Bend it like Beckett
Samuel Beckett specialist and Game of Thrones bit player Barry McGovern brings the Irish writer’s enigmatic novel Watt to the Auckland stage in a one-man play.
Samuel Beckett specialist and Game of Thrones bit player Barry McGovern brings the Irish writer’s enigmatic novel Watt to the Auckland stage in a one-man play. by Linda Herrick
In August 1942, Irish writer Samuel Beckett was on the run in France, hunted by the Gestapo for his role in a Paris-based Resistance cell codenamed “Gloria”. With many of the group already arrested, Beckett, a Paris resident since 1937, fled on foot with his lover, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, who later became his wife.
They eventually sat out the war in a tiny village called Roussillon in the mountainous south-east, where Beckett, fluent in French and German, continued to serve the Resistance, mainly as a translator.
It had taken Beckett and his partner more than a month to reach Roussillon, seeking shelter along the way in woods and ditches. Once there, Beckett, aged 36, laboured for a farmer for food. At night, he worked on Watt, a tragicomic novel he’d started in Paris featuring a forlorn servant named Watt that was published in 1953.
Waiting for Godot, the play regarded as his masterpiece, was first performed the same year.
Watt was very significant for Beckett. Writing the novel, he later said, was his way of “staying sane” during a time of extreme psychological stress.
“But it’s the most insane thing you ever read,” says Dublin actor Barry McGovern, who has adapted various one-man stagings of Watt since 2010, bringing his latest version to the Auckland Arts Festival in March.
“There are four parts – in order, it’s parts two, one, four and three, or something like that. In part three, suddenly out of the blue, Watt is in this asylum and there is writing backwards and that sort of stuff.
“You can’t be involved with backwards writing if you’re doing a thing on stage.
It’s a 250-page book and I’ve had to cut it down to a one-hour piece of theatre, so a lot of it’s gone. I hope I’ve got the essence there. But one is never sure of everything in Beckett’s world. It’s probably the strangest book he wrote, but it’s also very funny.”
Somewhat reluctantly, McGovern,
71, has built a reputation over the past 50 years as the world’s foremost Beckett specialist, a seed sown when he played Clov in Endgame in 1970 as a student at the University College of Dublin. “I’m just an actor,” he says, “but I do love his work.
I used to get annoyed when I was younger, but there’s no point. I think now I’m very lucky.”
The trick with Watt, he says, is to keep the staging simple. As Beckett writes in the book, Watt is a man who “would literally turn the other cheek, I honestly believe, if he had the energy”.
Watt observes other people to mimic their smiles; he obsesses over trivialities; he rolls into a ditch to rest when he’s tired – men in ditches are a recurring motif in Beckett’s work. But Watt is not a piece of physical theatre.
“It’s mainly narration, sitting and using the lights,” says McGovern. “I think people often overdo the action in oneman shows that they are narrating. If you tell it carefully, that’s the way to do it.”
G“I know it’s very strange but I don’t get too involved in the philosophy. I just tell the story. I wouldn’t worry about it. You’ll go crazy.”
reat poignancy underscores Watt, uplifted in the scene where he’s in the ditch, listening to “the voices, indifferent in quality, of a mixed choir” singing two verses that begin, “Fifty-two point two/eight five seven one four two.”
McGovern, taking his cue from Beckett’s score in the book for the soprano line, has added and arranged alto-tenor and bass lines, recorded by a choir. The singers, says McGovern, were “quite bemused”.
“Oh, they were, but I told them, don’t worry, just do it. There’s a bit at the end of the book that requires a bit of singing as well. It’s just the words, so I wrote the music for that myself.”
McGovern met Beckett in Paris several times during the last three years of the writer’s life – he died in 1989, at the age of 83. (Beckett was specific about his gravestone: “Any colour, so long as it’s grey.”)
Reports that Beckett had no time for small talk are true, McGovern confirms.
“If he had nothing to say, he didn’t say anything. There could be long silences, I’ve heard that from other people, too, but they were comfortable silences. He was quite happy to talk about anything.
“I had this big thing, ‘Oh, don’t ask him about his work’, but he didn’t mind so long as you didn’t say silly things like, ‘Who is Godot?’ I did ask him certain pronunciations, certain things as an actor, and he would be very helpful.”
McGovern’s career, which regularly takes him to the US, took an unexpected turn in 2014 when he was asked to play a “dying farmer” in a series he’d never heard of: Game of Thrones.
The series’ co-creators, DB Weiss and David Benioff, were postgraduate students at Trinity College Dublin who’d done theses on James Joyce and Beckett respectively. Twenty years on, they commissioned a small part crafted for McGovern on the basis of his one-man Beckett show I’ll Go On.
Series four, episode seven, sees McGovern lying in a pool of blood, muttering about “nothing” to Arya Stark before succumbing to a mercy killing.
“It’s a kind of Beckett spoof,” says McGovern. “I’ve never seen [ GoT], apart from that episode, which my son sent me. I did two days of filming on that in County Antrim and thought it was just another gig. But when I took Endgame or Godot or whatever to the US a few years ago and saw the posters hanging from buildings seven storeys high, it seemed such a big deal.”
Where Arya’s “nothing is nothing” is an obvious nod to Waiting for Godot, Watt was the pioneer, with the opening statement, “The only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something.” What – Watt – does that mean?
“I know it’s very strange but I don’t get too involved in the philosophy,” says McGovern. “I just tell the story. I wouldn’t worry about it. You’ll go crazy.”
Of far more interest to him is the story of how Beckett’s book first got published by Paris-based Olympia Press in 1953. “They used to publish a lot of pornography to keep it going and a group of students associated with Olympia after the war heard these rumours of a novel he’d written some years before.
“One night, a figure in a brown raincoat [Beckett] knocked on the door and handed over a parcel and left. It was Watt. The six people staying there spent the night reading it among themselves, falling about the place laughing. And so it was published, in a limited edition of 1125.”
McGovern met Beckett several times in Paris during the last years of the writer’s life. Reports that he had no time for small talk are true, McGovern says.