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| irish plays | |
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| samuel beckett plays | |
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SYNOPSIS Two identical black clad characters with long grey hair (a ''Reader'' and a ''Listener'') sit at a table. The Reader reads from a small book (described as "a sad tale"), and the listener, never speaking, prompts him to stop, start and repeat with knocking on the table. The play ends when the Reader finds that there is "no more to tell" from the book. INTERPRETATION Some critics speculate that the reader and the listener are in fact the same person (the play specifies they have near identical appearances) and that "he "is reviewing an event in his life, the "sad tale". Beckett was obsessed by a desire to create what he called a "literature of the unword", and this, perhaps, represents one of the best examples of this effort. Beckett would often take a biographical event in his own life and strip away all the biographical details, leaving the barest minimum of language and theme. In this case, he began with the play's origin (see above), and stripped away until he had the very basic plot of a man reading to another man. The subject of the play could then be read not as the storytelling to accomplish "the right story", but the act of reading for the interpretation of one's life. ''Beckett on Film'' In the '' Beckett On Film '' project, modern technology allowed Reader and Listener to both be played by Jeremy Irons , following the interpretation that the Listener and Reader are the same person. ONLINE REFERENCES
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