Ben Heppner in Tristan und Isolde at New York's Metropolitan Opera. Photograph: Seth Wenig/AP
On the face of it, there couldn't be two more different theatre artists than Richard Wagner and Samuel Beckett. Beckett himself cared very little for Wagner. But Dieter Dorn's production of Tristan und Isolde, recently restaged at New York's Metropolitan Opera, suggests there may be more to the comparison than meets the eye.
Arthur Schopenhauer's contribution to aesthetic philosophy informed both men's work. For Schopenhauer, music was the highest of the arts. It most effectively permitted the description of the ultimately indescribable Will that lay beyond the world of earthly appearances. The words of a libretto (or, for Beckett, of a play script) made this communication more precise. For Schopenhauer, the lyrical, tragic drama was second only to music in its ability to communicate these rhythms.
Wagner did not live to see the implementation of electric light in the theatre, which, through designers such as Adolphe Appia, made abstraction tangible. Production practice in the 1860s was heavily invested in the naturalism of historically accurate sets and costumes exemplified by the work of Saxe-Meiningen. As effective as Tristan und Isolde was when it premiered in Munich in 1865, it didn't come into its own until Appia's theory became current in the 1920s. With the abstraction of the impressionists, Matisse and Picasso, shape and colour became more evocative of the poetic currents that lay beneath photographic realism. Appia demonstrated that this was true in the theatre as well.
After 1945, Bayreuth's directors seized on Appia, presenting geometrical shapes on a bare stage flooded with light. At the same time, Beckett's first plays were being performed in Paris - plays that also depended for their effect just as much on the painterly ability of the director and designer as the performers. For Beckett's 1961 production of Waiting for Godot, Alberto Giacometti designed a tree that was made with wires and plaster: a mere suggestion of a real tree. Even these scenic elements became less common in Beckett's later work, until 1972's Not I presented a mere pair of lips. The theatrical event is reduced to a speaking mouth.
Dorn nods to Beckett's stage practice in his conception of colourless existence in the gray floor of the raked stage, and in the three white cycloramas gathered into a very visible vanishing point upstage center. It's a vanishing point suggesting the nothingness for which the lovers yearn - like the "very pompier trompe-l'oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance" that Beckett specifies for Happy Days.
In the foreground of this stage image there is in Tristan, as in much of Beckett, physical stasis, a lack of physical activity. The Day/Night duet that makes up most of the second act of Tristan is performed in a deep blue light, the lovers wrapped into one seeming unified and motionless object at centre stage for 45 minutes, nearly impossible to see in the darkness. As in either act of Godot, there is little more than talk for nearly an hour, but in Wagner this talk is filled with sublimely beautiful music, and in Beckett, devastatingly lyrical speech. As in Wagner's final operas, Beckett's dramas from 1962's Play onward also strip detail to allow expression of the essences of suffering, renunciation and desire themselves.
Beckett and Wagner share the same precision of soul. They do so through a spare essentialism: the rooted power of theatre based in simple rituals of performance. A little unexpected, perhaps. But theatre makes strange bedfellows, and not just after the opening night party.
