He was a Nobel Prize winner, an Irishman who lived most of his life in a foreign country. A man who wrote in both English and French, he was one of this century’s towering literary figures, turning out a total of 19 plays and several books. He was also a major influence on most contemporary playwrights, yet remained an enigma, a thoroughly private person, until his death in 1989 at the age of 83.
The man is, of course, Samuel Beckett, and though his plays are constantly being performed all over the world, the last major revival of probably his most famous play, Waiting for Godot, was eight years ago at New York’s Lincoln Center, where it starred Robin Williams, Steve Martin, F. Murray Abraham and Bill Irwin, with Mike Nichols directing.
This summer, New Yorkers will be treated to a first — a chance to see all 19 of his plays is coming up shortly. That same Lincoln Center is holding a Summer Festival 96, and the Gate Theater of Dublin — the playwright’s home town — has been invited to reprise its Beckett retrospective, performed two years ago as part of the Dublin Theater Festival. There will be 33 performances of the plays, from July 29 to August 11.
The Dublin retrospective was the first of its kind ever. It was a major success, so much so that Lincoln Center immediately set about arranging to bring it to American audiences.
The Gate company will be led by Stephen Rea, from The Crying Game; Barry McGovern, whose one-man show I’ll Get By was adapted from Beckett’s novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable; Rosaleen Linehan, last seen in Dancing at Lughnasa; David Kelly (Krapp’s Last Tape); Alan Stanford (Salome) and Johnny Murphy (The Commitments).
The plays are being staged by five of Europe’s best-known contemporary directors, all of whom worked with the playwright over the years: Antoni Libera from Poland, who translated all of Beckett’s writing into Polish and directed the last production in which the author was personally involved; Walter Asmus from Germany, who worked on numerous productions in Berlin and London; Pierre Chabert from France, closely associated with Beckett in Paris for more than two decades; Pat Laffan from Ireland and England’s Karel Riesz.
Michael Colgan, for the last 13 years artistic director of the Gate, first approached Beckett at his home in Paris a year or so before he died, with the idea of presenting the entire canon of his plays over several consecutive days.
Beckett gave his consent with one very typical admonition. “Keep it simple, Michael,” he said.
Perfectly typical of a man who once told his biographer, Deirdre Bair, “The best possible play is one in which there are no actors, only the text.
“I’m trying to find a way to write one.”
He almost did. His first performed play, Waiting for Godot, had five actors in the cast. Much later he wrote Not I, a ten-minute soliloquy spoken at rapid speed, to be performed on a blacked-out stage. The only visible thing is a pair of lips, talking away. (Billie Whitelaw performed that; she once asked Beckett to explain what it meant, since she was to speak before a college audience about the play. “Well Billie,” he answered, “you can tell them the author doesn’t know what the hell it’s about either.”)
And Krapp’s Last Tape is performed by a single actor, but he’s angrily answering his younger, tape-recorded voice.
Beckett, tall, slim and distinguished looking, was an intensely private man who lived most of his life in France. So private that he wouldn’t even go to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize. He sent one of his publishers instead.
He did cash the check, however.
He first went to Paris during the Roaring 20s in 1928 after a year of teaching in Belfast, and it must have seemed like heaven to him after the bleakness he had left. While there, he met fellow Irishman James Joyce (even translated some of Joyce’s language-bending Finnegans Wake into French) and several other expatriate writers and poets.
After a while he returned to Ireland to teach at Trinity College, and, in 1936, he contributed to a play called Youth’s the Season, by Mary Manning Howe at the Gate Theater, which at that time was run by Hilton Edwards and Michael MacLiammoir.
The following year, he left Ireland to live permanently in Paris. A year later, he was mugged on a street, stabbed and nearly died. He was rescued by a nurse, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, who became his wife in 1961. Together, they served with the Resistance and the Red Cross during World War II, and he was awarded both the Croix de Guerre with gold star and the Medaille de la Resistance.
Suzanne died in 1985.
While his plays tell little or nothing about Beckett himself, they speak a universal language. Gloom and doom, pessimism and reflections on death and aging are some of the main themes, but they are also highly comic. And since they require little or no scenery and the actors are mostly dressed in rags, old clothes and cast-offs, they seem incredibly simple to stage. But don’t change a word of the text, or the Beckett societies — and there are many — will be out in force ready to close the play down.
It happened in Boston once, when his Endgame was performed by the Mabou Mimes and the setting of the play was changed from a bare interior to an abandoned subway station. Beckett complained to the American Repertory Theater, and his objection was published in the play’s program.
Some of the plays are very short, others are full-length with two or three acts.
For a writer whose outlook on life was one of utter pessimism, Beckett has always had an enormous following, ever since his Waiting for Godot, first seen here in 1956, more or less reinvented theater. It ran on Broadway to mostly negative notices, lasted ten weeks, and starred Bert Lahr, E.G. Marshall, Kurt Kasznar, Alvin Epstein and Lucino Solito de Solis (the boy who comes at the end of each act to say Godot isn’t coming today).
It established his reputation as one of the most controversial writers in the theater, and opened the door for a number of absurdist plays. But more conventional writers like Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard and Tom Stoppard, to name just a few, have all admitted being influenced by his work.
One performance a few years back of Happy Days, in which an actress (in this case, Aideen O’Kelly) is buried up to her waist in sand for the first act, then to her neck in the second, while she talks about her life, had one man in the audience attend 17 times to see it. On another night, two women were overheard leaving the theater. “Not much like the TV show, is it?” one said to the other, referring to the 60s series starring the Fonz.
Irish-born actors Jack McGowran and Patrick Magee were among the playwright’s favorite interpreters. After McGowran’s death, Billie Whitelaw played most of the women’s roles. (She will appear in New York during the Festival to speak at the Kaplan Playhouse atop the Juilliard School in Lincoln Center, August 7.)
Another series of symposia will be held at New York University, August 1, 5 and 8. The first is to be a discussion on Beckett and 20th Century Theater, with panelists Tom Bishop of NYU, playwright Edward Albee, director Pierre Chabert, writer Mel Gussow of the New York Times, James Knowlson of the University of Reading and Robert Scanlan of the American Repertory Theater.
Beckett and Ireland is the second topic, chaired by Denis Donoghue of NYU and University College Dublin, and includes panelists Terence Brown of Dublin’s Trinity College, Gerry Dukes of the University of Limerick, Lois Gordon from Fairleigh Dickinson University and actor Barry McGovern.
The third is Readings from Beckett’s poetry and prose in English and French, with Pierre Chabert, Richard Howard and Barry McGovern.
All symposium events are free and open to the public; seats will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis.
Tickets for the plays are $30 and $45.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the July/August 1996 issue of Irish America. ⬥
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