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MeIn 2036, actor Samuel West will take the stage to perform Krapp’s Last Tape – an audio version of Samuel Beckett in which an elderly father, leaning over a reel-to-reel tape recorder, listens to his son’s voice. West will be 69, Krapp’s age in the game. And interestingly, the tape he plays will have the sound of him in his youth, recorded in 2006, when he was 39 years old – the age Krapp was on the night of the recording. Two years later another actor, Richard Dormer, will do the same, using the same recording that is locked in a BBC room.
These are the unlikely commissions of the Samuel Beckett Biennale, which promises to provide “performed reading” experimentally in Irish and British pockets over the next 12 years. It is organized by Seán Doran and goes through his cross-border collection Art Over Borders. Events will take place in locations important to Beckett’s life and legacy – from Enniskillen, Belfast and Dublin to Folkestone, Reading and Snodland – following his footsteps across Britain and Ireland.
That the Biennale should mention him on both islands is appropriate. He is best remembered for his obscure and ambiguous plays – Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy Days – Beckett is considered one of Ireland’s best exports, but the question has always been about how Irish Beckett was. After graduating from Trinity College Dublin in 1927, Beckett moved to Paris, never to live in Ireland again. He did not set foot in the country for the last 21 years of his life, and was buried in Paris at Montparnasse Cemetery. When he was in France during the second world war, he wrote to his mother that he chose France in the war over Ireland in peace. He later wrote several of his best-loved novels, including Waiting for Godot and Endgame, in French before translating them into English – prompting Irish novelist Vivian Mercier to say “Samuel Beckett is Irish but not an Irish writer”.
His estrangement from his homeland no doubt grew as part of a Protestant minority ruling in a predominantly Catholic country. Raised in the affluent Dublin suburb of Foxrock, he and his brother were sent to a boarding school in Enniskillen, and studied there during partition, when Enniskillen became part of the newly recognized Northern Ireland. The bitter division may have affected – as he says – “his inability to understand … words like ‘Irish people'”. It is no accident that the Biennale opens in Enniskillen.
But Beckett’s rejection of Ireland was apparently motivated by the country’s theocracy, which he found stumbling. When religious leaders demanded that his contemporaries Seán O’Casey and James Joyce be banned from the Dublin International Play Festival in 1958, Beckett responded by banning the country from staging his plays for two years.
London, meanwhile, could not contain the arch pessimist’s dim pictures of the present angst, and the Royal Court, the National. Theater and the West End’s Arts Theater both staged his plays in the 50s and 60s. There, Beckett was modern before he was Irish: a no-brainer, a writer in the European tradition, a writer of global society rather than a particular country.
However, scholars have pointed out the Irish identity in Beckett’s style and style. His 1956 radio drama All That Fall was undoubtedly set in Ireland. And when the first Gaelic translation and subsequent stage version of Waiting for Godot was commissioned in 1971, it had the playwright’s blessing. It has also been well documented that Beckett’s penchant for writing in French was not a loss of his own language but a desire to “write without style”, thereby achieving the green and the simple.
For most of Beckett’s life, the only Ireland on offer was the one he fled: Catholics, dissenters, anti-secularists and difficult modernists did. The country that banned it John McGahernbirthday book The cursed Darkness would not gather Beckett to his bosom. But from the 1980s onwards, Ireland went backwards. The authority of the Church ended, when the membership of the European project, the prohibition of homosexuality in 1993 and the end of divorce in 1995 also made the self-expression of the world to be foreign, more and more external appearance. As Ireland made peace with doubt, banishment and humor, it made peace with Beckett. But Beckett did not return to Ireland; Ireland went to him.
In 1985, Dublin’s Gate theater staged a trilogy of Beckett’s post-war works under the title I’ll Go On. But it was the following year, when Gate Gate’s artistic director, Michael Colgan, realized that there was not a single Irish delegate at a conference organized to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Beckett’s birth in Paris, that he decided to take action. In 1991, the Gate celebrated Beckett’s production of all 19 of his plays. Anne Clarke, Irish theater producer Landmark Productions, who was working at the Gate at the time, said:
With Beckett having died two years earlier in 1989, there could be no objection to this – as long as the play was prepared by the book. His estate is managed by his nephew Edward. Not even how the stage moves can be changed in the professional production of his works.
“That doesn’t rule out the possibility of doing something different,” said Mr Doran, who established a trusting relationship with Edward when he directed the Biennale, Beckett’s Happy Days Enniskillen festival, from 2012 to 2022.
Doran has managed to rotate a little more regularly, thanks to the experiment, the “laboratory” method of the projects in his festival, which is “reading done” instead of making everything. Although the program is still in progress, two events have already taken place: Krapp’s Last Tape held in Greystones in County Wicklow, in which the actor Malcolm Sinclair performed against an AI-generated game of his young voice, and the Ulster-Scots translation of Waiting for Godot in Derry.
Among the best to come are Samuel West and Richard Dormer’s performances in Krapp’s Last Tape. “Beckett wouldn’t have expected it,” says Doran. Doran remembers West’s initial embarrassment at listening to his first recordings, and says that this knee-jerk reaction was the reason he never had to write again; it will certainly add flavor to the elder Krapp’s shame on his young voice if the player feels the same way.
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It was Doran who sent the tapes, asking the BBC to watch them during the 30-year wait. At first he wanted to draw three people. “I was hedging my bets,” he laughs wryly. It’s a smart way, not because the third actor he arrived was Philip Seymour Hoffman, who refused the request long before his death in 2014. Planning to make thirty years abroad and gambling on the health of those involved.
“Richard is worried about this… He told me he smokes and drinks a lot,” Doran jokes. Although he admits he’s “passed the middle” now, 10 to 12 years on I’m still looking forward to it. Although there are no dates or theaters yet, high-bird tickets have already gone on sale, hundreds of which have been purchased.
In the meantime, you can check out the breathless Not Me, performed by opera soprano Claire Booth, directed by talented former National Theater director Rufus Norris. Norris said: “It’s very rich and very different from what I’ve said before. Not only is this the first time he’s directed a one-man show, it’s his first Beckett. The production takes place at Reading University, where the Beckett archives are held, in September. The next issue will be Love, Sam, a collection of Beckett’s letters to Wexford.
The 2028 Biennale will be international. Doran calls for Waiting for Godot which involves four homeless actors from the countries represented by the cast. Directed by Portuguese filmmaker Marco Martins, it will star French Estragon, Slavic Vladimir, Italian Pozzo and English Lucky.
With his work still performed and celebrated across the country – and now he says, in his Biennale, it is British and Irish at the same time – perhaps Beckett is best remembered not as Mercier’s “Irish but not an Irish writer”, but as something the man himself would have found easier to have: the quintessential Irish European.
Not me at Reading University, 19 to 20 September. Krap’s Last
The tape is at the Théâtre de la Ville,
Paris, 3 to 7 November.
