Word: beckett
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...transplant the work of an author who exercised such meticulous control over his plays that he itemized the number of seconds between pauses, the precise level of gloomy light? Presumably Beckett meant "First Love" and the novel trilogy to remain in the forms in which he created them. Yet there's reason in Colgan's audacity. He wanted to prove that even Beckett's fiction has theatrical verve, that the static can be dramatic, that pieces written for the eye can entrance the ear, that, for this most "internal" author, the page was also a stage. Colgan's strongest case...
...story, the TV show and the novels are all monologues, thus suitable for reading. And all take place in what the woman's voice in Eh Joe describes as "that penny farthing hell you call your mind." Some of Beckett's characters may never understand the harm they've caused or allowed, until "the agenbite of inwit" - a medieval phrase, often used by Beckett's mentor, James Joyce, to refer to the remorse of conscience - forces them into self-knowledge, into an act of contrition. In Eh Joe Neeson's face hardly moves a muscle; the play's director says...
...plays also reinforced the argument that Beckett was, in large part, a comic writer: unquestionably deadpan but characterized by (his phrase, from Happy Days) "laughing wild amidst severest woe." Godot is really a spectacle of mordant vaudeville; the role of Estragon in the first Broadway production was taken by that comic Cowardly Lion, Bert Lahr; and in a 1988 Lincoln Center revival, directed by Mike Nichols, the stars were Steve Martin and Robin Williams. The set up to the play's gag: they wait for Godot. The punch line: he doesn't show up! Maybe this is concept comedy...
...Laughing wild certainly abounded in the hour-long Saturday matinee of readings from Beckett texts by Fiennes, Neeson, McGovern and Julianne Moore. Among the readings was a passage from the short story "The Expelled," published, like "First Love," in 1946. Its protagonist is a dour brute not far from the nameless necrophile in "First Love," and Fiennes again took the role. He describes walking down a city street when "I had to fling myself to the ground to avoid crushing a child. He was wearing a little harness, I remember, with little bells, he must have taken himself...
...guilt of Irish laughter resounds through much of I'll Go On, McGovern's and Gerry Dukes' selection of passages from the three novels. McGovern, one of the foremost players of Beckett, mines every vein of showmanship in the works. Riding a bicycle while holding crutches, or squatting nearly naked and spitting out whole paragraphs in a long breath, he's a veritable Cirque de Solo. Even on his deathbed (in the Malone Dies section), the McGovern-Beckett character finds much to laugh about, though his smile is a rictus...