This clownish tribute sheds new light on the genius of Beckett
On Beckett/in Screen stream.theatre
Reviewing the British premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Arts Theatre in 1955, Kenneth Tynan cheered: “It is validly new, and hence I declare myself, as the Spanish would say, godotista.” Having spent 75 minutes in the virtual company of Bill Irwin and On Beckett/in Screen, his one-man tribute to 20th-century theatre’s foremost reinventor, recorded at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, I would declare myself Irwinista, too.
The 71-year-old American actor can speak about Beckett, whom he once met, with some authority. He played the logorrhoeic Lucky in the 1988 Lincoln Center revival of Godot, alongside Steve Martin and Robin Williams. In 2009, on Broadway, with Nathan Lane and John Goodman, he played one of the play’s tramp figures, Vladimir. On Beckett/in Screen duly gives us a synopsis of Godot, with a staccato-exact iteration of Lucky’s famous monologue. But although this isn’t a sentimental appraisal, fear not – nor is it a chinstroking affair.
“Mine is an actor’s relationship to this language, but it is also a clown’s relationship,” Irwin explains. He bears an impish resemblance to Frank Sinatra, and has a jaunty way of carrying himself, brandishing a photo of “Mr Beckett” with casual irreverence.
He covers the prose as well as the plays, beginning his rummage through the curios – ignoring well-known items such as Krapp’s Last Tape – in the year of his own birth, 1950, with the 13 short pieces (begun that year) titled Texts for Nothing. “Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t any more, I couldn’t go on,” runs the opening line of Text 1. Parading before a set of footlights, Irwin puts on a show of antic behaviour, his vocal delivery swooping between registers as his face tilts from emptyeyed smiles to passing confusion to sudden animosity. He dips into Beckett’s novels, too, coaxing a micholding stand-up routine from The Unnamable (1958) and, bowler hat on head and hands in pockets, lending a vaudevillian swagger to some patter from Watt (1953): “Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need…” Every minute yields a flash of insight; there are even daring asides at the expense of the (notoriously hands-on) Beckett Estate.
As for Godot, Irwin weighs up how to say Vladimir’s plea to the errand boy who mysteriously appears: “Tell him [Godot] that you saw me.”
The emphasis could fall on that “me”, he suggests, bringing in the play’s biblical references to the “two thieves” (one saved, one damned) and Beckett’s wartime experiences in France, where he and fellow Resistance members continually feared betrayal. “It’s huge,” Irwin concludes, marvelling at Beckett’s play as if inside a cathedral. And it’s no small achievement that, thanks to his enactments and exegesis, we too marvel anew. I could go on. Available until April 18. Info: stream.theatre