Word: macgowran
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dress rehearsals are rarely reviewed. But this one in Paris was extraordinary theater in its own right: Samuel Beckett collaborating as director with his friend of many years, Irish Actor Jack MacGowran, in a two-hour, one-man performance called Beginning to End, assembled from Beckett's novels and cemented together with passages of his poetry, radio and stage plays. The two have extracted from Beckett's life work the single figure of the Beckett tramp, Fool without his Lear. Now the tramp was confronting his maker in rapt concentration. Intense and difficult listening: this Beckett, like...
...next evening, MacGowran, now alone, was able with Beckett's music to still even the inimitable rudeness of a Parisian first night. He did it by a bravura demonstration of Beckett's simplest quality, often obscured by reverence for his profundity: namely, that he is another of the great Irish compulsive talkers. There is a necessary element of the barroom cadger in a role like MacGowran's. Suddenly a bony hand grips the listener's forearm, the bleary eye comes close, the words begin...
...long ago. The present, for Beckett's tramp, seems a stretch of shingle beach, or a corner in Caliban's cell. There is an outrageously shaggy story about the arrangement of 16 pebbles in four pockets, which grows with mad logic from the very gleam with which MacGowran first so casually confides the notion of his "sucking stones." MacGowran has found, too, Beckett's lilting Celtic love of the earth that resonates unexpectedly with Dylan Thomas-except that where Thomas pounded and battered his great brass bell, Beckett touches his once and lets the sound...