Ohio Impromptu

Background >

Setting

Light on table midstage. Rest of stage in darkness.



Charles Sturridge, Director of Ohio Impromptu for Beckett on Film, notes that ‘Beckett is a remover of anything that might misdirect the audience. He takes everything out except the absolute essentials in order to produce the purest, simplest line of thought.’

The isolated setting is a nondescript room with a single window, which has afforded glimpses of an external and painful past existence but contributes nothing to relieve the present internal gloom. This Krapp-like den appears shut off from whatever and whoever else may exist or have existed in the silent and indifferent world beyond. Indeed, ‘the earth might be uninhabited’.

Darkness permeates everything, pattering down and steadily encroaching upon the long black coats and the black hat on a table, which seems to float in the confined space midstage.

In stark and colourless contrast, the long white hair of the character(s) flows from the plain white chairs around a plain white table, pulling focus to their ghostly condition.

This unreal, non-representational place is a place to be filled with words. In such a place, with nowhere else than the stage they inhabit, characters cannot help but be imprisoned in their inner subjective world.



An unusual hint of Beckett drawing upon a specific locale (stronger in the earlier drafts of the play) may be detected in the mention of the river confluence at the ‘downstream extremity of the Isle of Swans’. Where the river Seine divides round the Allée de Cygnes recalls a favourite Parisian haunt of Beckett’s a half century earlier.