Mary Boland / Sydney Morning Herald
Ralph Fiennes, Barry McGovern and Charles Dance bring star power to the Sydney Festival's celebration of Samuel Beckett.When Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was first performed in English in 1955, the Irish critic Vivian Mercier described it as a two-act play in which "nothing happens - twice". It is hardly surprising, then, that Beckett, inventor of the dramatic non-event, also gave us a love story so starkly devoid of tenderness and romance as to divorce us from any expectations of love stories - and of love itself.
First Love, which will be performed as part of the Sydney Festival's Beckett Season, is a first-person narrative starring Ralph Fiennes as a freeloading vagrant who moves in with a prostitute he meets on a bench. He initially rejects her advances -"the mistake one makes is to speak to people" - but realises he is in love when he finds himself writing her name in a dried cow pat. She falls pregnant, to his dismay -"perhaps it's just wind, I said" - and he ends up fleeing the house while she is giving birth, her labour cries following him up the street and for the rest of his days.
"It's utterly devastating, that last part," says the artistic director of Dublin's Gate Theatre, Michael Colgan, who recently adapted the poignant novella for the stage in his latest project aimed at bringing Beckett's work to new audiences. The Gate is also bringing to Sydney two other performances based on Beckett works not originally intended for the theatre. The mesmerising Barry McGovern stars in I'll Go On - an adaptation by McGovern and fellow Irish Beckettian Gerry Dukes of the trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable - and Charles Dance in Eh Joe, which Beckett wrote for television in 1965. There will also be poetry and prose readings.
Colgan, who met the Nobel laureate in Paris several times during the writer's final years, has been described as Beckett's most enthusiastic apostle. Sitting in his spacious office in a Georgian building on Dublin's Parnell Square, Colgan recites softly from First Love, marking each pause with a stern glance over his spectacles. Later, in his missionary zeal to spread Beckett's words, he walks back and forth across the room with the frequency of Endgame's Clov, returning each time with other works, different editions.
"I think there's been a change," he says of the public's response to Beckett since the Gate presented all 19 stage plays and a handful of radio plays in Dublin's first Beckett festival in 1991. Back then, Colgan had often remarked the writer was unjustifiably neglected. Today, thanks in no small part to those productions, which travelled to New York's Lincoln Centre in 1996, to London's Barbican Centre in 1999 and to Melbourne in 1997, Beckett has a new audience who see his work as less intimidating and more accessible, less depressing and more humorous.
"I think people are getting the humour now. They're being less reverential; less reverential in that way of just sort of reading it in your Sunday clothes," Colgan says.
Following the success of the 1991 festival, Colgan took Beckett from stage to screen. Having set up Blue Angel Films with Irish movie producer Alan Moloney, he turned to well-known writers and filmmakers such as David Mamet, Anthony Minghella and Neil Jordan to direct prominent actors including Julianne Moore, John Hurt and Kristin Scott Thomas in the now-acclaimed Beckett on Film series. And last year Colgan chaired Ireland's Beckett
Centenary Festival committee, which oversaw dozens of events, including more plays at the Gate and other theatres. There were also Beckett-inspired art exhibitions, musical performances and conferences that brought together Beckettians from around the world.
Whatever the reclusive writer would have thought of having his photograph displayed on billboards throughout his native city and on flags lining Dublin's main road, O'Connell Street - both Colgan's initiatives - Beckett might have been quietly amused that audiences in his centenary year have changed utterly since they heckled, brawled and walked out in droves during initial performances of Waiting for Godot in Paris, London and Miami.
"It's not like before, where people were suspicious of modernism; people will not now look at a Sean Scully [painting] and say, 'carpet tiles', whereas in the '60s and '70s, people had a great suspicion," Colgan says.
"I think a sign of real greatness is an ability to survive scrutiny and withstand interpretation. Beckett has done that. All the plays have that integrity of writing; he's not trying to trick anyone. To call a play Act Without Words II or Rough For Theatre I or Play, you're not writing for Julianne Moore or writing for producers. The integrity and honesty of the piece speak to you; you accept it for what it is. I think audiences, young audiences especially, get that."
After Fiennes had a sell-out run at the Gate last year with Irish playwright Brian Friel's Faith Healer, he and Colgan began looking for a suitable Beckett work to perform. The duo chose First Love, a piece Beckett wrote in 1946.
"[Fiennes] would ring me up and quote from the shorter texts. He began leaving messages," Colgan says, picking up the novella again and quoting several passages, including two that contain the C-word. "Of course I've left them in [the stage production]. It's a shock when you hear it, but it's also so very considered, the way he uses the word."
Colgan adapted the work with no pressure from the sometimes formidable Beckett estate, managed by the writer's nephew and executor, Edward Beckett, whose mission is to ensure Uncle Sam's detailed stage directions are strictly adhered to. That this text was not intended for the theatre may have made it less controversial for Colgan to adapt. However, he is confident he has the estate's general blessing.
"They know that I do Beckett very well," he says. "And, I say it with terrible modesty, but it's a sad fact that I've done more Beckett productions than anybody else in the world. So they know that my heart is in the right place. I've never had a problem with it."
When he first met Beckett, Colgan was accompanied by Barry McGovern, who has since become one of the foremost interpreters of Beckett's work. They had gone to Paris in 1986 to take I'll Go On to a festival marking the writer's 80th birthday. The production had come about when, two years previously, Colgan wrote to Beckett to ask if he and McGovern might produce Beginning to End, the one-man show of Beckett's work performed for years by Irish actor Jack MacGowran. Beckett had no objection.
"But then came the sentence that changed my life," Colgan says: "There remains the possibility of a one-man show on the same lines, but with a different title and a different choice of texts." The result was McGovern's tour de force, which he first performed in 1985 and was now bringing to the city where Beckett had lived for decades.
Sitting in the Gate theatre bar, the actor recalls that first meeting, at the Hotel PLM on the Boulevard St Jacques, for which the Dublin duo arrived an hour early. Beckett was punctual to the minute. "We drank coffee and smoked. He was complimentary. He was interested in seeing a picture of the set," says McGovern, who would meet the writer again about half a dozen times. "At that stage he didn't go out much. He didn't go to the theatre any more or get involved in things. He was very much private and had health problems. But he was very encouraging; he had heard things about it.
"There are lots of myths about Beckett but he was happy to talk about lots of things. I asked him about pronouncing certain names. I should have asked him more."
At subsequent meetings they spoke for at least an hour. "We'd share whiskey or beer and those cheroots he used to smoke. I remember him saying goodbye to me [for the last time] and thinking I'd never see him again. I was with my wife and he embraced us warmly. I remember the stubble on his cheek. And those piercing blue eyes."
McGovern, who has played Lucky, Vladimir and Estragon in various productions of Godot, says I'll Go On evolved naturally as he and Gerry Dukes worked on the texts. "What we tried to do was get a feel for the three novels; this search for self, this search for identification. I see it as a sonata. A great opening movement; that Molloy section as the really first great movement. Then Malone Dies is the slow movement, in a sense, followed by prestissimo at the end, where I just do 10 minutes from The Unnameable, which is as much as you can take - or as much as I can take!"
The performance looks and is exhausting, he admits. "The Unnameable is this incredible driving on towards this 'endnessness' which never really comes. It's like a train and then as the later paragraphs go on, they're bigger and bigger. Sometimes you've six pages of a paragraph with just commas. It's like panting, panting on.
"Obviously we're keeping in some of the fierce humour but there's a lot of it that's quite frightening as well and that's not just humorous, so it's getting the balance right."
The Beckett Season takes place at Parade Theatres, NIDA, from January 12-21.
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