When the actor Billie Whitelaw was rehearsing the play Footfalls in 1976, Samuel Beckett gave her some advice. As she was getting to grips with this play in which a woman paces back and forth, over and over, revolving in her mind a relationship of traumatic attachment to a mother who is now only an insistent voice, Beckett instructed her, over again: ‘Too much colour, Billie, too much colour.’ He directed her towards a voice and embodied attitude that matched the tattered grey dress and ashen oval of stage space upon which he had insisted. When Whitelaw was rehearsing Rockaby (1981), Beckett similarly told her that the voice used should be ‘very monotonous’: ‘There's no colour, or hardly any.’ The colourlessness of grey is everywhere in Beckett's finished work and firmly associated with his austere and carefully curated personal image. But as the example above makes clear, an orientation towards grey was also part of his process, his craft. Beckett's attempts to dampen down and flatten the ‘drama’ in Whitelaw's performance, in and through rehearsal time, can clearly be linked to writing strategies designed to strip out or ‘vaguen’ those obviously ‘colourful’ elements visible in his manuscript drafts; they also match his famous turn from English to French described as a movement from ‘ex[c]ess to lack of colour’. Whether in the rehearsal studio, through the drafting process, or by reworking texts through translation, the act of taking time into the texts and insisting they absorb it seems to have been key to the work of realising Beckett's grey vision.

Alongside marking Beckett's obvious fascination with what we would now call greyscale images, this chapter will argue that Beckett's modernist, often minimalist works also materialise an analogous temporal aesthetic: a grey time structured, in particular, by an attention to waiting without the possibility of fulfilment or progression. In a greyscale image, the value of each pixel is a single sample representing only an amount of light; in other words, it carries information only about intensity rather than chromatic difference. I want to argue that grey time might similarly be described as a temporality structured not by a movement through states that are clearly different in kind, but through the modulation of experiences of intensity that emerge while waiting.