“What Age am I Now? and I?”: The Science of the Aged Voice in Beckett’s Plays

Abstract

Samuel Beckett’s dramatic works are known for aged and ageless characters—from the “eighty-nine, ninety”-year-old Voice in Footfalls (Beckett, Complete 400), to the elderly Nagg and Nell in Endgame, to Krapp, the “wearish old man” of sixty-nine in Krapp’s Last Tape, hereinafter Krapp (Beckett, Complete 29). Various performance strategies, particularly makeup and lighting, are typically used to accentuate the age of younger actors playing these characters; these strategies may be perceived as necessary to age a younger actor for these roles. However, just as Beckett’s texts designate physical constraints for a given character (such as May’s characteristic footsteps in Footfalls or Nagg and Nell’s confinement to ashbins), so, too, do they provide vocal restraints. Over the past fifteen years, gerontological studies in vocal aging have described the aging voice in terms of pitch, breath-pause length, and fundamental frequency variability. Such qualities, when examined in the scripting and delivery of Beckett’s dialogue, demonstrate that Beckett creates a score for aged voices using words and pauses. Moreover, examining Beckett’s physical stage directions in light of the physiological bases of vocal aging reveals that these physical cues also create vocal restraints—means by which certain vocal qualities are induced so that the audience perceives the actor’s voice as having an aged sound, whatever the age of the actor.