Abstract
While working on his production of Endgame in the Schiller-Theater in 1967, Beckett outlined his view of theatre work to his production assistant Michael Haerdter: 'One turns out a small world with its own laws, conducts the action as if upon a chessboard'. Drawing on biologist Jacob von Uexkiill's concept of Umwelt as 'an organism's model of the world', the present article outlines the characteristic creative environment of Beckett's theatre by investigating the role of the proscenium stage space as the 'chessboard' in shaping Beckettian fictional minds.
In most cases, the Umwelt enacted onstage is reduced to a bare minimum and increasingly defies the neat Cartesian mind-world dualism in favour of a continuous and constitutive interaction between the mind and its (fictional) environment. In choosing to pursue and foreground this mingling between mind and world, Beckett may have presaged a number of recent developments in philosophy and cognitive science that reject the Cartesian (representational) model of cognition and likewise build on the notion of Umwelt as the basis for all cognitive activity.
The present article argues that Beckett's late plays both exploit and undermine the carefully crafted 'small world' of the performance afforded by the proscenium stage space by introducing the trope of a disembodied voice, a crucial element in his work for radio and a recurring feature in his prose texts from the 1950s onwards.