Writing to a friend, the American director, Alan Schneider, in 1972 about his new (and, at that stage, still unperformed) play, Not I, Samuel Beckett described the spotlit image of Mouth, suspended high in the darkness, as ‘purely a stage entity, part of a stage image and purveyor of stage text. The rest is Ibsen.’ His comments established a clear, if elliptically expressed, distinction between his own approach to the theatre and the more traditional plot-based, character-based drama epitomised by the great Norwegian dramatist. Taken along with Beckett's other letters concerning his plays to Schneider and his theatrical notebooks, however, they also direct attention to the importance that he accorded to his stage images. As a director of his own plays, he would often concentrate, as he put it, on the ‘picture’, working to get the stage image as close as possible to what he had in mind. At the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1976, I watched him adjusting May's posture in Footfalls for a full half-hour before he was satisfied that he had finally got it right. He also spent a long time checking with the set and costume designer Jocelyn Herbert and the actress Billie Whitelaw that May's costume was insubstantial enough to echo the ‘tangle of tatters’ referred to in the text.
The powerful imagery of his stage and television plays makes a good case for considering Beckett as an important visual artist, who influenced artists with very different styles, from the minimalist painters Geneviève Asse and Robert Ryman, to Avigdor Arikha, Edward Gorey, Dellas Henke, Louis le Brocquy and Jasper Johns, as well as film, video and installation artists like Bruce Nauman, Stan Douglas, Valie Export, Tony Oursler, Rodney Graham, Steve McQueen and Ugo Rondinone, among many others.