The absence of stage directions bestows considerable freedom on dramatisation. Happily, the prose is relatively exempt of these pressures. Warner was held under threat of lifetime debarment from Beckett's scripts. In 1994, for instance, the highly esteemed Deborah Warner who directed the play FOOTFALLS, mounted at the Garrick in London, was censured for reassigning lines and getting actress Fiona Shaw to walk a few extra steps - what one critic has humorously called "walkabout". Draconian control by Beckett's estate means swift sentence served to those who transgress. These strictures are no less acute after his death. Coaching actors in cadence and timbre, he typically shunted aside token directors to monitor rehearsals and checked microscopic betrayals by the staged script. His personal involvement in productions was dictatorial. Intonation, pauses, nuances of light and sound, paces (the number of steps the actor is instructed to take), head rotation, angles of motion, even how far a character should lower his trousers - the list does not begin to cover Beckett's binding proviso on every conceivable letter of stage direction. Samuel Beckett's plays are infamously challenging to stage.
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