Ireland’s Playwright

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31061, 17 May 1966, Page 13

Ireland’s Playwright

'Bg A. J. LEVENTHAL. In the "Financial Times”) Last month Samuel Beckett reached his sixtieth year. This comes as a shock, for the public likes to associate youth with avantgardism and anger. Beckett never sounds angry about anything except being born, which for his characters, when they looked back, meant beginning to die. The plain people of any country, in front of a work of art in any medium that runs counter to what they have learned to like, content themselves by believing that Its incomprehensibility is the product of arrogant immaturity a quality comfortably assigned by outraged age to youth.

Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” had its first production in Paris in 1953 and it took a few years before this bleak, undramatic essay in despair, framed in scenes of disturbing humour, made its mark outside the boundary of the Theatre de Babylone. But thereafter the playwright within a period of 10 years became a world figure. It is not then so astonishing that his age in terms of years surprises the thoughtless and the unconverted. Yet there were enough of the faithful to think it worth while to familiarise themselves with his earlier work during that brief span and to be attracted by his experiments in the novel, in cinema, in radio and television as well as on the stage. In fact the work of Samuel Beckett became the concern of the whole cultural world. Every year for some time his name has cropped up as a potential recipient of the Nobel Prize. Critical books, on his work, apart from articles over a wider sphere, continue to be published in England, the United States, and France. Rarely has there been such a rapid rise to fame for one who makes no concessions to popular taste and retreats from all publicity that would bring him into personal contact with readers or viewers. He never explains and never

allows his own voice to be heard, be it on disc or radio. What he has written he has written; it is there to read or run from.

This shyness is not normal for an Irishman. Indeed there has been quite a high percentage of blatant self advertisers among Irish writers. To go back a little, one cannot imagine the predebacle Oscar Wilde fleeing from a society capable of enjoying his verbal quips. Wilde is mentioned because curiously there are points of similarity between him and Beckett. Both were born in Dublin and both were educated in the same school—Portora Royal School. Enniskillen. Portora was for a long time known, not particularly as a nursery for the intellect, but as an establishment that produced brilliant Rugby players. Beckett profited from his school coaching in games to represent his College when he went on to Trinity. A professor at this University said sadly of one of his students who had got into political trouble: “I can’t believe that a man so good at cricket could have become a Communist.” Wilde likewise went to the same university before he proceeded to Magdalen and. though he was said to have shown an aesthetic scorn for any physical exertion, it is reported that at Trinity he knocked a man down for denigrating him as a poet There Is, however, an outstanding factor. It is not unusual for authors to write in two languages, but there cannot be many instances of playwrights following this practice. It is remarkable, therefore, that such was the fact in the case of these two Irishmen, both dramatists with the same “formation.” But the contrast between the jewelled colour of “Salome” and the austere (if one may understate) background of Beckett’s plays calls a halt to further research in this direction. While Beckett is often still dismissed as depressing, there are no longer complaints

that “Godot” or “Endgame” are obscure. The lonescos, the Ardens, the Pinters with their often gratuitous mystifications have cleared the decks for Beckett appreciation.

But the old cry for entertainment that entertains goes on. It must be noted that if not to the same degree as James Joyce, Beckett is nevertheless a humorist Solemn as the theme sounds, the presentation of dying as a relief from living, the latter the greater affliction, shows in the paradox a humorist at work.

It is not always the clownish fun which first annoyed and then entranced “Gbdot” audiences. It is often ghoulish, as in “Endgame” when Hamm's mother, truncated in her dustbin, coyly asks her husband, equally legless in the adjoining bin, whether his knock on her lid meant that he wanted to make love. It is sustained to a zenith of agony in “Happy Days" when Winnie’s chatter about this and that accompanies the serious business of not so motherly earth occupied in sucking her up before our eyes. It is true that Beckett reverts to the same theme again and again. He has carried dying nearer and nearer to the brink of unsciousness. In “Play” he has crossed the bourne into a hell more terrible than Sartre’s, in its recurrent reliving of a domestic triviality. At the same time when his writing is literally out of this world it has been pared to a minimum of text. "Imagination dead, imagine” is said to have occupied originally some 80 pages, but even counting the end papers there are much less than 10 in the published version. Beckett has reached the classical quality which great artificers always seek. He who was once so free with the liberating word now whittles down thought and image until his prose achieves the glacial splendour of a distant iceberg.