proposition was my adaptation of Peer Gynt for performance in 2000, where I explored the idea of "Selfhood" in Ibsen’s play by using the split-self device borrowed from Beckett in Krapp’s Last Tape. In my version, two Peers appear simultaneously onstage, old and young versions of the same persona (rather like old Krapp and his youthful self who is heard on the tape). Beckett’s stagecraft, incorporated into Ibsen’s structure, has the advantage of dramatizing such abstract concepts of "self", "self-consciousness", the process of "becoming". In the final analysis, however, we also have to acknowledge that there are differences in the dramatic presentation of selfhood in Peer Gynt and Krapp’s Last Tape. In the early plays of Ibsen, the old self is still subject to (possible) change and redemption from the failure of youthful choices. But in the last plays, the bleak vision of Krapp’s Last Tape is confirmed in the irreparably damaged selfhood of men like Borkman and Rubek. |
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