This thesis examines key developments in theatre design in Britain between 1935-1965 through the lens of the praxis of the design trio known as Motley (active 1932-78) and of theatre designer Jocelyn Herbert (1917-2003). Analysis of their roles in the creation of the four theatre productions that are used as case studies, Romeo and Juliet (1935), Three Sisters (1938), The Kitchen (1959 & 1961) and Happy Days (1962) enables an evaluation of the complex threads of influence on Motley and Herbert both from within the UK and from the USA and Europe. Furthermore, it offers a close study of their working process including their relationships with directors and playwrights considering not only what they designed, but how and why. 

Critical engagement with theatre design practice has increased since the early 1990s but there is still very little evaluative literature about British theatre design during the period of this study, 1935-1965. To date there are only three books and three journal articles that specifically cover the seminal designers Motley and Herbert so there is scope for a broadened analysis and contextualisation of their practice. One of the original contributions to knowledge of this thesis is that it assesses the confluence of influences on Motley and Herbert and draws together the threads of connections between British, European and American theatre and the ethos of Michel Saint-Denis illustrating how these fed into Motley’s and Herbert’s work. 

Whilst acknowledging the complexity of theatre practice and of reconstructing past events, this thesis assesses a combination of archival design material, such as set and costume renderings and sketches, as well as written texts, press reviews and recorded interviews, and draws on my own experience as a theatre design practitioner. The four case studies enable an in-depth investigation of Motley’s and Herbert’s processes and practice, the circumstances in which they operated and how they negotiated these conditions, as well as indicating how the role of the theatre designer developed across the period 1935-1965. 

In approaching the four case studies from the point of view of design the thesis contributes a new layer to their intricate histories. By emphasising the significance of the professionalisation of the role of the theatre designer during this time and by revealing the connections between Motley, the London Theatre Studio, Herbert and the Royal Court Theatre it expands understanding of the period and reinforces the substantial contribution of design to British theatre history.

The convergence of influences on and evolving praxis of mid-twentieth century British theatre design (1935-1965) through a close study of selected works by Motley and Jocelyn Herbert

Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts is the first book to comprehensively assess Beckett's knowledge of art, art history and art criticism. In his lifetime Beckett thought deeply about visual culture from ancient Egyptian statuary to Dutch realism, from Quattrocento painting to the modernists and after. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished sources, this book traces in forensic detail the development of Beckett's understanding of painting in particular, as that understanding developed from the late 1920s to the 1970s. In doing so it demonstrates that Beckett's thinking about art and aesthetics radically changes in the course of his life, often directly responding to the intellectual and historical contexts in which he found himself. Moving fluently between art history, philosophy, literary analysis and historical context, Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts rethinks the trajectory of Beckett's career, and reorients his relationship to modernism, late modernism and the avant-gardes.

Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts

Beckett’s correspondence of the 1930s reveals his awareness of the artistic possibilities offered by film, and a particular interest in the optical manipulation of the image achieved both in the camera and at the editing bench. This interest grew stronger as his critical taste developed by immersive reading in film theory in 1936, the year he wrote an application to study with Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow. His extensive theoretical knowledge came from the pages of the modernist film magazine Close Up (1927–33), where the first English translations of Eisenstein’s essays appeared, and which epitomized a significant cultural meeting point of literature and cinema. Taking Eisenstein’s writing on film published in Close Up and the magazine’s overall cultural project as points of departure, this paper explores the traces of early cinematic forms and editing theories in Beckett’s late text, Ill Seen Ill Said (1981).

‘Execrations on another plane’: Film Theory in Close Up and Beckett’s Late Prose

Over the course of his life Beckett's work moves through a process of reduction toward increasing simplicity and concentration of means. 1 trace this reduction in Beckett's later works for the stage and compare it with the dialectics of negative theology, both Buddhist and Orthodox Chstian, paying particular attention to structures of visuality and iconicity (both visual and not) in Beckett's work. The visual enjoyed a status of peculiar ontological primacy for Beckett. In it he saw exemplified both the dualisms he worked to overcome throughout his career and the saving grace that will overcome them: a "breathless immediacy" (Beckett's words) that will skip the mediation of language and the linearity of discourse and present exquisitely balanced, essentially still, nondual images. Beckett's metaphorical, that is, vertically structured stage images are subtended by metonymic texts that run through a strategic process of self-emptying in a kind of kenosis of discourse. The aporetic figures thus produced form similarly iconic structures on the textual level as can be found on the visual level. In Beckett's horizontal world a displaced sacramentalism and a phenomenologically motivated process of enquiry into the nature of things combine to create an empty space, a gray area through which the divine can enter if the audience is inclined to make such an act of faith. Beckett creates an art of Erfahrung that leads to a confrontation with an Other beyond the limits of a reductive concept of instrumental reason. Supervisor: Dr. S. Rabillard, (Department of English)

Negative theology and Samuel Beckett's strategies of reduction : visuality and iconicity in Beckett's later works for the stage

(K)rap(p): voice as gaze in the mundane

Images of Beckett combines John Haynes' unique repertoire of photographs of Beckett's dramatic opus alongside three newly written essays by Beckett's biographer and friend, James Knowlson. Haynes captures images of Beckett's work in progress and performance and includes hitherto unknown portraits of Beckett himself. Haynes was privileged to be present at the Royal Court Theatre, London, when Beckett directed his own plays. Amongst the 75 plates are compositions that include the leading interpreters of the plays. Knowlson's first essay combines a verbal portrait of Beckett with a personal memoir of the writer; the second considers the influence of paintings that Beckett loved or admired on his theatrical imagery; and the third offers a detailed, often first-hand, account of Beckett's work as a director of his own plays. The essays are the result of personal conversations with Beckett and attendance at rehearsals, and provide a privileged glimpse into the world of one of the theatre's most influential and enduring playwrights.

Images of Beckett

Images of Beckett: Beckett as director

Images of Beckett: A portrait of Beckett

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Images of Beckett

Images of Beckett: Beckett as director

Images of Beckett: A portrait of Beckett