Nacht und Träume (play)

Nacht und Träume (Night and Dreams) is the last television play written and directed by Samuel Beckett.

It was written in English (mid-1982) for the German channel Süddeutscher Rundfunk, recorded in October 1982 and broadcast on 19 May 1983 where it attracted "an audience of two million viewers.

Originally entitled Nachtstück (Night Piece), it is a wordless play, the only sound that of a male voice humming, then singing, from the last seven bars of Schubert’s lied Nacht und Träume, words by Matthäus Casimir von Collin: "Holde Träume, kehret wieder!"

James Knowlson, in his biography of Beckett, states that the actual text used however was a slightly modified version by Heinrich Joseph von Collin, Matthäus’s brother.

The play finds its origin in Beckett’s fascination with Albrecht Dürer's famous etching of praying hands, a reproduction of which had hung in his room at Cooldrinagh as a child, however "the dark, empty room with its rectangle of light and its black-coated figure hunched over the table, resembled a schematised seventeenth century Dutch painting even more explicitly than Ohio Impromptu.".

In ritualistic and sacramental fashion the blessed shade offers him first a cup from which he drinks and then gently wipes his brow with a cloth.

"The screen layout calls to mind certain religious paintings where a vision often appears in a top corner of the canvas, normally the Virgin Mary, Christ ascended in his glory or a ministering angel.

The mysterious quality of the action, the beauty of the singing … and the specificity of the repeated, almost ritualistic patterns avoid this.

"[1] One has to assume, using the same logic as Beckett did with Quad II, that the dream/memory/fantasy is winding down and that, if it was to receive a third run through, it would be slower again suggesting that it is fading away.

[13] One might imagine Beckett appending the same disclaimer he applied to Berkeley’s philosophy in Film: "No truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience"[14]