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Concept

 

“Am I as much as…being seen?”

 – Play

 

"He's not standing over you with his hand over his heart. He's not trying to sell you anything. He's not being sentimental. And thus, there's a lot of space to come to as a viewer. You're invited to bring your own landscape…And that's a very expansive gift to be given."

 

Lisa Dwan, Irish Actress known for her performances of the work of Samuel Beckett

 

In the last two years, our human need to be in community with one another has been forcefully denied. Even with the benefits that technology offers for connection, Zoom and FaceTime fall woefully short without the three-dimensional warmth of human presence, shared space, and physical touch. These four short plays by Samuel Beckett-- Play, Footfalls, Rockaby and Come and Go--were selected to speak to the journey we have all been on recently.  They are arranged to help spark that three-dimensional warmth we long for, as we watch the actors on the stage in front of us journey from the ice of isolation into the bliss of connection.

 

After such prolonged darkness, any source of light and joy are ours to seize. I hope that you will find that delight in the experience of these plays. Due to its extreme austerity and poeticism, Beckett’s work is very different from what is encountered at a typical night at the theatre, a distinction which allows for more elasticity of experience. With Beckett’s rigid stage directions, little room is permitted for alternative directorial interpretation. However, this quality also enables the audience to have more freedom of interpretation. Recognizable slices of life in his plays can puzzle as much as they can thrill. What you bring home with you after seeing these plays might be radically different from the person seated next to you. It is actively and beautifully democratic.

 

In these four plays, you are invited to bring your own perspective to the experience, rather than have the “correct” meaning of the story dictated to you. In his plays, Beckett takes aim right at the center of what it means to be alive in the world, and that ultimately is defined differently by each of us. Through the characters in these four plays, he masterfully explores our need to connect with and be seen by others and what happens when that need is (or isn’t) met. Tonight, you will take in three versions of the same story, watch a mother and daughter attempt to find what has been lost, hear a woman reflect on her life, and witness the connectivity of old friendship. What those stories do to you and mean to you may vary.

 

Beckett’s work cracked theatre wide open and blew dust off the artform from the early 1950s onwards. Theatre that came after can almost always be pointed back to him. His plays influenced countless writers and artists, many among them prolific and influential in their own right: Harold Pinter, Maria Irene Fornes, Caryl Churchill and many more. Similarly, there is a line to be drawn between life before March of 2020 and what has followed. Like the characters in Beckett Bites, the world has come to comprehend the stark difference between isolation and connection, between despair and hope. In these four plays, a passage towards light and community is taken, one that is meant to meaningfully mirror the one we have all moved through in the last two years.

 

 

 

About the Playwright

 

How The Life Of Samuel Beckett Informed The Words He Wrote

 

“I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life

without having left a stain upon the silence”

 

 – Samuel Beckett

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Samuel Beckett is a rare playwright in that his name is often recognized outside the field of theatre. Even those who cannot immediately identify him by name might know the 1953 play which first gave him widespread fame: Waiting for Godot. While understanding what Beckett’s life entailed may not lead to a conclusive explanation of his work, it can illuminate what circumstances might have made him choose to leave “a stain on the silence.”

 

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in the suburbs of Dublin on April 13, 1906 into a solidly middle class family. His mother, May Beckett, was a devoted Protestant and rigid disciplinarian. His father, Bill Beckett, preferred the enlightenment of the outdoors, and instilled a love of nature into his son through long walks in the hills of Dublin and Wicklow. The sensory landscapes of the Dublin countryside and coastline – lighthouses, islands, the scents and sounds of the sea – remained in Beckett’s imagination and are pervasive in his work. His family was a musical one, and raised Beckett to play and to appreciate music, an understanding that would permeate his plays. These plays employ many musical elements such as repetition, dynamics and tempo.

 

While in adulthood, Beckett would claim France as his home country, his formative years as an Irishman cannot be ignored. Beckett came of age during a time of tremendous tension and revolution. As part of the United Kingdom, Ireland entered World War I in 1914, which occurred in tandem with a major shift in national political support, from the Irish Parliamentary Party to the republican Sinn Féin movement and the rise of the Irish Free State. The Easter Rising of April 1916, an armed insurrection against British government and oppressive British rule, left hundreds dead and thousands imprisoned. In the aftermath, Beckett's father took young Sam and his brother to see Dublin in flames, an image that would remain with Beckett for the rest of his life. It would not be the last time in his life that he would witness violence and war.

 

Beckett received a first-rate education and was an exemplary student. He attended primary school at Earlsfort House, a deliberately multi-denominational school which emphasized religious and racial tolerance, a pedagogy that helped to shape Beckett’s intolerance for prejudice. He enrolled at Trinity College in Dublin, where he studied French and Italian languages. Upon graduation, Beckett received a coveted teaching position at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. It was there that he would begin to meet characters who would influence his life and career, including poet Tom McGreevy and author James Joyce. Following his post in Paris, Beckett returned to Trinity College in Dublin as a lecturer. However, he quickly became disillusioned with teaching, and in 1930 made the decision to forgo the stability of a career in academia and pursue his ambition as a writer.

 

The 1930s were hard years for Beckett, as he struggled to establish stability in his personal and professional life. The sudden death of his father in 1933 affected him profoundly. Beckett began to suffer from debilitating anxiety, depression, and panic attacks. He sought out psychotherapy, and his discoveries through this treatment sparked an interest in the workings of the mind, the effects of isolation, and the recognition of mortality. In 1938, Beckett was stabbed in the chest by a small-time pimp in the middle of the night for seemingly no reason, and it narrowly missed his heart. He survived, but it would not be long before the threat of danger would find him.

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Beckett's path, and the world's, was interrupted by the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of World War II. As an Irishman, Beckett had the choice to remain neutral; instead, he became actively involved with the French Resistance and translated information obtained by French spies into English to be smuggled into England. After the arrest of several of Beckett's friends by German authorities, he fled a small village, Roussillion, with Suzanne Decheveaux-Dumesnil, his then-girlfriend. Throughout his life, he referred to his work with the Resistance as “boy scout stuff.”

 

After the war ended, Beckett experienced an epiphany about his purpose as his writer. He changed the focus in his work from an external observation of human life to an examination of the self. This kicked off what he referred to as a “frenzy of writing.” In the post-war years, Beckett wrote three novels: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. However, it was his play Waiting for Godot that thrust Beckett into the spotlight and would change his life forever. The play made its world premiere (as En attendant Godot) in Paris on January 5, 1953. Overnight, Beckett came to international acclaim at the age of 42. The success of this singular work opened a new world of opportunity for Beckett.

 

Following Waiting for Godot, Beckett wrote and produced three full-length plays for the stage: Fin de Partie (Endgame), Happy Days, and Krapp's Last Tape. As he moved forward in his work, his plays became shorter and sparser, but their meaning became richer and more complex. The four plays that Beckett Bites includes - Play, Footfalls, Rockaby and Come and Go - are part of a later body of work marked by an even greater shift towards the examination of the internal workings of the mind and Beckett's development as a theatre practitioner. Since Beckett was a writer of literature first, his exposure to the practical and technical elements in theatre had an indelible influence on his plays. As he gained a greater understanding of the mechanisms of theatre – specifically, the power of specific lighting, costumes and sound – he directly applied it to his work.

 

Beckett maintained a close circle of treasured and trusted collaborators and friends in his life, such as actors Jack MacGowran, Roger Blin and Billie Whitelaw, and director Alan Schneider, with whom he would work for throughout his career. While he married Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumnesil, their relationship was not exclusive. In 1957, Beckett would meet and begin an affair with translator and writer Barbara Bray, and the two maintained a close intimate and intellectual relationship until the end of Beckett’s life. While Beckett was not keen to imply autobiographical content in his plays, it is widely inferred that the love triangle in Play is an exception.

 

In the 1960s and 1970s, Beckett experienced the loss of beloved friends, family members and colleagues. He faced a multitude of health issues himself, but always pressed on and never abandoned his work as a writer. In the late 1980s, Beckett’s health began to decline significantly. In 1988, he was discovered unconscious in his kitchen, believed to have had a stroke. After he regained his mobility and speech, he wrote his final work, a poem titled Comment Dire (What is the Word.) He completed it in the rest home where he would spend the final year of his life. He died of respiratory failure on December 22nd 1989, less than six months after the death of his wife , and was buried beside her in Paris.

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Beckett's legacy is immeasurable and enduring. There is a bottomless trove of scholarship dedicated to Beckett, as well as an enormous quantity of records associated with his work and life. His letters and correspondence to colleagues and friends are all extant. Manuscripts of his plays and novels are available for those to hold in hand. Ever the writer, he kept diaries and theatrical notebooks that provide illuminative clues and content for his process.

 

Beckett’s work pokes at the most tender and vulnerable aspects of human existence, often avoided in the broad light of day. However, in the dark of the theatre, artists and audiences might experience a deeper, more expansive (dare I say hopeful?) perspective of Beckett's unique theatrical storytelling.