Arts
Beckett at the Court
John Spurling PProaching the Royal Court Theatre during its current Beckett season, I saw a greyhaired man gripping another by both shoulders on the pavement outside. Tall, slim, athletic, nattily dressed, he did a full Gallic salute, dipping his head in a formal priestlike manner either side of his partner's. Then he turned and walked briskly away from the theatre. If it was not Samuel Beckett, it was a Passable imitation and it only occurred to Itte afterwards to wonder how a man so obvintISIY in the prime of life could possibly be a Year older than the decrepit protagonist of i(raPP's Last Tape. As an observer of human life, of course, tieckett has always been more or less seventy Ye ars old. The student hero of his earlier stories (Published when he was under thirty) 'had a spavined gait, his feet were in ruins, he suffered with them almost continuously', while his mind was equally preoccupied with arbstruse intellectual problems (such as Beatthlee's explanation to Dante of the spots on 1.,_e Moon) and spinsterish personal matters e'llte the proper preparation of a sandwich r:311sisting chiefly of charred toast and overt:De gorgonzola. People with dilapidated huoadies and grotesquely anchoritic minds ve been the /subject of all his work ever since.
Rut one should not confuse matter with Ittethod leo, • Beckett writes as sprucely as he In order to push the notion of mortal tY nearer and nearer the point of dissolu11:o he has developed a more and more flaws technique. The single image of Play is nra,st ultimate memento mori, three funeral standing in darkness, but as a play it is s".w.Ork of art so perfectly achieved in its own :itl,et terms that one can compare it only tionn suCh classic models of dramatic perfeca„ Oedipus Rex and The Importance of TR h Earnest u • u •
bitrae j xtaposition of these two is not as ar
thodrY, as it may sound, since Beckett's mep„,".uePends precisely on administering traq1and comedy in equal doses. The first enh,;3f PlaY, for example, is almost entirely no';neI three mouldering heads sticking them . the urns re-live their conventionally click/teal adultery in ludicrous fragments of Ciudge then of my astoundment when th:aiune morning, as I was sitting stricken in att es,nrrling room . . .'). The second half is word'act repetition of the first, word for what'ause for pause, and thereby becomes Nivel of?rd Madox Ford wanted to call his The bactulterY, the Saddest Story. Schiti er '`oYal Court's season began with the ,ociot, Theater's production of Warten auf net see Uarected y 0 Beckett himself. I have thee n a Production of this play in which omie Passages Were so carefully set apart from the tragic ones. It reminded me of the Japanese custom of sandwiching a knockabout farce between two exquisitely melancholy NO plays. Beckett's Godot took the notorious music-hall routines at breakneck speed, then broke the rhythm almost as in a piece of music to allow a slow passage pf despair to be spoken straight out over the heads of the audience.
The result was to stress the formality of the play, to bring it closer to the later work in which Beckett's dramatic structures are more evidently musical. The role of Hamm in Endgame, for instance, is like that of some rather stagy instrument such as the cello rather than of a straight dramatic character. Patrick Magee, whose peculiarly operatic delivery exactly matches the tone and range of this self-confessed actor-manager ('I'm warming up for my last soliloquy'), first played Hamm at the Aldwych in 1964. His performance in Donald McWhinnie's production at the Royal Court has gained still more of this 'cello' quality. Beckett's lush romanticism was never more ravishingly offered nor more scathingly snatched away : 'But what in God's name do you imagine? That the earth will awake in spring ?That the rivers and seas will run with fish again ? That there's manna in heaven still for imbeciles like you ?'
The author's grip on his later plays, exercised both through his precise stage directions and through the almost religious admiration felt for him by his interpreters, remains tight enough to exclude any but small changes of emphasis. A Beckett retrospective is in this sense like a painter's: the objects are almost exactly the same as when they were first shown. Play is, one would think, impervious to interpretation. The actors speak in toneless voices, their phrasing rigidly punctuated by commas and pauses, while the light that plays on their faces in
turn is the only thing that moves apart from their lips. All that is required is extreme vir tuosity in all concerned, including the opera tor of the light. Then, as ihMcWhinnie's production at the Court, the miracle happens: the most painful prospect of human insigni ficance is transmuted into pure aesthetic pleasure. It was perhaps a mistake to follow rather than lead up to a masterpiece of this order
with the two new short pieces, That Time and Footfalls. In That Time a single spotlit head, with hair flared out as though seen lying on a
pillow, swims forward out of complete dark ness and remains suspended in black space like a moon, while the head's owner (played by Patrick Magee) listens with closed eyes to recordings of his own voice reminiscing from three different points of the stage. The effect, for the audience as for the dying man, is hypnotically soothing, but the very beauty of the text, called in question only momentarily by the painful breathing of the listener, makes this a poetic rather than dramatic experience.
Footfalls, written for Billie Whitelaw, places a complete human figure in view of the audience. The ghostly May, a kind of Miss Haversham without the wedding cake, dreadfully old and dressed in a tattered grey wrap, paces up and down a narrow lighted strip at the front of the stage, first listening to the disembodied voice of her mother and then reciting her own sad tale of disembodiment. The play perhaps derives its main image from the 'poor woman. All alone in that ruinous old house', briefly mentioned in Beckett's first radio play All That Fall, who listens incessantly to a record of Schubert's 'Death and the Maiden'. The language of Footfalls is unguardedly romantic ('like moon through passing rack') and might suggest that Beckett's lifelong horror of the grave is turning into something more like the grisly relish of early nineteenth-century Gothic writers. But the difference between one Beckett play and another is never a differ
ence of content, always of technical invention. The fact that he so seldom steps the wrong side of the thin line between tragedy and melodrama is a measure of his artistic agility.
Previous page
