the-crit
REVIEW 2 - May 5th 2025
On Television, Beckett
A review by Ciara Finnegan
On Television, Beckett, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, photo: Ciara Finnegan
Staging an exhibition of Beckett’s televisual works is a bold undertaking—especially considering that six of the seven plays are freely available on YouTube to anyone with a smartphone.¹ However, On Television, Beckett which was staged at the Württembergischer Kunstverein (earlier this year) in Stuttgart becomes, in the hands of curators Judith Wilkinson and Gerard Byrne, an elegantly executed exhibition. With scrupulous attention to both the affordances and limitations of their chosen medium—the gallery space—and the material they were working with—Beckett’s films and archival correspondence—Wilkinson and Byrne crafted an immersive theatrical experience of remarkable subtlety.
Beckett’s television plays were largely produced by public broadcasters in Germany and the UK, most notably Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) and the BBC. These institutions, operating outside of commercial imperatives, afforded Beckett the rare freedom to experiment with the formal and philosophical potential of television as a medium. Far from treating TV as merely a delivery mechanism, Beckett approached it as a compositional space, exploiting the claustrophobic frame, the flicker of cathode light, and the uncanny intimacy of close-up. The infrastructure of European public broadcasting—rooted in a cultural mission rather than advertising revenue—allowed Beckett to distil the essence of human presence into gestures, glances, silences. These works were not made for television so much as from it: built from its constraints, tuned to its frequencies, and attuned to the alien solitude it could so powerfully evoke.
Unobtrusively mapping the gallery space onto the works (the floor plan for this exhibition, I imagine, may have resembled Beckett’s choreographic sketches for Quad), the curators installed four cinema/theatre cubes², arranged so that each gave access onto a central square which was sparsely furnished with “some kind of pallet”³ and a bench. A square with white walls and a dead centre (to be avoided perhaps?) like the centre of the stage in Quadrats I + II.⁴
Having cleverly built disorientation into the design—the viewer, a participant of this well-engineered uncertainty, clings to bed and bench, those most minimal of landmarks—like Vladimir and Estragon to their unreliable tree.⁴ Entering the square from a different angle, you cannot be entirely sure whether you have or haven’t been there before. Route in doubt, you make another lap or two of the exhibition space to pass the time until the next film appears on one of the screens.
Through this careful attention to the architecture of the exhibition Byrne & Wilkinson create within the space a special quality of silence: a silence neither intimidating nor alienating, neither warm nor cold. In fact, I did not experience this silence as an emotional or atmospheric silence at all. The curatorial design respectfully acknowledged the particular order of silence intrinsic to Beckett’s work. This was a dimensional silence: physically spacious, it afforded solitude, and, being of such proportion, was generally undisturbed by occasional audio leakages from the cinema cubes.
If you wanted to watch all seven films (I did), there was, appropriately, a fair amount of waiting around. One could whip out one’s phone, I guess, and kill time by doom-scrolling. However, on the rear wall of the gallery space, a ‘frieze-essay’ unfurls horizontally. It is worthwhile choosing to stroll the frieze over the phone option—an act which, perhaps, doubles as a quirky critique of passive, vertical social-media scrolling.
Allowing authorship and ego to disappear into the exhibition design, Byrne & Wilkinson’s signatures are visible in this photographic collage and it is here that they reveal some of the intimacies of their individual relationships with Beckett’s work. The recurring motif of a colour-checker palette, running through the photographic sequence, reminds us that this work has been calibrated with an exacting eye, that the editorial decisions are precision sharp and nothing lingers without intention. This painstaking attention to detail, characteristic of Byrne’s artistic practice as of Beckett’s, folded in with Wilkinson’s scholarly methods, makes for a beautifully composed ‘frieze-essay’. The framed photographic collages draw the viewer toward a handwritten letter, an annotated script, a photograph, a sketch—a visual essay which, viewed in whole or part, offers a reading that reveals Beckett as an artist as tender and funny as he was diligent and fastidious.
Later, while waiting for the Quadrats to finish their laps, I hung out with the work on Monitor Two, a selection of programs broadcast on German television in the 1970s. I don’t speak German and can only vaguely approximate meaning from that which sounds similar enough to Dutch or English—so I watched this without listening to its audio track. The piece playing was Bambule⁵ and I had yet to read the supporting material provided in the accompanying handout. Disarmed of this contextual content awareness, my attention was drawn to the choreography of the camera—the frequent use of closeups and pans following the gaze of the speaker suggest that the original audience to Beckett’s television works were not unfamiliar with some of the techniques he employed. Outré as Beckett’s works were, they were, perhaps, not completely visually alien to the regular TV viewer.
Not completely visually alien, perhaps, but also not the easiest product to sell an audience. It is here that reflection on the technology of the time deserves mention. It is plausible that a physical feature of television as an object, namely, that in order to change channels you had to get up and press a button on the set itself, worked in the plays’ favour by holding captive the comfortable/the inert. Furthermore, an audience, faced with the choice of this channel, the other channel, or OFF, were possibly more inclined to stay with the work, strange though they may have found it, to watch it through to the end because FOMO was a much lower-level risk in the 1970s and 80s! In that pre-cable, pre-streaming era, if Germany was similar to my native Northern Ireland, where choice was restricted to two BBC channels and two Irish channels (if one lived within range of the RTE transmitter aerial) channel hopping wasn’t the sport it is today. Now, of course, the problem is not lack of choice but too much—the excess not confined to the medium of broadcast television, but extending across multiple media platforms.
On Television, Beckett, so beautifully orchestrated in both form and content, also provokes contingent questions relating to issues of control around the affect of Beckett’s work exhibited in a gallery in the 21st century. These questions present before one even enters the gallery space with a sign (presumably this is gallery protocol and not a curatorial decision) warning of the potential ‘retraumatising’ effects of viewing the work. Part of me wanted to kick that sign over. Surely to feel is an essential, inevitable, desirable reaction to Beckett’s work? To leave the exhibition unmoved, a tragedy. To enter with one’s guard up being to deny oneself the spiritual and physiological sensations of Joe’s gaze penetrating your soul, Not I, setting your heart racing and the phenomenological disturbance of moving through the architecture of the exhibition.
While TV now lacks the agency it had in the period during which these works were created, Beckett’s experiments within the medium anticipated broadcast platforms open to creative and critical scrutiny of form and content. Somewhere in a realm beyond cats and babies doing things on YouTube, these exist…
Ciara Finnegan is a visual artist, based in the Netherlands.
Notes:
Footnotes:
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He Joe, 1966. Black and white, sound, 29 min. Performers: Derek Mendel, Nancy Illig (voice), production: Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR): YouTube link
Geistertrio, 1977. Black and white, sound, 32 min. Performers: Klaus Herm, Irmgard Först (voice), production: Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) (excerpt): YouTube link
…nur nacht Gewölk… 1977. Black and white, sound, 15 min. Performers: Klaus Herm, Kornelia Boje, production: Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) : YouTube link
Quadrat I + II, 1981. Quadrat I: Colour, sound, 9 min. Quadrat II: Black and white, sound, 6 min. Performers: Helfrid Foron, Jürg Hummel, Claudia Knupfer and Sunsanne Rehe, production: Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR): YouTube link
Not I, 1975. Colour, sound, 13 min. Actress: Billie Whitelaw, Director: Bill Morton, Production: BBC: YouTube link
2. This detail extended to the cube interiors: modest by 21st-century projection standards, the screen size respected the 4:3 ratio of the TV monitors of the period. (This was also, perhaps, a jab at the 1080px square of the Instagram standard.)
3. Geistertrio, 1977. Black and white, sound, 32 min. Performers: Klaus Herm, Irmgard Först (voice), production: Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR): YouTube link
4. Vladimir: The tree, look at the tree.
Estragon looks at the tree
Estragon: Was it not there yesterday?
Vladimir: Yes, of course it was there. Do you not remember?
Waiting For Godot, Samuel Beckett, 1955. Faber & Faber, London/Boston, 1956, p. 60.
5. Eberhard Itzenplitz, Bambule, 1970. Screenplay: Ulrike Meinhof. Black and white, sound, 90’.
© 2025 by Frank Wasser