"Tonight's performance will last for three hours...." There is an audible gasp from the audience, something approaching terror. Especially from those of us who, unwisely, have decided to wait until after the performance to eat.
Especially from those of us whose weekends have already contained a hefty, full-to-bursting helping of Beckett recitals elsewhere. Brighton Festival's Beckett Weekend, centred around three prose adaptations by the Gare St Lazare Players, certainly lives up to its name. It's not for the faint-hearted.
Indeed, even the strong-hearted, the heartfelt Beckett evangelists, might flinch from some of this. The venue for our first two portions feels perfect - sparse furniture in a dimly-lit concrete cellar, just a wooden bench and a ledge for a stage - but the choice of works is brave in the extreme. Or, perhaps, just extreme in the extreme.
These are difficult pieces, to perform and to digest. The three excerpts of Texts For Nothing, welded together to form as much of a whole as nothing can form, are deliberately hesitant and doubting. They coil back upon themselves as soon as they appear to have reached any kind of conclusion, shrinking instinctively from the light. Occasionally, a coherent image forms and is extinguished almost instantly, returning us to a lost, confusing greyness. There is some great writing here, to be sure, and it is performed with loving care by Conor Lovett. But, Jesus, it tests a faltering attention span after an extremely long day.
And then, Worstward Ho follows on the Sunday afternoon and is harsh and impenetrable even by Beckett's considerable standards. Just a few ghostly images haunting prose that's frequently an impossible maze, insistently recounted by Lee Delong. It is another fascinating hour, demanding and ultimately rewarding. It is as far as Beckett went, pretty much, and that's quite a long way further than anyone else bothered to go. I have spent more relaxing Sunday afternoons.
In both cases, acute concentration is required, and the slightest slip loses the thread entirely. It seems to me that the performances are more than partly responsible, even though both deserve immense praise for tackling such daunting territory in the first place. Somehow, the music that's inherent in so much of Beckett's prose is lost in the desire to explain, to convey meaning. There's too much effort, too much work. Too much constipation. There's none of the joy that can
be found even in Beckett's bleakest work, none of the purity and the greatness. It's all a bit of a strain.
And thus, another three hours on Sunday evening is an intimidating prospect. But, to the relief of all, Conor Lovett's performance of excerpts from the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable is brilliant, riveting and, in comparison, the time flashes by. At last, here's the joy: the comedy of Molloy is so riotous and absurd and occasionally filthy that you could be watching great stand-up.
It's a marvellous introduction, but Malone Dies is where you find the reasons why some of us love this stuff, why it is held so close to our hearts rather than merely admired from a distance. Here, there are traces of that black, surreal comedy...but they're framed by something profoundly still, something deathly. Malone's stories disintegrate and splinter, life's flame flickering and then spluttering out. It is beautiful writing, kind and yet totally unsentimental, perfectly poised; as a consequence, it manages that most impossible thing: it is hopelessly moving, yet resoundingly intelligent at the same time.
After which, The Unnamable, perhaps the grandest of all Beckett's works, is a glorious, gorgeous after-glow. His movements echoed by an enormous shadow on the back wall, Lovett lingers in the after-life, somewhere between ghost and angel and god. Resisting the novel's classic but somewhat worn ending ("I can't go on. I'll go on."), he makes random noises into the nothingness to pass the time, before finally extinguishing the spotlight, disappearing into the void. And returning for the applause.
It's been a remarkable few weeks, really. Hours and hours and hours spent listening to Samuel Beckett's work - for you spend much more time listening than watching - and yet no sense of having exhausted it. Set aside the literary landmarks, the vast historical importance of it all, and you're left with fundamentals: that he left behind writing so full of humanity that it will always be irresistible. Too much humour, too much kindness, too much sadness, too much simple beauty. Everything that art can be, with so little of the nonsense.
Here's to you, guvnor.
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