Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Read online

  [The story of the staging of the world première of En attendant Godot (Théâtre de Babylone, January 1953) has been recounted in some detail by Jean Martin himself in ‘Creating Godot’, Beckett in Dublin, ed. S. E. Wilmer, Dublin, The Lilliput Press, 1992, pp. 2532. We include therefore only those parts of the interviews with Jean Martin which add to these accounts or which relate closely to Beckett the man.]

  We only rehearsed En attendant Godot for a few weeks you know. In fact, I rehearsed for only about three weeks in all. Sam said practically nothing while we were putting it on. You see he was extremely shy and very, very discreet. He has never been talkative and he didn’t explain very much. In fact, if you asked him to explain something, he used to say that he didn’t know what explanations he had to give. He relied entirely on Roger Blin [his French director, who also played Pozzo]. Of course, he hadn’t got the Nobel Prize then and he knew very little about the theatre. But he came to rehearsals every day, but every day. And Suzanne came very often too. But they didn’t offer any advice. He knew what he didn’t want but he wasn’t at all clear about what he did want. And in any case he was just surprised to see his play on the stage.

  Our lives became quite intertwined at that time, then and after Fin de partie, since Sam and Suzanne were living in the rue des Favorites and I was living in the Porte de Versailles. We would often walk back in the evenings after rehearsals of Godot together from Sèvres-Babylone to the rue de Vaugirard where I was living. I had an apartment in which there was no shower, so Suzanne would say to me ‘Come round and have a bath’ in their place in the rue des Favorites. You know at that period Sam and Suzanne were living very economically indeed, rather precariously in fact, because before Godot there had been the war, and then the Liberation and they had considerable financial problems.

  I had a doctor friend called Marthe Gautier and I said to her: ‘Listen, Marthe, what could I find that would provide some kind of physiological explanation for a voice [of Lucky] like the one that is written in the text? And Marthe Gautier, who was working at the Salpêtrière Hospital, said: ‘Well, it might be a good idea if you went to see people who have Parkinson’s disease.’ So I asked her about the disease and she told me how Parkinson’s manifests itself. She explained how it begins with a trembling, which gets more and more noticeable, until later the patient can no longer speak without the voice shaking. So I said, ‘That sounds exactly what I need.’ So I began to rehearse like that. But I also told myself that I had to find a way of making him tremble. I made him stand on one foot, this Lucky, and, as the other foot doesn’t rest on the ground, this makes him tremble and that leads to a trembling of the arms, then of the whole body, and to a tremor in his voice, finally to a sort of delirium. And I began to rehearse like that. And Blin said, ‘I don’t know, I honestly don’t know whether I like it or not; it’s important it doesn’t become too clinical.’ And Sam said nothing at all. And Raimbourg and Latour [who were playing Estragon and Vladimir] said, ‘Oh là là,Oh là là, whatever are you doing?’ So I finally said to Roger: ‘Listen I am not absolutely obsessed with playing it like this, you know. But let me try it as far as I can, and if it doesn’t work I can always go back. But I need to try it at least once from start to finish’. And Roger let me do it, but wasn’t at all convinced. Nor was I.

  Then four or five days before we were due to open, the costume lady at the theatre was there with her husband, whose job was emptying dustbins. She was a charming but simple, down-to-earth lady. We still didn’t have a suitcase for Lucky to carry and Roger said, ‘We need an old, battered suitcase.’ And she said, ‘My husband works on the bins and I am sure he could find you the props you need.’ And one evening her husband turned up with a big case that he’d found in the bins. It’s the one on all the photos of the first production. When Roger saw it, he said, ‘That’s marvellous. That’s exactly what we need.’ And, by way of thanking her and her husband, he said to them, ‘Look, if you haven’t seen a rehearsal, stay in the theatre and watch’, warning them that it wasn’t perhaps the kind of play they would enjoy. And so the bin-man and his wife went into the theatre and when I started my monologue - they had been a bit put off by the first part of the play - and as I worked up to my frenzy, because I started calmly, just trembling a little, then at the end finishing in a state of real delirium, at that point the costume lady started to cry out and to vomit, saying, ‘I just can’t stand this.’ And Roger Blin said, ‘Well, if it has an effect like that, you must keep it!’ And we did.

  [Fin de partie (Endgame). First production (in French) at the Royal Court Theatre in London, April 1957, then at the Studio des Champs-Elysées in Paris. Jean Martin played Clov.]

  Sam had become much more confident as far as directing was concerned after Godot and he let things pass on that production that he wouldn’t let through on Fin de partie, things that were not really the way he saw them. He had become much more intransigent at rehearsals. So there were, not exactly difficulties, but certain tensions with Sam in as much as he wanted us to adopt a way of speaking in a very slow monotone. But when we tried … well, the problems began when Sam got a bit desperate when we couldn’t do what he wanted us to do in the way we said our lines. ‘It needs a rhythm that you’re not getting at the moment’, he said. So - in English - he started to deliver Clov’s opening monologue: ‘Fini, c’est fini, ça va finir, ça va peut-être finir’ [‘Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished’] and Sam said: ‘Finnnniiishshed’, just like that. And Roger and I looked at each other and I said, ‘But, Sam, I understand perfectly well what you have in mind. But what you want can be done with English words, but you can’t do the same thing with French ones. You can’t say something like “shshsh” in French. It’s not possible.’ It is not that we had an actual dispute with Sam. But at first we didn’t manage to get the right rhythms for the play, because the problem didn’t lie with its interpretation but with physically executing what Sam wanted. The problem lay in the rhythms, the way of delivering the text, if you follow me.

  As with Godot, so with Fin de partie, Sam cut quite a lot out of his texts, between what was printed and what was performed on stage. Some cuts were already made in the first production; then he made even more substantial ones for some later revivals. He always worked towards a great economy of means, finding some things unnecessary. It’s important to stress this because a play is no longer played in the same way when it has a faster rhythm. And what worried Blin and I with Fin de partie was that Sam explained that he wanted not just a kind of lassitude in the characters but also that the vocal rhythms he wanted us to adopt finally slowed the play down: ‘weighed it down’ isn’t exactly the word; but it certainly changed the way in which everything went.

  Sam changed a lot over the years, I think, in his way of presenting his plays. Because when Godot and Fin de partie were first put on, I don’t think he was too happy when, deliberately or not, there were certain moments in the play that caused the audience to smile or even to laugh. Sam on the other hand found humour in deeply sad, even dreadful situations which didn’t make the public laugh at all. But over the years - and especially after he directed Godot himself in Berlin - I think he began to realize that the play should be played using faster, livelier rhythms. So I think the difficulties we experienced at the beginning with Fin de partie were not because we were not doing what he wanted us to do but because Sam himself was not fully aware of the ways of doing it. It was not a question of adding anything to what was already there, but of focusing on the way it was done.

  Peter Woodthorpe on the British Premiere of Waiting for Godot

  Peter Woodthorpe (1931-2004). British actor who played Estragon in the British premiere of Waiting for Godot, directed by Peter Hall at the Arts Theatre, London, in August 1955. He went on to have a highly successful career in theatre, film and television. Beckett very much admired his acting. Interview with JK.

  I was a biochemistry student at Cambridge University, where I pla
yed King Lear as a freshman. This was reviewed by Harold Hobson and it changed my life. Then I played the Yorkshire lad in the musical Zuleika - the one who says ‘I’m too young to die’ -and I was in the ‘Footlights’ revue at the Scala Theatre when Anne Jenkins, Donald Albery’s factotum, phoned me to say, ‘Peter Hall would like you to play a part in a new play at the Arts Theatre.’ Eight pounds a week; only luncheon vouchers at rehearsals! It was later [when it transferred to the West End] that I got £40. I was sent the script and had a fit. I couldn’t understand a word. But I had signed a contract, so I went to rehearsals and said ‘Sir’ to them all. After that I left Cambridge and never finished my degree.

  The important thing Peter Hall said when he started was: ‘I don’t understand this play and we are not going to waste time trying to understand it.’ And the other thing he said was ‘And we are not going to play it in Irish or it will be dismissed as another of those Irish plays.’ And a lot of Beckett still has been.

  The nerves built up on the first night. I have never seen people so ill. Peter Bull [who played Pozzo] was vomiting in basins and running to the loo. It was really panic. Then Peter came on and within two pages he jumped, in his nerves, eight pages. He played five of them, then suddenly realized his mistake and went right back to the beginning. And no one ever spotted that we had done those pages before! He also got the rope caught in his sleeve. It was my first professional experience and the audience shouting at us didn’t worry me as much as it did the others. I didn’t understand the play but I know that I felt how to do it. Its poetry spoke to me and its humour. And once I got it, I never lost it. I played it by instinct and feeling.

  On the first night there was only one curtain call and there were boos and cat-calls. One was: ‘This is why we lost the colonies!’ I remember the night that was shouted. Business was bad and hostile. And they told you they hated it. But then the whole atmosphere changed - dramatically changed - after the Sunday reviews by Hobson and Tynan. There were two shows on a Sunday and they were sold out. Cheers and bravos and laughter. Altogether different. What it was was the power of those two papers [The Observer and The Sunday Times] with the theatre-going public. Nobody bothered with the ‘dailies’. They booked on what they read.

  [The initial controversy about Beckett’s play did not subside later on either.] At the Criterion Theatre, this party had arrived in full evening dress on the front row. And one of the ladies shouted out at Peter Bull: ‘I do wish the fat man would go.’ And Peter ran off stage. ‘You’re going the wrong way’, said Vladimir. ‘I need a running start’, said Pozzo and Peter came back on again. And there was a clattering in the wings as Timothy Bateson [playing Lucky] falls over. Bull stopped in centre stage and, quivering with rage, he leant over the footlights and he looked at the woman full in the face and said, ‘And adieu to you too, Madam!’ And, as one, the six of them in this party got up and left the theatre. Hugh Burden [who by then was playing Vladimir] put his hand up and said, ‘She must have been Godot.’ This got the house back brilliantly. There was another wonderful moment at the Criterion when Hugh’s teeth fell out and they flew past me so the whole audience could see. And he looked at them and then looked at me. And, without thinking, I said ‘Pick ‘em up’. And he said, ‘Do you think so?’ And I said, ‘You might as well.’ So he went across, picked them up and said, ‘That’s better.’*

  We heard that Sam Beckett was over in London to see the show [when it had transferred to the Criterion Theatre]. After the show he came round to the dressing-room. And there was for me this very frightening man; his appearance was extraordinary. It gave me a frisson: the recession of the eyes, and the lightness of them, a piercing blue. And I thought of him as a giant bird, a giant crow. It was my immediate reaction. Then suddenly his face changed totally. There was a beautiful smile and he just said, ‘Bloody marvellous!’ And he held me. But he disliked the production. He told me he disliked it, so there you are. He hated the set with the walk-on. Three walks-on. I didn’t like it because it made it all look a bit chi-chi, weird, in the wrong way weird. Peter Hall hadn’t trusted the play and had commissioned a set. Beckett didn’t like the scene with the boy messenger because it became poesy. And even Paul [Daneman, who acted Vladimir at the Arts Theatre] played it wrong. I hated it. It should have been kept the same way.† Peter Hall thinks it was his success to this day. Well, it wasn’t really. It was the play’s success. Beckett also said to me about ‘Godot’ that he deeply regretted calling it ‘Godot’, because everybody interpreted it as God. Now that he saw it in English. And all the things that people made of it. He said it had nothing to do with God. He was almost passionate about it.

  The real success of the play was that it broke all frontiers, not only in writing; it broke the expectation of success from stardom. It was the star actors’ theatre at the time. You didn’t put a show on without a star. You didn’t think of it. And for this little play to run, that half the world didn’t understand - and booed at first - with no one in it, for months and months and months was a tremendous shock to the theatre establishment of the day. The only person I remember who welcomed it with open arms and understanding beyond anyone else was Vivien Leigh. She had a brain like a razor. And she came round and sat in my dressing-room and laughed. And she just told us what she thought the play was about. And it was magic: it had no pretence and it was about relationships and philosophies and essential needs and how people behaved, she said. She was wonderful. It was astonishing. She became a star in my eyes that night.

  I met Beckett two or three times while he was in London and one night he took me to his cousin John’s house. There was a cellist there that night. It was a musical evening somewhere in Hampstead. It was all a bit overwhelming. And in the cab coming back, I did say to him ‘What is it [Waiting for Godot] all about? Everybody is coming round saying different things.’ And we laughed a lot. He said, ‘But it’s all symbiosis, Peter.’ That is what he said. But I didn’t really have the ability to create a friendship with him. I was too young.

  Ruby Cohn on the Godot Circle

  Ruby Cohn (1922-) Professor Emerita at the University of California, Davis (seen here in the early 1960s); a friend of Beckett for almost thirty years. She has written many books on European and American theatre and several books on Beckett, including Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, Back to Beckett, Just Play, and, most recently, A Beckett Canon. She has edited Disjecta, a collection of his critical writings, as well as two casebooks on Waiting for Godot. Contribution given earlier as a lecture but revised by Ruby Cohn especially for this volume.

  Like many others, I first encountered Samuel Beckett through Waiting for Godot, or, more accurately, through En attendant Godot. In 1952, I was a student of comparative literature at the Sorbonne, and an addict of theatre everywhere I wandered. My small, unheated top-storey room on the rue Huysmans was a few streets away from the Théâtre de Babylone, which was located not on the rue de Babylone, but, with the logic for which the French are famous, on the Boulevard Raspail. Passing by the Théâtre de Babylone one cold morning of the new year 1953, I noticed a poster about the première of a new play by ‘un compagnon de James Joyce, l’Irlandais Samuel Beckett’ [‘a friend of James Joyce, the Irishman Samuel Beckett’]. Little dreaming that the play would focus the rest of my life, I went to see En attendant Godot.

  Over half a century has passed since then, and I have read and even written so much about that performance that I can no longer rely on the purity of my memory. In January 1953, it never occurred to me to seek out the author of En attendant Godot, about whom none of my fellow students had heard. At that time I read few reviews. I did hear - I can’t recall where - a rumour about an earlier radio broadcast of excerpts from En attendant Godot. Its producer, twenty-year-old Michel Polac, had asked Beckett for a few words of introduction to his strange new play, which the playwright surprisingly supplied. Several scholars have described the first French stage performance of En attendant Godot, but no scholar has described its
first radio broadcast. Perhaps no one heard it. I certainly didn’t, for I didn’t even own a radio at that time. Much later, thanks to Angela Moorjani, I read Beckett’s introduction to that French radio broadcast, from which I quote a few excerpts, in a different translation from the one published in The New Yorker of 1 July 1996:

  I don’t know who Godot is. I don’t even know (above all don’t know) if he exists. And I don’t know if they believe in him or not -those two who are waiting for him. The other two who pass by towards the end of each of the two acts, that must be to break the monotony. All that I knew I showed. It’s not much, but it’s enough for me, by a wide margin. I’ll even say that I would have been satisfied with less. As for wanting to find in all that a broader, loftier meaning to carry away after the performance, along with the program and the Eskimo pie, I cannot see the point of it. But it must be possible … Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo, Lucky, their time and their space, I was able to know them a little, but far from the need to understand. Maybe they owe you explanations. Let them supply it. Without me. They and I are through with each other.

  However, that was wishful thinking on Beckett’s part. Since Godot remains Beckett’s best-known work, he was never able to be quite ‘through with’ it.

  I was enthralled by En attendant Godot, and I saw that first French production twice more - once in Germany. I read what little else I could find by Beckett - as I remember, only the novels Murphy and Molloy, both in French. Back in the United States, I embarked on doctoral study, and, independently, I continued to read Beckett’s works, which were slowly being published by Grove Press, in Beckett’s translations into English. When I had to choose a dissertation subject, Beckett’s work seemed to me ineluctable.