Ohio Impromptu - Biographical Insights

Biographical Insights

Beckett would often take a biographical event in his own life and strip away all the biographical details, leaving the barest minimum of language and theme.

“Beckett served for a time as Joyce’s amanuensis … the two men used to walk together on the Isle of Swans during the thirties and … Joyce used to wear a Latin Quarter hat.” Beckett confirmed these details with reference to the piece during a dinner conversation with James Knowlson. “Of course,” he said. Knowlson then mentioned that he had heard people refer to the “dear face” “as if it too were the face of Joyce”. Knowlson believed it was actually a woman and Beckett concurred: “It’s Suzanne … I’ve imagined her dead so many times. I’ve even imagined myself trudging out to her grave.” “When he wrote Ohio Impromptu was eighty years old had nonetheless remained a couple for over forty years” and “the thought of Suzanne dying was intolerable to him.”

The character in the story is plagued by night terrors and insomnia, as was Beckett. All his life he was troubled by nightmares. “His insomnia was probably inherited, from his mother who suffered from the same … complaint. In the 1930s Beckett also began to experience panic attacks. “Chief among these was a feeling of suffocation, which often came on him in his room as night was falling.

The title of the play deserves some comment: Ohio Impromptu is a “straightforwardly descriptive, marking occasion and genre – impromptus à la Molière and Giraudoux (which were metatheatrical or self-reflexive exercises) – or more like the intricate little solo pieces Schubert, Chopin and Schumann called impromptus. “In promising an impromptu – a performance without preparation – the title of the play subverts its own promise when followed by a text which allows no extemporaneous composition, no improvisation on the part of the actors.

“‘Ohio’ is the answer of an American children's riddle which goes "what is high in the middle and round at the ends" or "what is high in the middle and nothing at the ends". The answer to both versions is ‘Ohio’. This gives the central theme of Beckett's play: ‘two voids or "nothings’- birth and death - and between the high of life.”