Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett's That Time and Footfalls

Summary

The rehearsals began on 1 September 1976, and the premiere was on 1 October 1976. The rehearsals were in the morning between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., about half the time being devoted each day to each piece. Beckett had already staged both pieces in London early in the same year. In London he had worked with Billie Whitelaw in Footfalls. They knew one another very well, and right from the start the rehearsals had gone ahead in an atmosphere of mutual understanding and intuitive sympathy. In Berlin, Beckett was confronted with an actress whom he didn't know in the part of May, an actress whose work in the theater was based on the search for realistic, concrete motivations and who was not willing or not able automatically to work in an intuitively structural way. The rehearsals therefore evolved in an atmosphere of productive questioning on the part of the actress and of respect on the part of Beckett for the striving of a very talented actress to perfect her role by constantly seeking, in her own way, for access to the characteristics of the “strange, mysterious” figure of May.