Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett

by James Knowlson

  [When he was directing in a regular theatre,] Beckett loved to go on little adventures in the theatre, especially up in the catwalks and in the basement and things: he was fascinated I think because he was an author, not a craftsman and a theatre person. But he was absolutely enamoured over the technical things.

  [Thorpe then speaks of his experiences with Beckett directing the San Quentin Group in Endgame at the Riverside Studios in London in May 1980.] He was actually moving his hand up and down to the beat of the poetry. It was a symphony he was conducting. It was all rhythm and music and he said to us that because we had done Godot: ‘Now I am going to fill my silences with sounds’ and ‘For every silence there will be sounds, be they the shuffling of feet, steps, the dropping of things.’ Beckett would walk the steps for you, and then check, just because he was a bit shorter, no more than an inch shorter, but his steps were shorter than mine, and then we would measure steps. Incredibly mathematical: now he’s hitting things that I never thought of as a young craft actor before. He was making a ballet out of it, and he said, ‘If you follow the mathematics, if you follow the sounds, if you follow the repetition of sounds, if you then put the repetition of sounds with your feet to the repetition of sounds that you make, then put them all together, you are then going to have’ - and he didn’t use the term ‘building blocks’ but I do - ‘you will have building blocks of sounds that surround the words.’

  At an early rehearsal, Alan [Mandell, playing the part of Nagg] comes in; Teri [who was to play Nell] is late. So Beckett said ‘I’ll play Nell.’ So, there he sat next to Alan and, again, it was almost the Clov character. He put his head to the left shoulder, and sat there, and put his hands up, as though they were on the edge of the bin, and he said: ‘Nell is a whisper of life. Just a whisper of life.’ And so he sat there, and both he and Alan mimed that they had their hands on the edge of the barrel, and Sam did not move. He went through this whole thing. I was standing there, with my hands on the top of my head, watching Alan and Sam, because Sam was Nell. Put a wig on him, and he would have driven … The two of them combined were the best, the best. Oh boy, it was just … it was frighteningly beautiful, and both of them without a script. Extraordinary. Sam lisped a little bit, so he had the little ‘yeth’ [Nell’s repeated ‘yes’], and it sounded like ‘y-e-t-h’. And he had this lilting whisper about him, just being on the brink of life and death.

  I caught on very easily and very quickly over the fact that there are musical tones and canters to what we’re doing in this. You don’t have to play-act, but you do have to find it from the inside. And he kept on saying, ‘Tone, tone, tone, we have to hit the right tone’. And we also learnt about mirroring, fore-shadowing, re-shadowing, and doing mirror-images of what we had done earlier. He just said, ‘we want a mirror-image of what you had done earlier. We want you in the same place, the exact same position, the exact same amount of time.’ I use the term ‘ghosting’, that is if something happens and Clov has to take five steps, and Hamm is sitting there, then we try to do the exact same thing, not once, but two and three times during the course of the play.

  There were all of these people who did it before us. We did it, when, quote, ‘Sam was an old man’, and things had changed, and his philosophy towards the theatre, his way of looking at the productions had changed, etc., etc. And to this day, too, recognition will never be there because of the stigma of the San Quentin Drama Workshop. We had done it after the initial performances had been done years ago, in the ‘fifties and the ‘sixties, and we will - and I will take this to my grave - we will always be considered third-class citizens because it was … Sam in his ageing years had decided to help this group, because of love … And because of love, we were hated.

  * Joan Plowright writes about George Devine’s proposals for her to play the role of Winnie and the obstacle of her unexpected pregnancy in her autobiography, And That’s Not All. The Memoirs of Joan Plowright, London, Orion Books, 2001, pp. 103–4.

  * Billie Whitelaw’s account of working with Beckett on the world première of Footfalls is borrowed from James Knowlson’s unscripted interview with her recorded on 1 February 1977 for television by David Clarke and the University of London Audio-Visual Centre. The interview was first printed in the Journal of Beckett Studies, Summer 1978, no. 3, pp. 85-90.

  * Duncan Scott’s memories of Happy Days are published for the first time with the agreement of his widow, Bernadette Scott.

  * The Schlossparktheater: built in 1804 as the stables and garden-hall of the neighbouring palace, ‘Guthaus Steglitz’. In 1920-1 converted into a theatre. From 1935 to 1945 it was used as a cinema. Reconstructed in 1945 after the war and reopened on 3 November 1945. From 1950, it was operated by the city of Berlin, from 1951 as part of the ‘Staatliche Schauspielbühnen Berlin’ and used as the ‘Kleines Haus’ [the small house] of the Schiller-Theater.

  * Honoré de Balzac’s Mercadet (also known as Le Faiseur), produced in 1848 and published in 1851, had a character named Monsieur Godeau, who was Mercadet’s absent one-time business partner.

  * Bernhard Minetti (1905-58), a leading German actor of stage and screen but with whom Beckett (as well as Mendel) had some problems.

  * The play was indeed put on again at the Schiller-Theater in 1975, this time directed by Beckett, with Horst Bollmann (Estragon), Stefan Wigger (Vladimir), Klaus Herm (Lucky) and Carl Raddatz (Pozzo).

  * This occurred when he assisted Walter Asmus with the San Quentin Drama Workshop production of Waiting for Godot in London in 1984.

  * The changes made by Beckett are recorded in The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, vol. II, Endgame, ed. S. E. Gontarski, London, Faber and Faber, and New York, Grove Atlantic, 1992.

  7

  Memories of Beckett

  in London and Berlin

  Beckett in Berlin.

  Biography

  From the late 1950s Beckett used to come over to London fairly regularly to attend rehearsals of his plays, especially when they were being put on for the very first time. In Berlin, as we saw earlier, he started to direct his own productions at the Schiller-Theater from 1967 onwards. Later in the 1970s he also directed a few plays at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in addition to advising the directors, Anthony Page or Donald McWhinnie, on others. In London, with so many friends and family eager to see him, his social life often became incredibly hectic. In Berlin, where he stayed quietly at the Akademie der Künste, it was still busy but less pressured.

  One of his characteristics was to take a keen interest in the technical side of a production and he became friendly with some of the crew, often going for drinks with them after rehearsals. One technician involved in lighting the plays at the Royal Court Theatre was Duncan Scott, who set down his memories of Beckett in London. For Berlin, we have assembled a collage of the memories of some of those who spent time with him there.

  London

  Duncan Scott

  Duncan Scott (1940-2000). Lighting engineer at the Royal Court Theatre, London. He became very friendly with Beckett during the productions at the Court of Footfalls, Endgame and Play (1976) and Happy Days (1979). He was the board operator for the lights on Not I

  (1973) and operated the interrogating light in Play.

  Duncan Scott* After a rehearsal of Endgame with the San Quentin Drama Workshop at Riverside Studios, Sam is asked, why only two yawns in this production, whereas previously there were three? He shrugs: it is not important. La literata however, insists that an explanation is crucial to her understanding. (Of what?) With his usual courtesy, Sam offers her one. Then he confides to me, sotto voce, ‘Maybe it was for fear of inducing another in the audience.’

  But [Scott adds later] it is easy to scoff at the interest shown in the question of the yawns in Endgame, but it would be a mistake to do so. Beckett always had a good reason for the changes he made, however slight. In the case of the yawns, I think that he had indeed seen that, in performance, three could produce tedium, while two were sufficient to express
it. His aside was not then entirely a joke. His attention to every detail of a performance is well attested to: lighting, sound, movement, the text in all its aspects, props and scenery, make-up, eye movements, breathing and silences. Whatever else I may not have listed too. Nothing was left to chance, the whim of the moment, or the discretion of the performer. Though this is not to say that suggestions from the performers, or anyone else, did not receive his consideration: they did, and he welcomed them. That this method of working produced creative masterpieces, no one can deny.

  We spoke of Schonberg, Berg, Bartok and Wagner. He said he did not like Wagner in general, only Tristan und Isolde. When I suggested that Parsifal was Wagner’s definitive statement, he showed interest, but said he didn’t know the music. He had been very upset by Patrice Chéreau’s design for Lulu in Paris. He said he couldn’t understand how Boulez could ‘let somebody fuck such an opera about’ except that Boulez and Chéreau were ‘cronies’. A water-closet on the set particularly upset him. He called it a ‘Lulu loo’.

  Music was a constant topic in our conversations. He once said that if he had been unable to be a writer, then he would have become a composer: if not a composer, then nothing. And there is no doubt that he treated words musically when composing his sentences, and directed his plays as if they were musical compositions. I witnessed a striking confirmation of this during the San Quentin Drama Workshop rehearsals at the Riverside Studios. The rehearsals were in an advanced state and were proceeding with little or no interruption from Beckett, who was standing in the auditorium, half-turned towards the prompt side, checking the speed of delivery, the timing, the duration of the pauses, and so on. As he did this, he mimed the words, and during silences, he could be seen measuring beats. What was remarkable, was that, although the actors could only see the back of Beckett’s head, and he did not once look at the stage, the synchronization of the words and Sam’s lip movements was so precise, there was no perceptible difference between them.

  I think it is worth noting that, at Riverside, Beckett was reproducing the performance he had wrested from Patrick Magee [who played Hamm] at the Royal Court a few years earlier, though Beckett’s actors were not automata working to a rigid, prearranged programme. As a fine conductor enables his orchestra to realize its full potential, so Beckett led the interpreters of his scripts to ever more masterly expressions of his intent.

  He suffers from excruciatingly painful cramp in the legs at night. He had to get up and stomp around the room. Even so, the circulation takes a long time to return. He sighs wryly: ‘Incontinence! Tunnel vision! Dodgy lung! If I had control of my body, I’d throw it out of the window.’

  ‘Look at the world, then look at my trousers!’ [from Nagg’s ‘the tailor and his pair of trousers’ story from Endgame.] We talked of Giscard d’Estaing’s ‘little problem’ with the Emperor Bokassa [i.e. gifts from Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the military ruler of the Central African Republic from 1966 to 1979, to d’Estaing] and I told him about the French-made documentary, Amin Speaking. From this we went on to the state of the world in general and he said he would have preferred to have lived in the eighteenth century. I muttered something about ‘distance lending enchantment’ and, by way of apology, quoted a journalist in The Guardian, who argued that young people watching television and reading newspapers ‘might get the impression that the world was a violent place’. ‘Whereas …!’ said Sam, with a smile.

  Would he mind telling me, I asked, where he found those arcane words he used, such as ‘cang’? Of course not. He got them from his extensive reading, and when he came across a word that appealed to him particularly he would jot it down in a notebook. ‘To use such words in one’s writing is a fault of youth’, he said. ‘Nowadays I strive for the complete opposite.’

  ‘Ah, yes!’ I replied. ‘Look what you have achieved with “ping”.'

  ‘From “cang” to “ping”,' he said.

  ‘It’s like the game where you have to change one word into another by successive alterations of one letter, each time making a new word. “Cang” to “ping” in three throws.’

  ‘Throes!’ he cried. ‘There’s another good word.’

  He wondered if I had ever detected the influence of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy in his own works.

  A quotation from Mallarmé he liked to cite: ‘Le vide papier que la blancheur défend’ [from Mallarmé’s poem ‘Brise marine’]. ‘It is that “blancheur” that I wish to attack. I can’t wait to get back to the blank paper.’

  Foolishly, I thought it would be an abuse of his friendship to ask about his work, but once I asked him if, while writing Watt [written ‘for company’ in the village of Roussillon d’Apt, in the South of France, after fleeing from the Gestapo] he had made himself laugh. He at once became extremely animated and with that hair-sticking-on-end look, and ultra-penetrating gaze, confessed that sometimes he had. He was keen to know which parts of it I had found particularly funny and hardly allowed me to finish describing the effect on me of the complex feeding arrangements of the famished dog before crying, ‘Yes, but what about the family that owned the dog?’ and then it was: ‘What about this bit?’ ‘What about that bit?’ with such enthusiasm that I wished I had asked him before.

  [A propos of his prose text Company] ‘It begins with a happy sentence’ - pause for twinkling smile - ‘Birth was the death of me.’* How’s that for a beginning! The situation is a man, lying in a room, in the dark, he has no past and no future, and there is a voice suggesting various pasts to him. One of the questions is, is it his own voice? Or that of someone else? If it is that of someone else, is he in the same room or not? And so on. Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that. Very complicated. ‘I wrote about ten thousand words, then gave it up. It became bad company. I got out of me depth. Maybe I’ll go back to it sometime. I can’t finish anything these days. Perhaps I’ll send it to the publishers unfinished, as I have with all the other stuff.’

  [On speechlessness] A résumé of what Sam said: The ideas of speech arising from speechlessness and old age, or the imminence of death providing a kind of mental clarity whereby the definitive speech could be made at last, were inextricably intertwined. The child on the threshold of speech, i.e. leaving his state of literal speechlessness for another state of figurative speechlessness, was compared to the man in his second childhood, i.e. himself, at the boundary he must pass beyond to gain the real escape from speechlessness before dying - that is to say, entering an eternal state of total speechlessness.

  He fervently disagreed with Wittgenstein: ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.’ [When you can say nothing, then you must stay silent.] ‘That’s the whole point,’ he said, ‘We must speak about it.’ He told me that one evening he had had dinner with Jocelyn [Herbert], and on the following day learnt from the newspaper that, on the day prior to their engagement, Jocelyn’s sister had been found drowned in the Thames. Not once had Jocelyn made reference to this tragedy, and when he later questioned her about this omission, she replied simply: ‘What was there to say?’

  All examples of definitive statements were taken from music. The ‘Vier letzte Lieder’ of Richard Strauss, for instance. In some cases, he said, the imminence of death without the concomitant of dying was quite sufficient to produce it, as witness Schubert, who died at the age of thirty-two.

  Once, during the rehearsal period of Happy Days, Sam asked me if there were somewhere we could go for a drink after the rehearsal at three o’clock. I suggested that we go to The Lindsay Club in Kensington Church Street, of which I was a member. The club was managed and staffed by three elderly ladies, one of whom had extensive experience working in films as an extra. Many of its members were also from the theatrical profession. Guests were required by law to sign the visitors’ book, but did not have to provide proof of identity. It was not until the receptionist handed Sam the massively heavy book to sign that I realized that I had forgotten to suggest he adopt a pseudonym. Sam didn’t hesitate howev
er, but, unable to hold the register high enough to see properly, wrote at arm’s length, in large, capital letters: SAMUEL BECKETT. The lady studied the signature closely, then, impassively, waved us inside.

  Once downstairs, Sam took a seat while I went to the bar to order the drinks. It was the film extra’s turn of duty behind the bar. She turned a deaf ear to my request. She stared at me, and then she stared at Sam. Her stare went to and fro, increasing in intensity and lingering longer and longer on Sam. Finally she snapped: ‘Which one of you is the member?’

  When we were leaving Sam said warmly, ‘I like this place. Can we come here again?’

  BERLIN

  Ruby Cohn He stayed in Berlin in a two-storey room at the Akademie der Künste with the living area downstairs and bedroom and bath upstairs. It was very spartan - which is what he liked. There was a big writing table in front of a bay window and the bay window looked out on the woods, which he loved. He had binoculars and he would look at squirrels and birds. There was also a small end-table at the side of a sofa. In the winter it was incredibly cold there. He complained about it and I said to him, ‘Why don’t you go to a hotel?’ But he wouldn’t and I pleaded with him to be careful, many times, because it was so icy on the streets and so on. I was afraid he would fall.

  Gottfried Büttner The first time Marie Renate and I visited Beckett in the Akademie was one evening in 1967. He was waiting for us, wearing his brown artist’s suit with two polo necks on top of each other, one over the other, because it was unpleasantly cool in his modern, rather barely furnished atelier. Up on the third floor we noticed the view out on the tops of trees, dark green, the daylight having disappeared; it was grey as in Endspiel [Endgame].