Beckett in Dublin, page 1
BECKETT IN DUBLIN
EDITED INTRODUCED BY S.E.WILMER
THE LILLIPUT PRESS
CONTENTS
Title Page
ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
A MAN OF THEATRE
JAMES KNOWLSON BECKETT AS DIRECTOR
JEAN MARTIN CREATING GODOT
S.E. GONTARSKI WORKING THROUGH BECKETT
THEMES AND STRUCTURES
LINDA BEN-ZVI FEMININE FOCUS IN BECKETT
KATHARINE WORTH BECKETT’S GHOSTS
DECLAN KIBERD BECKETT AND THE LIFE TO COME
ROSEMARY POUNTNEY BECKETTS STAGECRAFT
STEVEN CONNOR OVER SAMUEL BECKETT’S DEAD BODY
AT HEART A DUBLINER
GEORGES BELMONT AND JOHN CALDER REMEMBERING SAM
BRENDAN KENNELLY THE FOUR PERCENTER
J.C.C. MAYS IRISH BECKETT, A BORDERLINE INSTANCE
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
Plates
Copyright
ILLUSTRATIONS
Photographs by Tom Lawlor of Beckett Festival productions at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, 1-20 October 1991
1 Barry McGovern as Vladimir in Waiting for Godot
2 Alan Stanford as Hamm and Barry McGovern as Clov in Endgame
3 Derek Chapman as Man in Act Without Words I
4 Tomás Killeen as B in Act Without Words II
5 David Kelly as Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape
6 John Olohan as B and Phelim Drew as A in Rough for Theatre I
7 John Olohan as B and Phelim Drew as A in Rough for Theatre II
8 Fionnula Flanagan as Winnie in Happy Days
9 Bernadette McKenna as Woman 2 and Stephen Rea as Man in Play
10 Helene Montague as Flo, Susan FitzGerald as Ru and Bernadette McKenna as Vi in Come and Go
11 Adele King as Mouth in Not I
12 Stephen Rea as Listener in That Time
13 Susan FitzGerald as May in Footfalls
14 Stephen Rea as Speaker in A Piece of Monologue
15 Maureen Potter as Woman in Rockaby
16 Kevin McHugh as Listener and Johnny Murphy as Reader in Ohio Impromptu
17 Johnny Murphy as Protagonist in Catastrophe
18 O.Z. Whitehead as Bem, Barry Cassin as Bam, Seamus Forde as Bim and Micheál Ó Briain as Bom in What Where
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Beckett Festival in Dublin in October 1991 was the brainchild of Michael Colgan, director of the Gate Theatre, and it proved to be one of the most successful features of Trinity College’s 400th anniversary celebrations. The festival was the result of close co-operation between the Gate Theatre, Trinity College and Radio Telefís Éireann, with much support from many other organizations. Over a three-week period the Gate Theatre produced all nineteen of Samuel Beckett’s stage plays, Trinity College hosted lectures, seminars, readings and exhibitions, and RTE broadcast the television and radio plays.
The board of directors of the festival, which helped to determine the programme and make it possible, was chaired by Michael Colgan and included Edward Beckett, Anthony Cronin, Mary Finan, T.V. Finn, John P. Kelly, David McConnell, Barry McGovern, Thomas Mitchell, Cathal Mullan, Tony Ó Dálaigh and Patrick Sutton. The Gate Theatre, under the direction of Michael Colgan, with Anne Clarke and Marie Rooney, produced the plays in addition to overseeing the progress of the festival as a whole. The Festival Co-ordinator, Rupert Murray, with Eileen O’Halloran, Aisling Milton and Eamonn Crudden, provided the link between the Gate Theatre, TCD, RTE and the various activities. The committee responsible for the lectures and seminars in Trinity College included Terence Brown, Gerry Dukes and Ben Barnes. Other TCD staff participating in the events were Nicholas Grene, John McCormick, Barbara Wright, Peter Fox and Bernard Meehan of the TCD Library, Thomas Murtagh, Alex Anderson, Daphne Gill, Mary Hegarty and the Quatercentenary Committee, particularly David Scott, Gerry Giltrap, Peter Boyle and Marcella Senior. Others responsible for specific aspects of the festival included Caroline Murphy, Eoin O’Brien, Jim Sheridan, James Knowlson, Medb Ruane, Susan Schreibman, Alan Stanford, Marie Donnelly, George Hutton, Teresa Mooney, Jane Doolan, Michael Garvey and Donald Taylor Black.
Organizations which contributed greatly to the festival included Aer Lingus, the Arts Council, Dublin 1991 – European City of Culture, Irish Life Dublin Theatre Festival, the British Council, the French Cultural Institute, the Goethe Institute and Bord Fáilte.
This book is made possible by grants from the TCD Association and Trust, the TCD Arts and Social Sciences Benefactions Fund and the TCD Quatercentenary Committee. I would like to thank Antony Farrell and Mari-aymone Djeribi of the Lilliput Press, Marie Rooney of the Gate Theatre, and Aisling Milton and Eamonn Crudden for their help in the preparation of this book. I would also like to thank Tom Lawlor for allowing us to use his photographs.
S.E. Wilmer
Director of the Samuel Beckett Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies
Trinity College Dublin
INTRODUCTION
In October 1991 Trinity College Dublin celebrated the work of one of its best-known graduates, Samuel Beckett, in a three-week festival. Michael Colgan, the director of the Gate Theatre and himself a Trinity College alumnus, had told Beckett of his desire to produce all of his stage work in a single season, something which had never been done. Beckett approved of this idea but it was not possible to achieve it while he was still alive.
Beckett died in December 1989. With the coincidence of Trinity’s 400th anniversary and Dublin’s being selected as European City of Culture, Michael Colgan’s idea grew into a more ambitious plan: to produce all of the nineteen stage plays, while RTE (the Irish broadcasting service) transmitted much of Beckett’s radio and television work. At the same time Trinity College would host a series of lectures, seminars and events. To enhance the festival a number of works relating to Beckett by such artists as Louis le Brocquy, Jasper Johns, Robert Ryman, S.W. Hayter, Avidgor Arikha and Brian Bourke were assembled in the Douglas Hyde Gallery. An audio-visual unit was established to enable people to listen to and watch Beckett’s recorded work for radio and television. Trinity College Library displayed a number of Beckett manuscripts, including the newly acquired prompt book of En attendant Godot (in which Beckett had made notes during its first rehearsal period) as well as manuscripts on loan from Reading University. Enlarged reproductions from Eoin O’Neill’s The Beckett Country were mounted in the foyer of the Gate Theatre.
Beckett in Dublin attempts to recapture some of the highlights from an enterprise which spiritually brought Beckett home after his death, and celebrated his life while the memory of him was still vivid. The chapters in the book examine different aspects of his life and work, and are roughly divided into three areas: Beckett as man of theatre; Beckett as artist; and Beckett as friend and Irishman.
The unique presentation of all of Beckett’s published stageplays by the Gate Theatre is recorded in a single photograph of each production (except Breath, which has no visible characters). The photographs are included in the chronological order in which he wrote the plays and reflect the increasing minimalism of the work.
The first section, ‘A Man of Theatre’, contains three points of view by people who worked with Beckett in different capacities. James Knowlson discusses Beckett’s artistic vision, which led him, possibly out of frustration with directors, to direct his own plays. In his productions he emphasized repetitions, variations and counterpoint rather like a choreographer, causing Billie Whitelaw and other actors to feel like musical instruments. In many of the plays these patterns relate to his themes by emphasizing repetitive lifestyle, the echoes of memory and the variations caused by aging. Knowlson also examines the paintings which influenced Beckett as a writer and director and added a religious dimension to certain dramatic moments. At the same time as showing Beckett’s specific vision, Knowlson demonstrates that Beckett was not inflexible as a director. His purpose, furthermore, was not to make a clear statement but, as in music or poetry, to leave an impression, to suggest rather than to define.
Jean Martin, who played Lucky in the first production of Godot in Paris, witnessed Beckett’s development from amateur to experienced man of the theatre. In the rehearsals of Godot, Martin remembers the author sitting quietly, intervening only rarely, allowing the director, Roger Blin, to go for circus effects. Rather than indicating how Lucky was to be played, Beckett left Martin to formulate his own interpretation. He remembers Beckett objecting, however, when he saw Vladimir being played too emotionally. By the time of Fin de partie (Endgame), Beckett had gained sufficient confidence to indicate how lines were to be delivered.
Stan Gontarski in a sense begins where Martin leaves off and proposes that Play marked a turning-point in Beckett’s aesthetics at a time when he was changing roles from writer to writer/director. Gontarski argues that, in this transition, Beckett shifted emphasis from the text to the performance and that in examining Beckett’s variant texts one should ascribe greater legitimacy to production scripts than to published versions. Gontarski also shows how Beckett’s aesthetic moved from conventional theatrical characterization to dehumanized, ‘non-particularized’ pieces. Later, when Beckett returned to directing his earlier plays, he applied this new aesthetic by making them more abstract. Gontarski regrets that in denying the validity of the changes which Beckett made to his plays after directing them, Beckett’s critics have accepted him as a writer but not as a man of the theatre.
In the second
This feminine sense of character, language and aesthetics is taken to a metaphysical plane by Katharine Worth, who analyses the supernatural aspects of Beckett’s stage, radio and television work. She sheds light on the spirit world in Beckett which is closely allied with Yeats’s notion of restless ghosts (as in his Noh plays) that need to converse and ruminate. In some cases, such as Eh Joe, unwelcome ghosts terrify the living. In others, as in …but the clouds… and Ghost Trio, the living seek out the dead. In Footfalls the ghosts of May and her daughter merge, trapped in each other’s trauma. But amidst the rituals, repetitions and haunting presences, a notion of spiritual regeneration sometimes obtains, a sense of birth in the presence of death, as in A Piece of Monologue.
Declan Kiberd attributes Beckett’s notion of the supernatural to his Protestant formation, complicated by an interest in Eastern religion. He perceives a Buddhist-Protestant synthesis in the stark stage images of plays such as Waiting for Godot. Kiberd suggests that Beckett’s impositions on his actors reveal a puritan mistrust of the theatre, and that his love of minimalism is linked with a Protestant-Buddhist disapproval of luxury.
Rosemary Pountney and Steven Connor discuss structural elements in Beckett’s work. Pountney highlights a number of features of his stagecraft, noting that as the characters become progressively dehumanized in Beckett’s plays, there is a corresponding animation of objects—the tape recorder in Krapp’s Last Tape, the light in Play, and the camera in Film. She also describes the constraints placed on the actor, and the use of the human voice not for intelligibility but for rhythm and tone. Above all she focuses on the endings in his work. She analyses the variety of devices used: circular endings in Waiting for Godot and Endgame, linear endings as in That Time, Rockaby and possibly Krapp’s Last Tape, and what she calls ‘linear cycles’ such as in Happy Days and Footfalls where the recurring images are so potent that they continue to reverberate after the play has ended.
Steven Connor, in approaching Beckett from multiple standpoints, demonstrates the writer’s postmodern and elusive qualities. Beckett’s philosophical position was self-contradictory. He mixed genres in such a way that Company, for example, falls between prose and drama. He wrote simultaneously in two or more languages so that he defies conventional linguistic analysis. As an exile, he was neither fully Irish nor French, and his political convictions remain vague. Moreover, Connor warns against trying to categorize Beckett now that he is dead, and encourages, instead, the exploitation of his contradictions.
The third section of the book, ‘At Heart a Dubliner’, moves from the abstract to the personal. The dialogue between Georges Belmont and John Calder, edited from a seminar session during the festival called ‘Remembering Sam’, presents an intimate portrait of Beckett at home and in college, in pubs and in cafés. Belmont, a fellow writer from France, describes how he met Beckett in the 1930s as a student and became a friend of his family. Calder, his prose and poetry publisher from the 1950s, also became a close friend. They exchange anecdotes revealing the human side of Beckett.
Brendan Kennelly, a poet and Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin, argues that Beckett was essentially a poet and that his writing style mirrored his position in Dublin society as a member of a self-conscious minority group, a privileged Dublin Protestant who would have been taught to ‘button his lip’ after Irish independence.
Finally, James Mays roots Beckett’s work in Dublin, uncovering the Irish nuances in some of his seemingly anonymous later work. But at the same time he emphasizes the distance that Beckett created between his roots and his art in inventing his past. He utilized not only his own memories but also those of a former generation. He distanced his characters, distorted their language, counterpointed word and image, subverting intelligiility in the process, thereby leaving an unresolved tension between the abstract and the personal.
Beckett in Dublin portrays a shy, self-absorbed man who struggled for recognition as a writer and who lived for a long time under the shadow of James Joyce. After World War II, he began writing in French. When Godot went into rehearsal, he embraced the collaborative process of drama, possibly as a relief from the loneliness of writing. With his later plays, he became more determined to shape his own works on the stage and eventually took over as director. Beckett experimented with music, poetry and the visual arts, pushing back the artistic frontiers in the various media and creating new forms in French, English and German. Although he left Ireland in the 1930s, memories of his childhood continued to echo throughout his work. In celebrating his life, we remember him not only as an international figure but also as a Dubliner.
A MAN OF THEATRE
BECKETT AS DIRECTOR
JAMES KNOWLSON
‘There are elements of the sound that cannot be indicated on the score and that is why one makes recordings oneself.’ The words were those of the composer Sir Michael Tippett, in Tippett at 85, a BBC television programme broadcast in September 1991. But they could equally well have been Samuel Beckett’s own and, if one were to add to ‘elements of the sound’ the phrase ‘and of the visuals’, they could be applied most appropriately to his work as director (or recorder) of his own plays.
Beckett once complained to me of the failure of a famous English actor to capture the poetry of his lines (and, out of discretion, I shall not name him): ‘You hear it a certain way in your head, and he just can’t do it.’ ‘He’s doing it ahl whrang,’ he said, squirming in his seat, to Alan Schneider of another actor’s performance as they attended the British première of Waiting for Godot,1 and, through the director, Peter Hall, he went on to proffer words of advice to the actors after the performance. He listened to his wife’s or his friends’ accounts of various productions, read reviews, or simply looked at photographs or listened to records of productions of his plays (like the Columbia Arts recording of Waiting for Godot) and found that often they simply did not work, sometimes for the most obvious, practical reasons, sometimes for much more complex, sophisticated ones: the urns were too far apart in Play; the chair was not the right height in Endgame or the windows were wrongly placed; the tempo was quite wrong in parts of Godot; there was not enough silence, and so on.
It is not, contrary to what many people persist in believing, that Beckett thought that there was only one way of doing his plays. Indeed, the differences in his own productions of the same play disprove this allegation totally. But he did have a vision to which certain elements of certain productions were clearly not being faithful, or against which they were actively working. I also think that he, too, like Sir Michael Tippett, felt that the words of the text, taken along with the stage directions (however precise these may be – and, in Beckett’s own case, they are remarkably precise), still only partially conveyed the way that he saw his own plays. For what was not written down counted for Beckett almost as much as what was written down on the printed page.
By what was not written down, I mean, among other things, the echoing or contrasting tones of balancing or differing voices, the pace and the rhythms of the dialogue, the frequency and the duration of the pauses, the quality of the voices and the looks, the variety of the gestures, the volume, and again the quality, of the lighting. To take only one example for the moment, that of pace, one of Billie Whitelaw’s chief memories of rehearsing Play at the Old Vic when George Devine was directing with Beckett in attendance was of Beckett saying ‘faster, faster’ when Kenneth Tynan and Laurence Olivier wanted them to go for intelligibility by slowing it down.2 Devine agreed with Beckett and in the end the play went at an enormous speed.
