Beckett with Eva-Katharina Schultz, 1971.
Eva-Katharina Schultz (Winnie) [Eva-Katharina Schultz (1922-). German stage and film actress. A regular member of the SchillerTheater repertory company. She performed Winnie in Beckett’s production of Glückliche Tage. Interview with JK.] I was already cast in the part when Beckett arrived, to his great surprise because I looked young. But I said to him, ‘With my make-up and my wig and everything it will be OK’. It was a big problem because I was in seven [actually five] productions at the same time … Playing in the evening, almost every evening, and big parts. It was very difficult to cope with learning the lines as well as … cope with the lines and the props in Happy Days, at the same time. Beckett said, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry, it’s not necessary to rehearse every day’ and I didn’t. I was so busy with thinking about my performances in the evening, and apart from not having time and being too busy playing elsewhere, I didn’t feel that I deserved it.
Working with Beckett was not difficult because all the time he was very patient and he said from the very beginning, ‘Don’t ask me for any meaning in the thing; it just is what it is’.
I was very much in despair very soon with the whole thing and he said, ‘OK, I’ll read it for you.’ He had his notebooks … But he was the best Winnie he ever had. When he was reading it, it was very flat, he didn’t have any modulations. Yet it was so lively in a way in which I would have liked to have been capable of. During the first night I had the feeling that I had played it in a trance and it just happened. When I came back to my dressing-room afterwards, I broke down in tears because I thought it was not enough.
With colleagues at the Schiller there was a family feeling. My dominating remembrance is that all women, including myself, in that production and around us at that time had the feeling that they had to shelter him, to embrace him; they were full of love towards him. As a human being, not necessarily as a man. He was so patient and on his part there was a sort of love vibrating towards the stage, towards the actors.
Warten auf Godot (Waiting for Godot)
Produced at the Schiller-Theater’s main stage, Berlin, March 1975, directed by Beckett.
Horst Bollmann (Estragon) Beckett was mostly on stage; he had a chair on stage, sitting very close to the actors, up against them and looking at their mouths, you know, when they were speaking … with a book. It was difficult with the English and German but we could very much rely on Tophoven’s translation, of course, and once there were difficulties, let us say in the rhythm or something, he would change the translation. I remember I did not turn up to rehearsal once and Sam played the part of Estragon, word by word on stage, with all the movements and so on, and he was so shy with it, looking down at the ground all the time, you know, like a boy and looking up at Stefan [Wigger, who played Vladimir] to see what he thought of his acting.
Despite Beckett’s very precise directions, there is still room for invention. Within a given situation the actor has to find a way to invent. Beckett would reinforce things, would correct things. But with him I never felt restricted, I felt free. He made you feel free in that his personality was so rich, so fully developed. He could communicate with you in a very simple way, so that you never had a complex about his being a genius and you being just anybody. I consider that my encounter with Beckett is reward enough, in itself, for having been an actor all my life.
Walter Asmus (assistant director) [Walter Asmus. Distinguished German theater director and close friend of Samuel Beckett. He worked with him on many occasions, first as assistant director on the 1975 Schiller-Theater Warten auf Godot. He later directed the play again several times for the Gate Theatre, Dublin. He is Professor of Theatre Studies in Hamburg.] In the beginning I spoke exclusively with Beckett in German. It was only later on, I think, when I went to Paris to see him, for example, that I started to speak in English with him. Certain people were quite overawed by him, you know, and I was quite shy and withdrawn. Being with the actors was different and being an assistant meant that I was not intruding. I could just be in the background and watch and listen and be there if needed. That, I think, was part of my success in doing this job. The actors were the important people for me, and for the director, of course. What can’t be over-stressed was that there was an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding, with everybody trying to make it a fine production.
Walter Asmus
Beckett knew the play by heart. He knew it line by line and he used, for example, to block it out himself and instead of explaining it, he used to show it - ‘you go to here; then you say this sentence, this word; then you go on’ - and so on and so forth. It would normally take him one or two years to prepare for it. That means he had to learn it, really, in German, by heart. He had to sit down and learn the lines.
Of course he was a perfectionist. He was always dissatisfied and would say, ‘It’s still a long way …’, because he was a perfectionist. He saw it as it should be, all in his mind, so clearly, and, because he did so, it was natural that at times he was uptight, impatient, and wondered whether he would ever get where he wanted to go. When he said, ‘It’s still a long way’ it soon became a joke. He would say, ‘Yes, it’s very good’ and someone would say, ‘But it’s still a long way, Sam, isn’t it?’ I exaggerate a little, perhaps, but that was the spirit of the thing. At times Sam tended to be - with the actors I’m not sure, but certainly with himself and with the whole situation, in his perfectionist way - an impatient man. It’s normal to have an actor struggling with lines. It’s a very painful, annoying process at times for a director. But, on the other hand, it’s hell to learn these lines. And even the dialogue in Godot, you know, the little bits, the musical echoes, the little variations - the lines all have a similarity, but there’s a little twist, a little difference.
At the beginning the actors are insecure with the words. Then it gets a little better, but they still need the prompter’s help. Sam isn’t interested in all that. Sam expects a great deal. He wants them to be word-perfect immediately and nobody can do that. But when they are word-perfect, then, at first, they try to show that they are wordperfect and that means that they just say the words. They concentrate on that and for whole stretches of time it becomes mechanical. So, it would happen, every now and again, that we would be sitting there listening to this beautiful, witty exchange, but nobody would laugh, nobody was amused because what they were doing was mechanical. It didn’t have any heart. For example, the boot business, at the beginning, with one of the tramps, with his finger feeling inside it, bending down; it’s a very fast thing, and when it was mechanical, it was not funny at all. But when they had finished working on it, it was. It was such an artistic thing. And in the end Sam was sitting there, as curious as a schoolboy, his eyes twinkling, and he’d say, ‘That’s it, that’s it.’ Everybody felt it. And he just stayed there like a spectator.
Underlying tensions are always there, in any production. It is the normal thing. So it was nothing specific to this Schiller production. Beckett had this feeling all the time: ‘It is not enough’. It’s the ‘not enough’ syndrome! I remember him sitting there and I was taking notes and he said, ‘I know it so well’ and he complained. But one needs that in this world, this striving to get there and if somebody says, ‘Oh you will’, you are happier. You need somebody to comfort you. And he always did. You always had to comfort him. He said all the time, ‘I want to stop doing theatre.’ On various occasions, he’s said, ‘I can’t do it, Walter.’ He blamed himself. Later, at the Riverside [the Riverside Studios in London],* where he was not so well prepared, it was exactly the same. He was sitting next to me during rehearsal, with people there. And he was sitting silently and I felt certain vibrations and I said, ‘Sam, it will be OK. It’s quite good Sam. It’s coming, you know’, just comforting him because I knew what was going on in his mind. He turned to me and his eyes glittered as he said, ‘Walter, I bate this play!’ Just like that. I was scared. He looked at me so wildly. But that was just the way
he worked.
Let there be no misunderstanding. That had nothing to do with the Schiller, or with the actors. That was Sam Beckett’s own way of getting there, and in that he was indispensable. I know so well from my own experience of the theatre that all theatre people have this as well. But at times he seemed almost to have a complex about not being a trained theatre director. He felt not in command because he was not a theatre man, because he thought there was a deficiency in him. He thought theatre people could do it in a better way because they knew how actors function. But basically they can’t, or hardly any can. You always have to go this same cruel way.
Damals (That Time)
Produced at the Schiller-Theater, Berlin, October 1977, directed by Samuel Beckett.
Klaus Herm(actor) Having all the details, the information, imagining stories about these simple sentences and then, little by little, peeling it away and reducing, this seems to me an important way of working. But you can’t reduce right at the beginning. Rehearsals were rather short, at the utmost, three and a half hours, but with pauses. In the pauses there was always a lot of smoking. It was like working in a mathematical or logarithmic way but all the same we never had the feeling of being corseted. Beckett always asked, ‘Would you agree with that? Would you be able to do that?’ He never said, ‘You must do this’ or ‘You must do that.’
Klaus Herm in That Time, 1977.
Spiel (Play) and Kommen und Gehen (Come and Go)
Spiel was produced at the Schiller-Theater, Berlin, October 1978, directed by Samuel Beckett, and Kommen und Geben was directed by Walter Asmus (same location and date).
Walter Asmus (director) Beckett gave me more or less his Regie-buch of Come and Go, something like that, and we talked about it and I made little changes in the text, I think. We rehearsed separately. He rehearsed Play in the morning and then afterwards I rehearsed Come and Go. I rehearsed Come and Go, of course, in my own way. He came to a few of my rehearsals. We had made plans to have a fan on the stage for the dresses in Come and Go to move in the wind; things like that. He suggested that at a certain point. I don’t know whether it was his idea then or whether he had had it before, but in the end we dropped that for technical reasons. I remember one thing which was quite enlightening for me and very typical. We were experimenting with the three actresses, because actors always want to know ‘Where do I come from? Why am I here? What is my intention? What am I going to do?’ - big ‘W’ questions which are important in acting, and the actors’ situation. So we had fantasies about these three ladies coming to meet after shopping, for example, to give them some social context. So, as they were sitting on the bench, we gave them plastic carrier bags, and we did the normal discussion. Then Sam turned up at the rehearsal. I don’t think we had arranged it; he was just there. It was dark in the room with only the light of the stage. Sam was standing there in his parka and it was cold and he was watching and getting used to the light and peering around, having a close look at everything, at every detail and then he saw the plastic bags at the foot of the bench. He looked at the bags. Then he looked down at the ground. He had this way of looking, when he got tense and uptight and he looked at the bags again and you really could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Finally I said, ‘Oh Sam, don’t worry, don’t worry, we’ll take it all away. It’s just for ourselves, you know. We need this to help us do this.’ And he said, ‘Yes, Walter, yes Walter, I trust you.’
THE SAN QUENTIN DRAMA WORKSHOP
Rick Cluchey
Rick Cluchey (1935-), seen here in Krapp’s Last Tape, 1977. Founder and animator of the San Quentin Drama Workshop. Formerly an inmate for many years at San Quentin prison before being released on parole and receiving a pardon. Worked with Samuel Beckett as an assistant in Berlin, he then played the roles of Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape, Hamm in Endgame and Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, all directed in Berlin and London by Beckett. This is a revised version of an essay in Samuel Beckett: Krapp’s Last Tape. Theatre Workbook I, reprinted by kind permission of the publishers and Rick Cluchey.
I first began to act in Beckett’s plays in 1961 while serving a life sentence at San Quentin in California. Although many other of my fellow convicts had a similar interest, as early as 1958, we were all, none the less, required to be patient and wait until the Warden of that day decided to allow us the special sanction of an experimental workshop, where such plays might be performed. So, in 1961, with the advent of our own small theatre, we began to produce a Beckett trilogy, as the first works to emerge from this little workshop.
Thus our first effort was Waiting for Godot, then Endgame and, lastly, Krapp’s Last Tape. In all we gave no less than seven productions of Beckett’s circle of plays during a three-year period. All of the plays were acted and directed by convicts for a convict audience. And so every weekend in our little theatre at San Quentin, it was standing room only for imprisoned Americans; and rightly so, because if, as Beckett has stated, his plays are all closed systems, then so too, are prisons. I, personally, can say that San Quentin is a closed system, a very tightly closed system!
If the critics are right when they proclaim that all of Beckett’s characters are drawn from his early life in Dublin - that is, the streets, bogs, ditches, dumps and madhouses - then I can only add that the most informed, knowledgeable and qualified people to portray Beckett’s ‘characters’ would be the inmates of any prison! For here more than any other place in the world, reside the true Beckett people: the cast-offs and the loonies, the poets of the streets, and all of the ‘bleeding meat’ of the entire system; the real folk of our modern wasteland.
And may I say that it was of special interest to us at the time, that while all over the world audiences were puzzled and fascinated, the critics astounded by the plays of Beckett, we, the inmates of San Quentin, in fact found the situation perfectly normal. Yes, and we did understand about waiting, about waiting for nothing! Our ‘affinity’ with the works of Beckett has perplexed many critics, but never our audiences.
During my work with the Beckett plays at San Quentin the first role was that of Vladimir in Godot. I was then, and am now, struck with the simple situation of a man waiting in ‘fear and trembling’. Certainly that was my own situation at the time in San Quentin prison. Yet too, I was reading Kierkegaard and we knew the old philosopher’s idea of a God beyond reason. All I really knew for sure was that Waiting for Godot is like waiting for God. And, needless to say, in places like San Quentin, the possibilities of Him making an appearance seemed highly unlikely. In short I had no real idea who Godot might really be. However, it was never a problem, I just felt very close to the character of Vladimir and that too seemed natural and harmonious. Between 1961 and 1963, two productions of Godot were given and in both I was to play Vladimir.
Yes, and in my own mind I wondered about the man who could create these plays which seemed so much about my own life. I was being driven mad by my own calendar maker, the Warden and the State of California. So of necessity I took up the mask of Beckett’s people: Watt and Murphy, Molloy and Malone and the Unnamable. In [Beckett’s] works I was to feel secure with the characters, perhaps, in many ways because they were so like the people of San Quentin: extensions of disconnection, decay and uncertainty. ‘Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into.’ Well in the end it was Beckett and not the Warden, who gave me my freedom, a freedom of mind if not of body. Yet the passing of time, the playing of games and the telling of stories was to continue.
So, in mid-1963, I decided to re-stage Krapp’s Last Tape. I had previously directed a production and one of my associates had directed one; so now I felt compelled to try acting Krapp. It was to be our third production in two years. San Quentin never had it so good, all that stroking of bananas before sex-hungry convicts, a Freudian tease. If Krapp, as I performed him at San Quentin, is a frustrated man, so was every convict in our audience. If Krapp seemed to reject his burden of past misery as being too heavy, so had these poor, bitter convicts! ‘All the dead vo
ices’, a line from Godot, seems to speak of the situation Krapp is in. He is trying to redeem time, the lost time, his past time; and so were the convicts. Krapp wants to recall a girl in a punt. And the convicts’ reality as audiences has never been as close to that same desire. The symbols were clear: those bananas, the girl in the punt, the lost time, the light and the dark, and the need to relive the past somehow. At San Quentin, my Krapp was in a trap; but then so was the audience.
The truth is I never had the slightest notion I would ever meet Samuel Beckett, Yet I knew the man or felt that I did. When eventually I was to realize my parole, I decided to come to Europe and, quite by chance, met Beckett in Paris. It was the beginning of a long and lasting friendship; one which in due course would bring me into greater artistic contact with Beckett the director. The road from San Quentin to Paris was a long hard one for me, but the rewards have never been more worthwhile.
Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Page 19