The Fastest Godot in the West

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

Barry McGovern as Vladimir in Waiting for Godot at the Mark Taper Form. Photo: Craig Schwartz

Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot.
Dir. Michael Arabian.
With Alan Mandell and Barry McGovern.
14 March - 22 April 2012. Mark Taper Forum. Los Angeles, CA.

Very early on in the Mark Taper Forum production of Waiting for Godot, one line proved arresting and captured the experience of this Godot. As the two most famous tramps in contemporary literature surveyed the space in which they found themselves, nursing their wounds from a cold night in a ditch and a beating, Didi remarked, ‘On the other hand what’s the good of losing heart now, that’s what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties’. Although Beckett was referring to the nineteenth century, the line assumed remarkable contemporary significance in Barry McGovern’s delivery. While the audience laughed heartily and knowingly, I suddenly found myself thinking about the play as newly relevant, as if we knew the line referred to a century before, and yet still felt it also—and actually—directed to a decade and a half ago: the 1990s. The success of this production was because of these moments of new recognition in an old friend that one thought one knew well. We were reminded that Godot can still surprise us, and that surprise made the production all the more interesting and valuable.

The metacontext of the production also shaped the experience and understanding of this Godot, the history and the legacy of the play reflected by its leading players. As the Los Angeles Times’s Margaret Gray noted in her review, ‘productions of this caliber are rare’, and compared the pairing of Alan Mandell and Barry McGovern, not incorrectly, to a ‘fantasy face-off’ of Washington versus Lincoln or ‘giant octopus versus giant squid’! Mandell and McGovern are two of the foremost interpreters of Beckett, having both worked extensively with the playwright as their director and having both played Didi and Gogo multiple times each (although McGovern has stated that he ‘sees [himself] as more of a Vladmir’). Mandell, who is now 84, quipped, ‘It was easier when I was 80’, yet performed with the energy of someone half his age. McGovern performed his 400th Godot during this run. Their performances brought the text to life in a dynamic way that transcended the theatrical stereotypes of Beckett and presented a play simultaneously realistic and absurd. These are two performers who knew Beckett and who know ‘Beckett’.

Experiencing Mandell and McGovern in Godot is watching and listening to two virtuosos playing beautifully from a difficult but beautiful score. In doing so, they make it look effortless yet show the beauty of the instrument being played and their own skill simultaneously. That skill brought a musicality and velocity to Beckett that has not always been present in other productions, and yet were the key factors to the aforementioned surprise and discoveries.

Estragon/Gogo was played by Mandell as fearful and depressed, yet with a playful physical comedy that belied his age and found the inherent clownishness of the character. McGovern’s Vladmir/Didi was played as alternately gregarious and annoyed. The action and dialogue was fast-paced, rapidly flowing back and forth, indeed this was the fastest Godot I have ever seen. Mandell recalled being directed by Beckett in an interview quoted by Gray: ‘I always thought of [Beckett] more as a conductor than a director. He didn’t sit around talking about who was this character, what life did he have before this. It was about rhythm. It was about language. The pauses were like musical beats’. If the production was shaped by thinking about it in terms of music, then these two virtuosos played quickly and lightly, but never in haste. This was Godot robbed of portentousness and pretentiousness, replaced with a Music Hall banter that weighed all the more serious for its lightness. The swiftness of the dialogue reminded me of the pleasures of Beckett versus the production of ‘Beckett’.

Left to Right: Barry McGovern, Alan Mandell, Hugo Armstrong and James Cromwell in Waiting for Godot. Photo: Craig Schwartz

The danger, of course, when such luminaries perform is that the rest of the cast must elevate their performances as well. It is here that the Taper Godot was most uneven. Hugo Armstrong was a competent and amusing Lucky. His noose formed a long lead stretching the length of the stage and even allowing him to enter the house. Pozzo’s yanking it from the other side of the stage, stopping Lucky’s progress with a backfall, provoked audible gasps from the audience. James Cromwell, however, seemed out of place in his interpretation of Pozzo. Cromwell, ordinarily an excellent performer on stage and screen (and who has directed the play in the past and played Pozzo before), constructed the character as ‘a bombastic, vicious aristocrat’ who, he claimed in an interview with Susan King for the Los Angeles Times, he ‘patterned after…Newt Gingrich’. These choices proved very odd, as Mandell and McGovern spoke in their own respective accents, but Pozzo, Lucky and Boy all seemed to be affecting a British clip. In fairness, Cromwell’s Pozzo was full of bombast, but I am not certain I would describe it as Gingrinchian. Perhaps Cromwell suffers by comparison with Mandell and McGovern, but he also demonstrates the dangers in ‘jollying up’ Beckett: one does not need Gingrich to enhance the text of Godot. Similarly, Boy (L. J. Benet) was dressed all in white and barefoot, ethereal, almost angelic, lending credence to audience members sitting near me who asserted that ‘Godot’ stood for God. Given how grounded and rooted the rest of the production was, it seemed an odd choice of costume and performance. Both in presentation and performance, only Lucky seemed to be from the same world as Vladmir and Estragon.

The world of the stage, pace the stage directions, featured a plain dirt circle with a bare tree (which sprouted a few small leaves for the second act) and rocks. Not specified from the text was a digital background with a digital country road and digital clouds. The production began with a digital figure walking down the road and disappearing below the back of the stage, emerging as Vladimir. It drove home the sense of the play’s being in medias res, reinforcing a sense of time in motion. It was also another enhancement of the text that reinforced the atmospherics and themes of Godot that purists might have found objectionable. Throughout the production the digital clouds kept moving slowly across the sky of the scrim and a digital moon slowly rose (projection designs by Brian Gale, who also designed the lights). The use of the projections was effective in conveying a world always slowly in motion but never really changing. The use of these digital projections was, perhaps, anathema to Beckett’s intentions, yet seemed perfectly suited to the play, this production and the world that Mandell and McGovern were creating on stage. It was both cutting-edge theatre technology, yet also suggestive of being ephemeral. The digital clouds also contrasted with the concrete reality of the dirt, tree and rocks of the stage. Whereas the latter were a physical presence, the former were an absent presence, light suggesting reality. In one sense, Beckett would have most likely objected, but in another it out-Godoted Godot.

Godot at the Taper was an inspired and inspiring production, though not without its quirks and problems. The rapidity of the dialogue, the snappy pace, and the imaginative departures (digital clouds, an overlong noose, Lucky passing through the audience, etc.) made this the right Godot for Los Angeles, yet the presence—and performances—of Mandell and McGovern evoked a sense of direct Beckettian lineage. Whereas two of Beckett’s hand-picked actors and digitally projected clouds would seem to be at odds, the production actually presented a unified whole. This might also be the fastest anyone has ever had to wait for Godot. Mr Godot still does not show, but we do not mind and the time passes quickly. Overall, the production provided a template for producing, performing and understanding Beckett in the twenty-first century. Vladimir was right: we should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.

Note: With gratitude to Anthony Miller for his insights and suggestions

Published in The Beckett Circle, Autumn 2012.

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Renewing the French Beckett

Alexandra Poulain

Catherine Frot plays Winnie in Marc Paquien's production of Oh les beaux jours!

Samuel Beckett – Oh les beaux jours!
Dir. Marc Paquien
With Catherine Frot and Pierre Banderet
20 January – 11 March 2012, Théâtre de la Madeleine, Paris.

Each new French production of Oh les beaux jours! is almost inevitably ghosted by the memory of the original production, directed by Roger Blin in 1963 with Madeleine Renaud as the sinking, singing Winnie. So memorable was Renaud’s incarnation of the part that the play was not produced again professionally in France until 1992 with Denise Gence, another legendary figure of the French theatre who, like Renaud, had acted with the Comédie Française before leaving to explore more contemporary, experimental theatre. The play finally entered the repertoire of the Comédie Française in 2005, with Catherine Samie, the company’s doyenne, playing Winnie, and the memory of these three predecessors, all of them hugely respected actresses in their sixties or (in Samie’s case) seventies and at the pinnacle of their theatrical careers, has created a tradition from which Catherine Frot’s interpretation of the part in Marc Paquien’s production departs.

Although a significant part of her career has been in the theatre, Frot’s huge popularity is due mainly to her roles in movies where she has developed a very personal style of acting, renewing French burlesque comedy with a tragic edge, and often playing the zany bourgeoise hovering on the brink of a precipice (for instance, Un Air de famille, dir. Cédric Klapisch, 1994; La Nouvelle Eve, dir. Catherine Corsini, 1999; La Dilettante, dir. Pascal Thomas, 1999; Mon Petit doigt m’a dit, dir. Pascal Thomas, 2005). Although her recent work has been almost exclusively on the screen, she says she had long hoped to play Winnie, ever since she saw Madeleine Renaud’s performance in the mid-seventies. Frot was then barely 19 and just starting her own acting career, and she says she was overwhelmed by the sheer strength of the theatrical image which the play offers, that of a woman who dreams only of lightness while she is being sucked into the earth. Though she says she has now reached the necessary maturity for such a part, Frot is notably younger than her predecessors – precisely the age which Beckett had in mind for the part (‘About fifty, well-preserved’), and she plays it with a comic, clownish buoyance which contrasts with furtive moments of utter poignancy when she vainly attempts to extricate herself from the mound. The performance is both extraordinarily funny and impeccably attentive to nuance, double entendre and innuendo. Going against the grain of earlier French productions, which tended to make the tragic potential of the play rather more explicit, Frot’s rendition, which reminded me of Fiona Shaw’s robust, life-embracing one in Deborah Warner’s 2007 production, reveals the comic potential of virtually every word of the French text, whilst making audible the text’s subtle musicality and every layer of sardonic irony.

The production is well served by designer Gérard Didier, who reinvents Beckett’s ‘mound’ as a freakishly beautiful gigantic oyster-shell, stranded on some deserted beach under a tormented sky. Perhaps the least convincing element of Paquien’s production is Pierre Banderet’s overly civilised Willie, who does not quite do justice to the character’s obscenity and bestiality (but in fairness it must be said I attended a very early performance of the production, and this may have evolved). All in all the production is undeniably successful, and a thoroughly enjoyable theatre experience which infuses the French Beckett with a vital dose of comedy, much as Peter Brook’s 2006 Fragments, presented both in French and in English at the Bouffes du Nord, had done. The show which opened at La Rochelle in January 2012 and played for three months at the Théâtre de la Madeleine in Paris is currently touring France.

Published in The Beckett Circle, Autumn 2012.

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Teacht is Imeacht

Alan Graham

Teacht is Imeacht, an Irish language production of Beckett's Come and Go. Photo: Kevin Abosch

Teacht is Imeacht at the Focus Theatre, Dublin

Before Vanishing is the evocative title of a new production of four Beckett shorts by the new Irish theatre company Mouth on Fire. Established in 2010 with the purpose of presenting Beckett’s work in ‘conventional, unconventional and site-specific locations’, the company has previously staged Catastrophe, What Where, Rockaby, A Piece of Monologue, and Play in productions which have garnered considerable acclaim from critics and theatre-goers in Ireland. Before Vanishing, directed by Cathal Quinn and premiered at Dublin’s Focus Theatre in April 2012, adds Ohio Impromptu, Footfalls, That Time and Come and Go to this repertoire and, in keeping with the company’s innovative approach to the Beckett canon, Teacht is Imeacht, an Irish-language version of Come and Go.

In many respects, it would seem appropriate that Beckett characters, and especially the characters of Come and Go who do not so much converse as make utterances, should speak in what has been traditionally perceived as a dying language. Indeed, the translation of a Beckett text into Irish produces heightened notions of the impossibility of expression and the redundancy of language as well as highlights interesting dynamics with regard to the writer’s relationship with his native country. Beckett of course did not speak Irish and had only a limited knowledge of the language - his Protestant up-bringing ensured that he escaped what Vivian Mercier called ‘this rather factitious element of Irishness’ at a time when an independent Ireland was set on making Gaelic an official language of the new state. Nonetheless, references to Irish (as well as a smattering of Irish words) feature in Beckett’s work, typically as an indication of the marginalised status of the Protestant community in the Free State and often attended by a sense of incomprehensibility at this turn of events: a toilet door marked ‘Fir’ (‘men’) mystifies Mr. Rooney in All That Fall (‘from Vir Viris I suppose’), jumbled speech in Watt ‘meant nothing to me … so much Irish to me’ and in Molloy, ‘tears and laughter … are so much Gaelic to me.’

The history of Irish language productions of Beckett’s plays is by no means substantial, yet, as with many interfaces between the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic literary traditions, it is not without its tensions. Beckett’s friend Con Leventhal, who was very critical of what he saw as the ‘Irishifying’ of Waiting for Godot in its first Dublin production at the Pike Theatre, dryly remarked in 1956 that ‘it may well be that Godot will do down in the local records as a lineal descendant of the works of the high literary kings of the Irish dramatic renascence. It is understood that there is a proposal to translate the play into Irish which would assist in bringing about a general acceptance here of this theory’. For some, translation into Irish was a crude means of reducing Beckett to the conservative literary culture and history which he would have seemed to have abandoned. Yet when an Irish version of Godot was eventually mounted in 1971, Beckett was reported to have been pleased with this development. Although only having a brief run in Galway and Dublin, Fanacht le Godot, directed by Beckett’s key Irish collaborator Alan Simpson who also took charge of the original Pike production, was a critical success and moved an Irish Times reviewer to fulfil Leventhal’s fears: ‘[U]ntil I saw Godot in Irish I didn’t properly understand how exactly Beckett takes hold of the Irish literary tradition … he is the legendary clever craftsman of humour, humour sexual and macabre, as ancient as the Táin [Táin Bó Cúailgne – a twelfth-century Irish epic] and as fresh as Finnegans Wake’.

The choice of Come and Go for a Gaelic treatment is an astute and highly successful one (despite its claim, Mouth on Fire’s is not in fact the first production of an Irish version of the play – Beckett gave permission for an Irish Come and Go, translated by Declan Kiberd, which was staged for an inter-varsity drama competition in 1970). The translation here is provided by the distinguished Irish language poet Gabriel Rosenstock who was motivated by the very strong connections he discerns between Beckett’s writing and the Gaelic literary tradition: ‘there’s a sparseness in his writing that reminds me of the beginnings of Irish literature … a texture, terseness and tonality’. Indeed, Rosenstock emphasises the linguistic paucity of Come and Go in his version by eschewing the variety in the women’s responses to the whispered revelations (‘God grant not’, ‘God forbid’, ‘Please God not’); here each woman reacts with ‘Nár lige Dia’ (close to ‘God forbid’).

An important and successful decision was the playing of the original English directly before the translated version. This manoeuvre primes the audience for the possibilities of translation, especially in establishing an intriguing relationship between the very Anglo-Irish setting of the play and the new language in which its characters must now be reticent. For an Irish audience, the Edwardian civility of these three women with very Protestant-sounding names, played exquisitely by Jennifer Laverty (Flo), Geraldine Plunkett (Vi) and Melissa Nolan (Ru), speaks quite clearly to Beckett’s origins; the reference to ‘Miss Wades’, a former school for girls on Dublin’s Morehampton Road attended by Beckett’s cousins, strongly evokes Protestant society in the city in the early twentieth century. There is also much of the ‘Protestant spectacle’, a sense of exposure in public space experienced by Ireland’s minority, in the visual provided by the three primly-seated figures, a dimension to a number of Beckett plays (most notably Happy Days and Rockaby). The transformation of these three ladies into Gaelic speakers has a unique effect in which the threat to the Protestant community represented by Irish as a language of public discourse is made tangible. The secrecy which surrounds the women’s situations is nuanced by an understanding that the language in which they hide a shared history also confers on them a marginal, even fugitive status. Teacht is Imeacht supplies a unique and vivid portrait of their besieged community and brings the extinct social world of Beckett’s youth eerily back to life. The play ends with a rare display of solidarity among Beckett characters with the three ladies holding hands. An interesting effect is achieved with the final line (‘I can feel the rings’ / ‘Mothaímse na fáinní’) in which the spectral rings, not ‘apparent’ in Beckett’s stage directions, take on the deathly status of Irish itself, the ‘fáinne’ being a key symbol of the Irish language movement.

The cramped space of the Focus Theatre suited the featured pieces well, and the lighting (Becky Gardiner) and sound were masterfully executed, especially for That Time which was staged with great innovative zeal. Teacht is Imeacht has since been performed in the small Gaelteacht (native Irish-speaking) town of Carraroe, Co. Galway to coincide with the unveiling of a Beckett bust. Before Vanishing will be performed at the Galway Theatre Festival on Friday October 5 and Saturday October 6 and will also be staged in Tokyo at the Theatre X Cai in February 2013. Mouth on Fire will present Rocabaí and Blogh, Irish language versions of Rockaby and Rough for Theatre II, as part of the Borradh Buan Irish Language Festival at the Axis Theatre, Ballymun on Friday October 26 next.

Published in The Beckett Circle, Autumn 2012.

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Samuel Beckett – Act Without Words II

Derval Tubridy

Act Without Words II: Raymond Keane crawls out of a sack. Photo: F. Sakauchi

Samuel Beckett – Act Without Words II
Company SJ
St. Alfege’s Park, London, 2011 and Theatre Alley June 2012

Act Without Words II has the focused intensity of the best of Beckett’s theatre. A mime featuring two male protagonists, A and B, it delineates the routines of life circumscribed within the movement from daybreak to dusk. Sarah Jane Scaife’s production of Act Without Words II, in St. Alfege’s Park in the heart of Greenwich, London, took place at dusk on a summer’s evening in late June, 2011. The audience gathered at a small gate on the perimeter of the park, from where it was guided through headstones and trees to a dim clearing in the gathering dark. The door of a snug brick outbuilding opened and a shaft of light seared the night, illuminating a strip that would become Beckett’s ‘low and narrow platform at the back of the stage, violently lit in its entire length’.

Scaife’s decision to take Beckett’s mime from the intimate space of the stage to public outdoor spaces foregrounds the ethical resonance of the work because, as the director explains, these are the places ‘where the homeless spend their time’. Beckett’s A and B become two homeless men, living rough, their lives circumscribed by the monotony of daily routine, goaded into action by the point of a stick wielded by some unknown, like the bell that wakes Winnie in Happy Days. Played by two powerful physical theatre experts, Raymond Keane (Director of Barabbas Theatre Company) and Bryan Burroughs (winner Best Supporting Actor: Irish Times Theatre Awards 2009 for his part in Johnny Patterson The Singing Irish Clown (Barabbas), Scaife’s direction is tightly choreographed to emphasise the disparity between A and B, as Beckett describes ‘A is slow, awkward (gags dressing and undressing), absent. B is brisk, rapid, precise’. The disparity between both protagonists, as performed by Keane and Burroghs, underlines a fundamental pathos in our understanding of how the very act of living is a challenge and a difficulty for some, and raises provocative questions about our attitudes, and responses, to the homeless and to those on the margins of society.

In Act Without Words II Scaife collaborates with award-winning theatre and lighting designer, Aedín Cosgrove. The simplicity and strength of her design for Act Without Words II makes possible a space for performance while providing a visual counterpoint to the abject and liminal settings of the play. Those who had the chance to visit the ‘Happy Days’ Beckett Festival in Enniskillen in August 2012 may have seen Pan Pan Theatre’s production of All That Fall with sublime lighting design by Cosgrove. The freedom afforded by staging a radio play was fully embraced to powerful effect by Cosgrove who played the intensity of a wall of spotlights off against the vulnerability of individual lightbulbs dangling at different heights from the ceiling. Each set of lights illuminated in response to the spoken word. Those who consider All That Fall tangential to their experience of Beckett would reconsider after witnessing the complex of aural and visual intensity effected by Pan Pan and Cosgrove’s extraordinary lighting design as the train finally arrives at the station with unspoken and possibly awful ramifications.

Scaife’s production of Samuel Beckett's Act Without Words II was first produced to critical acclaim in 2009 as part of Dublin’s ‘Absolut Fringe Festival’. It was re-presented at the 2010 ‘Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival’, and subsequently travelled to two major London festivals in 2011 with support from Culture Ireland: ‘Greenwich & Docklands’ (where it played in St. Alfege’s Park) and ‘Imagine Watford’ (where it played in the stage-door laneway of Watford Palace Theatre). In June 2012 it played in Theatre Alley, New York, as part of the River to River Festival, its proximity to ground zero lending greater charge to the sense of vulnerability and despair already evident in the production.

Scaife founded Company SJ in 2009 in order to explore new ways of performing Irish texts. She has a strong affiliation with Beckett’s work and has a real sense of the rhythms and counterpoints that underpin his writing for theatre. She has directed Beckett worldwide, including China, India, Greece and Mongolia. Hers is not a personality driven interpretation of Beckett’s work, but one in which each element––body, speech, sound, space and light––is orchestrated to fully convey the fundamental of the work even as it responds directly to contemporary experience. Scaife, Cosgrove, Keane and Burroughs deliver a rigorous and inventive production of Act Without Words II that reminds us how important Beckett’s theatre is for our understanding of contemporary times.

Published in The Beckett Circle, Autumn 2012.

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Godot at the Globe

Chris Ackerley

Photograph: John Watson (Vladimir) and Harry Love (Estragon) keep their appointment.

Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot
Dir. Richard Huber
With Harry Love, John Watson, Jimmy Currin, and Jerome Cousins
18 August – 28 August 2011 Globe Theatre, Dunedin, New Zealand

No, not that Johnny-come-lately, that mere imitation on the South Bank of the Thames – this is the Dunedin Globe Theatre, New Zealand, which in 2011 celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. And what better way to do so than to re-enact the play that, more than any other, brought Beckett within the ramparts of that fair city? Patric and Rosalie Carey in 1959 staged the first Dunedin production of Waiting for Godot in the University of Otago’s Allen Hall. Not an unqualified success, it nevertheless brought the play into public consciousness, and drew blood in the local newspapers between those dismissive of ‘screwball experimental dramatists’ and others who felt that denizens of a university town ‘should not be afraid of using their brains’. Both reactions encouraged the Careys, two years later, to turn their home into a small amateur theatre, dedicated to quality drama, both classical and experimental.

The Globe flourished, despite a rocky beginning. Its first offering, Romeo and Juliet, turned quite literally hundreds of people away; but the second, Endgame, played on opening night to an audience of fifteen, and on the next to two. Nothing daunted, the Careys persisted in their folly, and in 1966 mounted an excellent Godot, with a stage designed by Ralph Hotere, already one of New Zealand’s recognized artists. Geoffrey Jowett, the 1966 Estragon, turned up for the 2011 rerun, all hope apparently not yet extinguished. In its first years of operation, the Dunedin Globe mounted eight Beckett productions, more than the rest of the country combined. Thus began a tradition of a close association between town and gown, for although the Globe has remained fiercely independent over the past five decades it has relied on the university (though not exclusively) for both actors and audience.

The 2011 Waiting for Godot was no exception, the play supported financially by the University of Otago Humanities Performing Arts and Dunedin City Council Creative Communities funds. Directed by Richard Huber, it featured Harry Love as Estragon, John Watson as Vladimir, Jimmy Currin as Pozzo, Jerome Cousins as Lucky, and Liam Johnston as the Boy. Audience reaction was positive, there were good houses for all ten sessions, and it was reviewed favourably. I had some quibbles: the stage setting seemed to have taken its cue from the recent (London) National Theatre production, the perfectly abject tree somewhat at odds with the detritus at the back of the stage; the Boy did not look as ‘angelic’ as Beckett would have wanted him to be; and the actors occasionally had to retake their cues from one another as the odd line was missed or slipped a little. John Watson and Harry Love are, however, old campaigners, and recovered well, on one night debating at length the dubious merits of a second carrot as they awaited the belated arrival of Pozzo and Lucky. Harry Love, in particular, was a superb Estragon, with an impeccable Irish brogue, and while John Watson played perhaps more for pathos than despair, his Vladimir complemented Harry’s Estragon admirably. More controversial was Jimmy Currin as Pozzo: he was suitably bullying and blustering, but there was nothing of the Ascendency Landlord about him or his proletarian choice of dress, and thus an important aspect of the play was underplayed.

There are many Godots, with vast differences between the musical-hall and silent movie slapstick of the early 1950s productions and the more serious stage iconography of some later versions, including those done in Germany under Beckett’s personal direction. (I am reminded of the irreverent jest: what does a Frenchman, an Englishman, and a German find funny; answer [respectively]: a worm in an apple, half a worm, two verms.) Opinion will remain divided as to what constitutes the right timing and tone, but this small-city performance, with its various faults and excellencies, got one thing right: the audience liked it. My critical judgement told me time and again that there were aspects of the play, with respect to poignant emphasis and an underlying tragic vision (the latter perhaps too muted), that might have been done rather differently; yet the audience laughed, and at the right places, and went away feeling good about what they had seen. This might seem somewhat unreflective (‘What do we do now, now that we are happy?’ as Estragon asks), but John Watson and Harry Love were very funny, and a production that accentuates the comic elements without altogether losing their tragic intimations at least constitutes a useful reminder of the traditions in which the piece is essentially rooted. Chris Ackerley Photograph: John Watson (Vladimir) and Harry Love (Estragon) keep their appointment.

Published in The Beckett Circle, Autumn 2012.

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Samuel Beckett in Norway

Rockaby/Berceuse and Footfalls

Rosemary Pountney in Samuel Beckett's Rockaby/Berceuse

Samuel Beckett – Rockaby/Berceuse and Footfalls
Performed by Rosemary Pountney
22 March 2012, Den Nationale Scene, Bergen

Samuel Beckett in Bergen

Randi Koppen

The double- (or triple-) bill of Rockaby/Berceuse and Footfalls performed by Rosemary Pountney on a rare visit to Bergen in March this year, exhibited all the signature features of a late Beckett performance: the precariousness of sight and sound, the uncertainties of origin and issue, the compulsive loops and repeats. And yet there was something new to the experience, produced in part by the particular sequence of texts performed, in part by Rosemary Pountney’s unique corporeal presence on stage. Curiously, the experience of performances in sequence seemed to reverse the ‘evolution into absence’ so often invoked to describe the movement traced by Beckett’s plays. In the first half, the lonely, drawn-out act of dying is enacted twice, first in English, then in a hypnotic French. Next, in the death- or dream-space that opens up, a ghost walks, first as a column of dusty light, then as a body whose corporeal presence comes more and more to insist: an enduring fact demanding the performer’s as well as the spectator’s attention.

The signs of aging and death are with us from the beginning, visually inscribed on the body, much less a feature of voice. In Rockaby the woman in the chair appears with a face like a death mask, shrivelled hands framed by black, sunken breasts just about visible: not so much prematurely old, as the stage directions specify, as simply old. As the woman sinks down into words and darkness, then strains forward for more, the voice coming out of the dark, indistinguishable from her own except by its point of issue, enacts the rhythm of the chair that rocks her off to death. In the English version one is conscious of the simplicity yet ambiguity of the language, in homonyms like eye/I, pane/pain, blind/blind; in instabilities of pronouns and subject attribution. With the French the materiality of sound and its performative effects move to the foreground, intensifying the lulling rhythm. This is repetition with a difference, though: not a return to the beginning but a new start of strangeness and abstraction, showing us death as an enactment open to repetition.

Both plays turn on this compulsion to repeat, of course. After an interval, the mechanical rocking controlling body and voice in the first play is replaced by a walk of light visualising the sound of dragging feet: a sequence of lights switched on and off along a narrow strip of floor mark the progress of a human body. For the first two scenes there is no body on stage, except in a glimpse; when it does appear, the embodied presence is doubly strong – not just because a figure now fills the empty space, more because of the felt effort with which this aged woman shuffles, drags and turns. Every move is made by the support of a stick, each ‘wheel’ a painful manoeuvre to prevent the stick from being caught in the tattered train of her old dress. The effect is corporeal, breath-stopping. At the same time the woman’s face is expressive, the voice insistent, the gaze turned out at the audience in a performative register that has brought us from the abstraction of the death mask to expressiveness on a much larger scale, from formalist reticence to an acutely felt reality. What we see and hear is an inversion of entropy: thematic doublings and echoes abound, tensions increase in the relationship between mother and daughter, the pressing actuality of the situation before us becomes strikingly apparent. At the end of the three plays, more than anything it is the body’s expressive presence that brings home the underlying ‘realism’ of Beckett’s late drama in all its disturbing urgency.

Rosemary Pountney in Bergen

Erik Tonning (University of Bergen)

Rosemary Pountney, who has been performing Beckett shorts ever since her acclaimed Not I at the Oxford Playhouse in 1976, brought her performance of Rockaby/Berceuse and Footfalls to the prestigious venue of Den Nationale Scene in Bergen, Norway – one of the country’s three national theatre institutions, which was once under the directorship of Henrik Ibsen.

Dr Pountney (author of Theatre of Shadows) was invited to perform in Bergen via an unique collaboration between the theatre and the University. Although she has performed these plays many times in the past, her approach in Bergen, assisted by director Tore Nysæther, was entirely fresh. The four sections of Rockaby were followed directly by a compelling encore, the last sequence of the French Berceuse. In Footfalls, Pountney played both mother and daughter, literalising Beckett’s instruction ‘voices as alike as possible’. Nonetheless they were expertly differentiated in a sound recording of the voices and footsteps in Scenes 1 and 2. The first two scenes were played without a human figure. Instead, a light moved steadily across the strip of stage, precisely synchronised with the sound of dragging footsteps and V’s voice counting them. In the post-show discussions, it was clear that the spectral, mystery-laden atmosphere this created had made a strong impression on audiences, as had the contrast between the steady progress of the light and the slow, pained movement of Scene 3, which Pountney performed (of necessity) using a walking stick. With the kind permission of Edward Beckett, her performance movingly demonstrated that chief Beckettian quality: making and remaking, playing with shadows.

Published in The Beckett Circle, Autumn 2012.

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