That Time

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Setting

Loudspeakers sounding from the wings left and right offstage and high above accentuates both the extent of stage darkness as well as the small, isolated patch of light falling on to the striking image of a floating face 'about 10 feet above stage level midstage off centre.'

The significance of the setting is not in where this is but in why this is. Audience attention is pulled between the alternating fragments of memory disturbing the silence of the dark and the fragmented image of the spectre listening in its pool of light.

Charles Garrad, director of the Beckett on Film production, says 'What I did was try and interpret Beckett's stage directions for film. This is the most amazingly static piece you could imagine in the theatre. It's a man's head suspended in the middle of the stage. He doesn't speak and his eyes shut three times. Then he opens them. The voices come three times: one from the left, one from the right, one from above, and they constantly interrupt each other. Immediately we begin to understand that they are his voices. What I did was take the three voices as three different points of view. On the stage you can easily place the voices, but in the film you look from one position and then another, and finally another. They are constantly interrupting each other.'