earticle

영어

This study is to investigate what makes a play be a theater itself from Beckett's play, Not I. There are usually four ingredients for a theater: play, space, character, audience. In order for a play to become a theater, therefore, the play has all the factors in it. As a performance based a play needs a stage(space), Not I has to satisfy the rest, that is, character and audience, to be a theater. Mouth in the text could hardly be described as an intact actor or just a prop because it is neither a human being nor an inanimate object. It is a facial organ simply. This dramatic method of Beckett smashes the traditional idea that a theater should employ a living body and rewrites what a character could be. In the light of Beckett's reduction-oriented view, it could be possibly said the character or sender is modified into a mouth, just one physical component, and that Mouth performs brilliantly its creator's famous phrase, ‘the obligation to express' through pouring words ceaselessly. Auditor who is listening attentively to Mouth without single word throughout the play on the down-right stage evidently represents audience. The presence of him should dedicate himself to not a reader who is reading a play at a table in a room, but an audience who is seeing a performance on a chair at a playhouse. He conducts two missions in the text. One is the counterpart paying attention to Mouth's words, and the other is an audience observing Mouth. As a result, Auditor fulfills multiple roles in the play, such as, character, receiver, seer, audience, so we can say that he is an implied audience in Not I. Furthermore, the multi-function trait given to him can be accomplished only on a stage. Since a theater without even an audience is never called a theater at all, Beckett has established the necessary and sufficient condition for a play to be a theater itself by exploiting an unusual device, Auditor, in Not I.