He told me about the short, one-and-a-half-page text he had just written for Barney Rosset to help him possibly start up again in publishing. He dismissed it with ‘It’s nothing, really’.* ‘But sir, you’ve been known to pack a lot into a two-page text’, I protested. Amused, Beckett chimed in immediately, ‘I also pack a lot out’, and we both dissolved into laughter. He described his lifelong commitment to writing less and referred to the principle of failure, ‘to write things out, rather than in’. He also mentioned Eleutberia and Dream of Fair to Middling Women and said that when asked, he had looked at them again but judged them too poor for publication. ‘They’re really quite bad’, I believe is how he described them. I reflected, ‘So, we’ll never see them?’ Beckett smiled impishly, and replied, ‘Well, not for a while, anyway …’ which I took to mean not in his lifetime.
I then proceeded to describe the work I had been doing on his manuscripts at the Beckett Archive in Reading University: my first experience ever in manuscript study. I quoted James Thompson, the Librarian, who remarked that my beginning manuscript study with Beckett was like going directly into the Olympics! Beckett then asked if I had any problems and I was able to say that in all I had been unable to make out only about twelve lines of manuscript in a week’s work. He smiled admiringly and told me that he, too, sometimes could not decipher what he had written a year or two before. I informed him that after my week’s work at Reading I was, in any case, confident of being able to decipher the concluding portion of his dedication to me in the copy of Comment c’est [How It Is] that he sent me in 1976. He laughed. My confidence, as it turned out upon my return home, was ill-founded, for I still can’t make it out!
I had many detailed questions for him regarding the textual work I was doing and the way he went about translating his own work. In this connection, when we were discussing the whereabouts of the typescripts of Company, Beckett suddenly stopped short and, leaning rather anxiously over the table, he asked, ‘Tell me, Mr Krance, did I write Company first in English or in French?’ I was slightly taken aback but, after a couple of seconds’ hesitation, I reminded him that he wrote it first in English.
It was by now about noon and the conversation turned to more general topics. When I told him that I had seen it quoted that he thought Celine’s Voyage au bout de la nuit [journey to tbe End of the Night] was one of the greatest works of the twentieth century, Beckett momentarily hesitated then said, with a grin, ‘I don’t remember ever saying that.’ He was quick to add, though, his enthusiastic admiration for Céline’s later works, the trilogy, D’un chateau l’autre [Castle to Castle], Nord [North] and Rigodon [Rigadoon], making a definite point of his high praise of Nord, which he found fascinating. Beckett praised C éline’s art as a stylist, saying, ‘Yes, he was a great artist’, but immediately qualified this statement, almost as a knowingly understated aside, with, ‘although he was a bit foolish’ for a period. We both grinned in appreciation of the understatement. I then asked Beckett, although I was sure of his response, whether he had ever met Céline. ‘No’, he readily replied, adding with an impish grin, ‘I was on the run from ‘42 on.’ I retorted immediately, ‘So was Céline, a little later, in ‘44, but in the other direction … you were running in opposite directions.’* At this we both openly laughed and it was here that it dawned on me how freely Beckett had laughed on several occasions in the course of our meeting.
The conversation then shifted to Oscar Kokoschka’s painting. Beckett was genuinely surprised and impressed when I told him that I had studied with Kokoschka for a six-week period in Salzburg. I asked him if he liked Kokoschka’s work and he replied forthrightly that he liked his earlier works but the later works not so much. With keen interest he asked, ‘What kind of man was he?’ He seemed genuinely pleased when I described him as ‘vital, lively and energetic’ and smiled widely and approvingly when I told him that Kokoschka liked to end his day with some good bourbon.
It was now 12:15 and our meeting was coming to a close so I here interjected the lead into my ‘closing remark’: ‘Let me tell you what happened to me on the last day of the Salzburg session. After six weeks of neglect, I was despairing that the Master would take any notice of my work. But on the last day of his rounds, with everybody in the room around my easel, which was full of watercolours, Kokoschka stopped short and began leafing through the top half-dozen paintings, saying “There! This is what I’ve wanted all of you to do for the past six weeks! Bravo! Who did this?” I stepped forward, with knees shaking, and identified myself. Kokoschka then inscribed the top painting with the following: “This is the greatest moment of your life. Repeat it often [followed by the date; probably something like the end of July 1959 OK.” With Beckett smiling almost paternally, I went on to explain that, my head dizzy with joy, I had put all of my paintings in the (unlocked) locker overnight, with the intention of moving my things out the next morning. When I got there the next day, the signed painting was gone. Beckett and I both said almost simultaneously and with a shared resignation, that someone had stolen it for the dedication and the signature. I was now ready for my closing remark: ‘In any case, what I wanted to say was that I have had three great moments in my life: the first one was when Kokoschka signed my painting; the second one was when you sent me a signed copy together with a dedication, of Comment c’est; and the third one was meeting you today.’ Beckett was pleased even if, perhaps, a touch embarrassed and I believe that he said something like, ‘Well, thank you’, and that I replied, ‘Thank you … Sam.’
We got up from the table and walked back towards the entrance of the café. In the foyer Beckett turned towards me and we shook hands. I noticed more consciously than when we shook hands on meeting, how steady and solid his grip was, despite a gnarly hint of arthritis. I told him again what a great pleasure it was to meet him. He smiled warmly and, as we made to separate, said, with equal sincerity, these two words, ‘God bless.’ And I, after an instant’s pause and slightly stunned, think I remember having said ‘God bless, Sam’ in return.
Michael Rudman
Michael Rudman (1939-). American-born director who has directed widely in the USA and in England. He directed Waiting for Godot at the Lyttelton Theatre of the National Theatre, in London, opening 25 November 1987. These notes, which appeared in an abbreviated form in the National Theatre programme, are reproduced by kind permission of Michael Rudman.
Notes for the National Theatre Staff on a Meeting with Samuel Beckett, 2 September 1987
The first impression was somewhat coloured by what I had been led to expect, but also became the lasting impression: an extremely courteous Anglo-Irish gentleman, living in Paris very near several hospitals and experiencing old age with grace but with considerable irritation.
He was prompt for our meeting, scanning the lobby of the very modern PLM Hôtel St Jacques, at about four minutes before the appointed hour and seemed pleased when I recognized him. He led me to a coffee shop [the Café Français in the hotel] where we took a ‘quiet table’ and we both ordered coffee. On many occasions he lowered his head onto one hand and looked slightly pained at his inability to remember either a name or a line or a place. But usually he did remember in the end or came up with some description that served well enough instead of the proper name. He had more interest in small things about me and the rest of the world than anyone I’ve ever met over the age of sixty-five.
The two things he seemed most interested in, to do with me, were my (then) forthcoming child and my interest in tennis and golf. Whenever I mentioned any of these subjects, his face broke into a warm smile and my memory is that he nodded.
His eyes are the brightest blue with what I would swear are black crosses in the middle of them.
He said he had no children which was ‘fortunate for them’.
He remembered the prices of the theatre seats that he occupied at the Abbey Theatre in the late ‘twenties and early ‘thirties and he said that he had a weekly ticket, which contradicts some things I’ve read
about him. Apparently he would go once a week and sit in the one-and-sixes which were just to the right or the left of the three-shilling seats in the balcony. He was full of praise for that period of the Abbey’s history.
Beckett gave me a lot of specific comments on the play, most of which I’ve written down for use in rehearsal. The notes that I’m now dictating are mostly impressions which I don’t want to lose.
As to the play [Waiting for Godot] he’s not bored with it but he is almost certainly tired of it or at least tired of answering questions about it. After an hour and twenty minutes, I apologized for tiring him and he said, ‘I would have got tired anyway.’ One has to be very careful about quoting him because one wants to be exact. He makes one want to be that.
He seems very impressed with the fact that Mike Nichols is directing Waiting for Godot in New York at the Lincoln Center [with Robin Williams and Steve Martin as Vladimir and Estragon] and is using the Assistant Director from the production that Beckett did at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin in 1975 [Walter Asmus]. I told him that I had directed Hamlet at the Lincoln Center, but he wasn’t impressed and, later, when I began to describe the auditorium of the Lincoln Center and its difficulties to him he declared the interview at an end and called me ‘Mr Rudman’.
Just as the play seems to want to break dramatic moulds, so he seems very resistant to any conversation about accepted theatre practices such as actors delving into the biography of characters or costumes representing the history of characters and he is particularly scornful of suggestions such as that Vladimir’s carrot should teach us something about Vladimir.
He displayed a considerable amount of acting ability when I asked him if Estragon spoke the truth when he said that he was a poet. He demonstrated that Estragon was referring to his clothing in a graphic and slightly comical way. His acting ability was also apparent when he quoted lines from a play or sang either of the two songs. I suspect that like most playwrights he’s an actor manqué, but in the sense that the profession is missing an actor rather than the other way around.
He liked the man who played Lucky in the San Quentin Drama Workshop production which he oversaw at the Riverside Studios in London. He couldn’t remember his name but thought his first name was Peter [it was in fact J. Pat Miller] and reported to me that he had died recently of AIDS. He liked Jack MacGowran, who played Lucky with great success [at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1964], and of course the actors in the Schiller Theatre production which he had directed. He seemed very aware of how difficult it was to direct a play but seemed strangely innocent of how directors normally work with actors. He said he had spent months preparing that production, which leads me to my most important impression. What he would really like, I think, would be to see an English reincarnation of the Schiller Theatre production. He referred me to the Assistant Director from that production [Asmus], who is apparently willing to go anywhere in the world and help out, and I think that we should try to get this bloke to England.
He agreed with me that the play sounded good in Irish and that the Irish way of speaking, he said, was good because it enabled one to separate syllables. I think he would rather like it if all four of the actors were Irish.
He seemed to think that only a playwright could direct his own play with enough care and attention because only a playwright would take sufficient pains. I don’t think he believed me when I implied that I would give it as much care and attention as he did.
I think that if it is at all possible we should take Lindy Hemming [the costume designer], Bill Dudley [the designer] and whoever is playing Vladimir and Estragon to Paris for one or two days and rehearse in that hotel which has large meeting rooms, and let Beckett walk down the street, about 300 yards, and look at some rehearsals. I can’t see what harm it would do and I think it would do a great deal of good.*
This leads me to my main point which is that I’m more and more convinced that the play is like one man’s dialogue with himself -rather like [the way] the two Byzantium poems of Yeats are a dialogue within the poet’s head. I think this is why he is so resistant to and scornful of considerations of biography for the characters. It follows then that the most difficult thing is the most important, namely to get to know this man himself in order to realize his play properly. Really, it’s a dramatic poem much more than it is a poetic drama. Everything he said to me seemed to bear this out and I’m certain that the reason he finds it difficult to talk about the play is the same reason he finds it difficult to talk about himself. In neither case is it impossible, if you ask the right question or a question that he finds comfortable to answer. For example on tennis or golf he is quite forthcoming about his childhood. His family had their own lawn-tennis court and he would sometimes spend ‘all day playing golf by himself with two balls, one ball competing with the other’.
When Beckett refuses to answer questions on specifics I believe that he can’t. I think that this play simply happened in his head and that that is the only possible landscape for it. I think that he wrote it (as he told me and has told others) to divert himself from a novel he was writing and that he has an unfulfilled longing to be diverted by it again. He wants the stage ‘uncluttered’ and he doesn’t want much colour. He referred to other productions as ‘cluttered’ in a derogatory way.
My biggest single worry is that on the one hand he wants it to be funny (I think he wants it to be really funny and I think he really wants it to be funny), but on the other hand he wants the movements stylized, maybe a little bit like mime. My worry is that the English audience won’t find that kind of thing or that way of doing things funny. My worry is that the English audience (and I suspect most audiences, except possibly for the Germans) will find things funny that are rooted in character and, dare I say it, in time and place. Still I think we must try to give him what he wants.
Jan Jönson
Jan Jönson (1947-). Swedish director, actor and writer. He studied at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Stockholm, performing afterwards as an actor at the Royal Dramatic Theatre. He directed Waiting for Godot at Kumla maximum-security prison in Sweden, followed by a production of Godot at San Quentin State Prison in California, after consultations with Samuel Beckett. In 2002-3, he directed Endgame at lLA maximum security prison in Oslo. Contribution written especially for this volume. The translation, revised by the editors, is by Vibeke Kennair Ottesen.
Barefoot, dressed in a transparent shirt with long sleeves and a pair of pale trousers which ended just below the knee, at the age of fourteen, I stood in the wings at the Folketeatern in Gothenburg, Sweden, warming myself under the stage lights, and watching the actors perform the roles of Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I played the part of ‘A Boy’, who came on twice per night, at the end of the first and second acts to say in one breath, ‘Mr Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow’. In time it became a ritual for me hiding behind the scenes under the warm lights, from curtain up until the very end. I wanted to listen to their feelings, to follow the story and feel the ‘temperature’ on the stage, before I carefully entered to deliver my message. Something had been ignited inside me.
A few years later, after performing Alan Dairy’s monologue, The Man Himself, at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, I was invited by the Department of Corrections in Sweden to perform it at Kumla maximum prison for men, as they found that the monologue captured the inmates’ lives. After my performance the men did not applaud. They had, after all, just seen a play about themselves, which was not something to applaud. Instead, one man stood up from the front row and gave me a red rose, saying, ‘Please, come back and teach us some drama’. His face reminded me of ‘Estragon’ in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I responded, ‘I can’t teach you drama, but I can come back and read a play with you written by an Irish playwright called Samuel Beckett’. Another man called out, ‘Beckett is my hero!’ I told those men about my love for Samuel Beckett and his work. I also suggested that
we should meet again soon and read Waiting for Godot together so as to experience what happens to the text when it is read by people who live in darkness. They answered, ‘Come back soon - we’re not going anywhere’.
I returned with several scripts of Waiting for Godot in English, Beckett’s own translation from the French. I met the men and we read and listened to each other and found a way of doing this. For each scene we changed readers and, after about a week of this, one day a man suddenly got up from his chair with the script in his hand, and said in a clear voice, ‘This is not a script. It’s my fucking diary’. He continued, ‘What Vladimir is saying, thinking, waiting for, laughing and crying about is almost identical to my life’.
Greatly moved, I felt I must show people this play and the prison management agreed to let me do a production. Of fifty men it seemed to me that five were identical to the five characters in Godot. After a year of rehearsing, we felt ready. The dress rehearsal, performed for the other inmates and the employees at the prison, was a mesmerizing meeting between the actors and their audience; the prison somehow was no longer there. The première was held for invited guests from ‘the outside’ and, more importantly, for the actors’ families.
My actors received due recognition. The prison management saw something new; they did not see inmates standing before them; they saw human beings; and they said that this was the best correctional work they had ever seen. As a result the prison gates were opened and we went on the road in a comfortable van loaded with the costumes, the props, Estragon’s stone and the poor-looking tree which we had stolen the night before from a farm behind the prison. We were invited to do a guest performance at the Stadsteater in Gothenburg. My actors got to experience freedom: sounds, colours and smells from which they had been banished for years. We performed only the first act, since we did not have the rights for the whole play. The audience listened to the actors with absolute respect and attention and there was a feeling of forgiveness in the air for these men. Afterwards we returned to the closed prison and, the next day, the actors woke up back in their cells, prisoners again without identity and without human worth.
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