Earlier today on Radio National’s The Deep End there was an interview with the co-producer of a production of Beckett’s Endgame by the Eleventh Hour Theatre Company in Melbourne. On the basis of that interview and this review by Alison Croggon I’d definitely go to see it if I lived in Melbourne. Beckett is one of those writers – spare, elliptical, almost platitudinous but full of meaning – which Croggon captures thusly:
Comedy is always cruel, and perhaps it is most pitiless when it springs from a compassion as profound as Beckett’s. Beckett’s compassion is not of the kind that can be easily construed in humanist terms; it is far beyond looking for transcendent meaning in the human condition. Rather, Beckett grants his strange characters a space in which the trivia of their existence in a godless, inhuman universe is given its proper dignity. Where nothing means anything, everything becomes significant.
Well said.
In the interview, co-director William Henderson spoke of the time Beckett went to see Buster Keaton, who at that moment was watching a game (football or baseball) on TV. They were both shy and a bit awkward in company, it seems, so when things didn’t fire immediately Keaton simply continued watching TV. There were aides in the room who gradually coaxed them into conversation and then things went along fine.
It seems to me that living was hard work for these guys.
And indeed I had been feeling a bit fragile about the project of life. Earlier I had been talking to a woman who told me that after more than 20 years she and her husband were separating. She gave me a reason in a short sentence. The words don’t matter, it was the sudden wave of emotion that transformed her face for a brief moment before she regained control. What might have been. What was.
It was a brief encounter and we mostly spoke about mundane matters. But it opened once again experiences in my own life that were well and truly settled.
Sometimes one feels that try as we might in the end we are alone in the world. There is a point in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot where one of the characters says that our mothers give birth astride the open grave (it’s a very male perspective.) Our lives are that brief moment as we fall from womb to grave.
But hey, I’ll sleep OK and tomorrow is another day. I wish it would rain, though. Last night’s storms missed us completely.
Let’s bite the bullet here.
(”Did you bring an portable explosive device capable of blowing off my face?”, “No.”.)
That bullet bitten, let’s front up here. Beckett’s really not that funny.
He was a good paradigm shattermerchant at the right time but we all can probably quote more entertaining lines from Oliver Stone, Joss Wheedon, The Goon Show or “Curb Your Enthusiasm” with more brio and bunchyhomepunch than we can from the corpus of Sam B. Here yah go. Spot the quotes here.
“Say hello to my little friend.”
“Grow gently old down all the unchanging days.”
“You talking to me!?”
“We’re through the looking glass now.”
“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
” He’s fallen in the water.” “Yes, it’s a tradition among drowning men.”
“Let me go to hell, that’s all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.”
“Did you hear us fighting? No? Trap!”
“I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.”
“What’s a John Cale quote doing in the middle of a Beckett parody?”
“Make sense who may. I switch off.”
Biting Nabs’ bullett, Becket can be a very funny writer. Malone Dies had me embarrassing myself on a train. But Beckett does not do one-liners. So the above list doesn’t help.
And then there are the plays - which when performed by a skilled company are as moving as anything written in that medium. San Quentin Theatre Co and Dublin Gate Co performances of Beckett (both performed in Melbourne over the years) are the best theatre I’ve seen.
Another bullet to bite - nearly all writers really aren’t that funny.
But thanks Brian - was meaning to go to this and had forogtten about it - so am now well reminded.
Thanks Brian for the quote -
Humour is such a subjective quality. And no, Beckett is not always funny - sometimes (always, actually, even when he is funny as well) he is tragic. And reading Watt was about as close to going mad as I want to get. All the same, if you don’t think Beckett can be funny, you could do worse than see the production I wrote about.
Nabs, I agree with wbb. You don’t look for one-liners in Beckett. Croggon says that he “pierces to the quick of existence” and then:
After the madness and carnage of the first half of the 20th century and the apparent certainty during the 50s and 60s when I was young and Beckett was writing that the world would end with a nuclear holocaust Beckett was a writer that captured the existential Angst of the age.
Part of my interest now is whether he remains a man of his times or whether he means anything to subsequent generations.
The ‘giving birth above the grave’ quote I mentioned is a fundamental metaphor in Godot, I think. It comes from the very last speech of Pozzo, who after a furious outburst says (Calmer):
But to appreciate that you have to read at least the following page and a half (if not the whole play) where you find Vladimir saying:
The Boy brings the message that Godot won’t be coming today. Tomorrow.
But the deterioration between Act One (yesterday) and Act Two in the characters is such that they have passed from being just above the threshold of viability to below. There is no hope.
After re-reading Godot again in 2002 after 40 years I wrote in part:
The Melbourne production is said to emphasise the humour. I find it hard to find anything funny in Beckett. But he requires brilliant acting and the Melbourne production is said to deliver in spades.
Alison, hi, and thanks for dropping in.
My last comment was written before I read yours.
Oh I’m not disputing Beckett is a great writer, capable of slyly creeping out your funnybone. It’s just I’ve never found him quite as funny as others expect to.
However, as a nod to all the Beckettists, here’s a time when I did find him funny.
http://aftergrogblog.blogs.com/agb/2004/12/the_old_man_and.html
w/r/t the issue of Beckett as comedian…
Imagine a dream Python production of “Godot” — Palin as Didi, Chapman as Gogo, Cleese as Pozzo, Gilliam as Lucky (physically), with Lucky’s tirade voiced on tape by Terry Jones.
If there’s a heaven, it had damn well better be full of stuff like *that* to be worthy of the name…
Nice post, Brian.
Go on.
“Go on.”
To where?
Where no one-legged blogger has gone before?
Get with the program Kimbo. I’ve just invited that hairy and literate primate to do the Beckett Tango.
I’m leading off the front foot here.
On, is where. Unless you’d prefer to stay here. It makes no difference to me. Just go on.
Yeah, ok, I got it already.
fyi - season booked out. Nabs’ll be shattered to miss out. He’ll go on.
Beautiful post, Brian. I’m sort of sorry, though, for the melancholy that seems to underpin it.
One can, I think at least, profitably explore the depth and beauty of Beckett’s work as an artist, without being obliged to accept his ultimate conclusions. Like Chekhov or Turgenev, Mr. B. was a very great artist; but he was not the only artist, and his conclusions are not the only conclusions.
“It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.”
– Stevens, ‘No Possum, No Sop, No Taters’
The review that you linked to was full of good stuff; one of Croggon’s lines I thought was very interesting — the thing about Beckett’s plays being sort of like art installations. In a way he’s one of the great visualists, one of the great painters of our time, similar to the Old Dutch Masters in his power and purity… and I wonder if some of his images won’t outlast the ‘actual’ ‘painters’ of the 20th cent. The two old guys standing by a tree, the people encased in the urns, the mouth in the spotlight, the old drunk yelling at his tape recorder, the guy in the black glasses sitting in a wheelchair talking to himself… already they’ve become an important part of what the 20th cent. *looked* like.
I love the democracy of Beckett, too. (The San Quentin workshop is maybe the best evidence of that.) Once a long time ago, I was talking about ‘Endgame’ with a friend from the Rust Belt who didn’t have what you’d call regular ‘college’ training; but it turned out to my surprise that he’d played Clov as a teenager, in an amateur production that he’d produced himself in an abandoned small-town storefront in the Midwest. When I asked how that had come about, he shrugged and said, “Well, you know, there wasn’t that much else to *do* around there…”
As the man himself put it, ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’
j-p-z, on the visual nature of Beckett’s work, I heard recently that he would spend 20 minutes absorbed in a painting in an art gallery, then grunt or make a monosyllabic comment and pass on to the next one.
This post didn’t start out as being about Beckett at all. Gotta go now, but I’ll say a bit more about that and melancholia tonight maybe.
Let me explain a bit. I’ll try not to be too long-winded.
The genesis of the post came when I talked to the woman who was separating from her husband after more than 20 years. Such partings are common enough but can be pretty devastating at the time. You build a life together with all sorts of hopes and dreams. Although ostensibly you are successful in this another story is developing which breaks through and destroys the dominant visible narrative.
At the time you can feel a failure and that you have wasted the best years of your life. It’s sad, I think, but you look forward and eventually own the past as well.
When I was thinking about all this I heard an interview with the artist Janice Cobey on painting the heart ache of broken relationships. The interview about Beckett followed shortly thereafter. The idea of a post incorporating all three in sequence was born.
When I came to write the post the first problem was that the Cobey paintings didn’t really grab me. Also I felt I had to strip all the detail out of the separation story for reasons of privacy.
So I nearly gave up, but the solution was to start with Beckett.
I read Beckett in the early 1960s when I was in my early 20s. William Faulkner in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech seemed to think we would all be blown up as indeed did anyone who thought about the state of the world at the time. Indeed in 1962 we almost were.
But the existential Angst of the immediate post-war years went way beyond the physical and Beckett was not the only merchant of gloom around. For me the crisis of the times was summed up in Erich Heller’s essay The hazard of modern poetry (modern meaning from Goethe onwards) in the later edition of his book The Disinherited Mind. I recall an aphorism on the door of one of my lecturers that went something like
But that’s not quite true either, no statement of words is or can be, but yet we go on. We don’t have to, but we do.
J-p-z, in the four decades since those times I’ve had a satisfying life, with more to come if I wake in the morning. But I’ll treasure my melancholy a bit too.
BTW your vision of a Monty Python production of “Godot” in the next world sounds good. I have to tell you though, our Kerry Packer when he died the first time came back to tell us that there is nothing there!