When Friends Collaborate

Picture it. Small dark theater, empty of audience. On the tiny stage, a blue spot illuminates the tramp, his gray face upturned like a mole's in the glare, hair and high-top shoes mossy with age. The language is English, the rhythms Irish, the author unmistakable: "Dying is such a long tiresome business I always find." Down front, standing in the third row, the world-famous recluse is silhouetted against the light, angular with shy intellection, gray hair en brosse, the jug ears set low, long left arm and skinny hand reaching up, pointing out how it should go.

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 a Bach sonata for unaccompanied violin, is a music compacted of roughnesses and silences, almost demanding of the audience too the explorations and repetitions of rehearsal in order to flower in performance.

Yet 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.

Cunning Anthology. Words without plot. They are drawn from Malone Dies and Malloy, from Watt, Embers, Krapp's Last Tape and Waiting for Godot, but no seams show. There is an incident with a white horse, another with a girl, both long ago. There is an anecdote about two old men, deep trouble, silent snowy night, also 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 die.

MacGowran's cunning anthology of Beckett is at root the celebration of man's fear and lust for death. "Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringlv. The gravedigger puts on the forceps," or, "Oh I know I too shall cease and be as when I was not yet . . . Often now my murmur falters and dies and I weep for happiness as I go along and for love of this old earth that has carried me so long and whose uncomplainingness will soon be mine."

Yet Beckett, a Stoic in a post-Romantic age, strives to find the words to face death with. The words are essential, yet they are impossible; perhaps even silence is impossible. With wrenching beauty at its climax and end, MacGowran's performance makes that terrible paradox its own only consolation. "You must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me. until they say me, strange pain, strange sin ... Perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story . . . Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."

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