Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Page 16

  He was very, very technical and the interesting thing about it was that his interest in the purely craftsmanship side of things was absolutely fascinating. Because he was not at all an airy-fairy poet, you know. He was really down-to-earth. ‘How do you do it?’, ‘How do you do it?’ He was asking people how does one cut the thing and what’s the best way of doing it and so on. He himself said, ‘It’s a matter of fundamental sounds. No pun intended.’

  I retired from the BBC at the end of 1976 but, during that period, I did a lot of stuff with him, and always got on very well. What is wonderful about him was that if he disliked anything he always said, ‘It’s my fault, it’s the text, not the production’. He was the most courteous and considerate of people, never wanting to hurt anybody. To give you an example, my daughter was born in 1961, roughly at the time when I started at the BBC. Beckett was in London shortly after she was born and came to our house and met her - she was a baby-in-arms - and ever since then, whenever I met him he said, ‘How is Monica?’ He remembered her name; extraordinary. He had the old-fashioned English, or Irish, gentleman thing. He was very meticulous about that, but he was very warm.

  It was Sam who got in touch over Lessness. It had appeared in the New Statesman and then he said he wanted this to be done on the radio. It was really for the radio. And I then went to Paris to discuss it with him, I remember in the boulevard St Jacques under the Jack Yeats picture. He said, ‘Well, this comes out of Imagination Dead Imagine. It was all an enclosed space which is like a womb, you see, which is then broken open and now you have this wilderness in which there is only the little body standing up. That’s the only thing that’s still standing up’. So I said, ‘Well how do you want this to be read?’ So he said, ‘I’ll read you a bit’. And he started reading out: ‘Grey, everything grey, little body only upright, fallen over’, etc. And I said, ‘Sam, allow me to record a little bit so that I can tell the actors to pick up the tone’. He said, ‘No, no I never record anything’. I said, ‘Listen, I swear to you I’ll never use this, only to play it to the actors’. And he read a few minutes of it for me and I’ve got that on the tape.*

  The story goes on. I had this recording of Sam and I cast the six voices with Pat Magee, Nicol Williamson, Harold Pinter, Donal Donnelly (a great Irish actor), Denis Hawthorne and Leonard Fenton. And so I recorded this. I played them the recording and said, ‘You take up the tone’, and they all did it and of course Beckett had specified that each person be recorded separately and then we cut this together. And on the recording that he did for me he also indicated the pauses; it had to be exactly that. Now the interesting thing is that they’d recorded these and we’d cut these all together and I thought it was terrific and then we played it to him and he said, ‘No, no’, and I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Too sentimental’. And, of course, his own voice was extremely sentimental, so that he disliked his own sentimentality; he shuddered from it, from his own voice.

  Sam told me (and I know he’s told other people) that he remembers being in his mother’s womb at a dinner party, where, under the table, he could remember the voices talking. And when I asked him once, ‘What motivates you to write?’ he said. ‘The only obligation I feel is towards that enclosed poor embryo.’ Because, he said, ‘That is the most terrible situation you can imagine, because you know you’re in distress but you don’t know that there is anything outside this distress or any possibility of getting out of that distress’ - and, if you remember, in Endgame, the question of the little boy that is being seen, Sam had an absolutely mystical obligation towards that poor, suffering, enclosed being that doesn’t know there is a way out. But if you look through his work you find it confirmed over and over again. And the whole complex of Imagination Dead Imagine and Lessness and all these others always relates to this enclosed space from which there is no way out. He even describes how the body is bent and all sorts of things. So he had this terrific imagination or dream or reality of this memory of being enclosed. And that self is self-enclosed. You can’t really get to the others.

  Eileen O’Casey

  Eileen O’Casey née Carey (1900-95), singer, dancer and actress who married Sean O’Casey in 1927. Mother of Niall, Shivaun and Breon. She wrote a biography of her husband, Seán (1971) and her own autobiography, Eileen (1976). These memories of Beckett are published with the kind agreement of her daughter, Shivaun.

  Seán O’Casey never met Samuel Beckett, although there was mutual admiration. When Seán had his eightieth birthday in 1960, Beckett wrote in The Irish Times: ? send my enduring gratitude and homage to my great compatriot, Seán O’Casey, from France, where he is honoured.’

  I was introduced to Samuel Beckett’s work on the stage when I took my young son, Niall, to see Waiting for Godot. We were enthralled. The first time I met Beckett was on 19 November 1963. I was with Jackie MacGowran and his wife, Gloria, and we went to see Uncle Vanya at the Old Vic Theatre. I liked Beckett immediately and I knew he liked me. Jackie had told me that Beckett did not usually go out to supper after the theatre, so it was a pleasant surprise when he asked us to join him at a restaurant called ‘Chez Solange’. We were in the restaurant upstairs, and it seemed to me that Beckett was well known there. We stayed there a long time; there was so much to talk about. Of course Seán came into our conversation a great deal. He was at our home in Devon, and when I was in London I used to telephone him each evening. On this particular evening, I telephoned him from the restaurant and, when he answered, I said, ‘I am here having supper with Samuel Beckett.’ Seán said, ‘What is he like?’ I remember replying, ‘He is like you in appearance. He has a great sense of humour, like you have - but different.’

  After Seán’s death, I visited Paris and met Beckett there. From then on he became one of my dearest friends. I remember on one occasion I had gone to Paris to see Seán’s publishers, and also another old friend, Tom Curtiss, the theatre critic of the Herald Tribune. The weather was fine and Beckett took me to a restaurant where we ate outside. Then he took me for a walk around Paris. I told him I wanted to do some shopping: clothes for my son Breon, and for the husband of my daughter Shivaun. Beckett said he would go shopping with me, as he knew the places to go. He took me to my hotel and we arranged to meet the following day. I was dead tired after so much walking. To my dismay, at 9 o’clock the next morning the telephone rang and the receptionist was telling me in an awed voice, ‘Madame O’Casey, Monsieur Samuel Beckett is below waiting for you.’ I am afraid I had to tell Beckett that I would not be ready for an hour. He was as good as his word and took me to all the best shops, where I could get what I wanted: the shop for the lovely thin jerseys and the shop where he bought his own shirts. He told me that he wanted to buy a present for Shivaun. He met Shivaun when she was fourteen years old [more likely to have been sixteen from Shivaun’s own account below] and they struck up a friendship that has lasted to this day. I suggested he buy her some scent. He was very shy in the Parfumerie where he bought her a large bottle of ‘Jolie Madame’.

  After that, whenever I went to Paris, I saw Samuel Beckett. I felt completely at ease with him. Like Seán he enjoyed talking to people he liked. We used to outdo each other with conversation. On one of my visits to Paris I was taken ill, and Beckett was wonderfully kind to me. I have always found him one of the kindest of men, very understanding and a great friend.

  Shivaun O’Casey

  Shivaun O’Casey (1939-), Irish actress and director; daughter of Sean and Eileen O’Casey. Founder of the O’Casey Theatre in Newry, she has directed plays in Ireland, England and the USA. She also directed the film Seán O’Casey: Under a Coloured Cap (2004). Interview with JK.

  I met Sam Beckett just before going to the Gibsons.* I was going with Jackie MacGowran and John Gibson. It was when Waiting for Godot was on at the Criterion Theatre [1955-6] or it might have been just after, so it was when I was at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. I was about sixteen at the time - or maybe a little younger. We got on the tube at Chiswick to go to the
Gibsons and there was Sam. Amy and John [Gibson] stayed with him in his house, when they went to France. It was in his house in the country [Ussy], not in Paris.

  It was prior to dinner. We were on the way and poor Amy was only expecting Sam and John but there were a lot more people. I think John Calder was there, too, and another woman. Anyway, the little girl wanted me to bath her, I remember that, and I was as shy as Sam - you know, we were both very shy. But we shared a taxi back and that’s really where we became friends, talking about the theatre and his work. We had a long chat. He was such a sweet man and very interested in what I thought about theatre. I was living in St John’s Wood at the time, so it was quite a long talk and we sat outside a bit and chatted in the taxi. Then he went off. He said to look him up in Paris and he’d write a play for me, but I never did. I did look him up in Paris but that was quite a bit later, in the ‘sixties.

  I went over to Paris with my boyfriend at the time. I think we were on our way to Venice in this clapped-out old car, in the early ‘sixties. And we met Sam. He gave us a meal in Montparnasse. I think I went to see him alone and we talked again about theatre and he told me what he was doing, trying to become more and more minimalist, if you like. He was beginning to think about staging just a face - even in those early days he was thinking about that. I do remember a nice incident though when I was in Paris with him. A young man came up to him and asked him something. And Sam really got quite cross because the boy persisted. He was very polite at first, you know, ‘I really would rather not talk round here’; ‘I’m having a private meal; it’s very nice to meet you but …’ Still the young man insisted, so Sam stood up and said: ‘Go away. Don’t you dare interfere.’ So the guy finally went. I remember that, because Sam was such a polite man. He didn’t like people being rude.

  I think he was pessimistic in his philosophy but comic with it too. I found him very charming and funny. Not a bit dour; very sweet. I never felt miserable, I always felt uplifted after being with him. He loved young people and when I introduced my son Ruben to him, I’d said earlier to Ruben, ‘Now you’ve got to go at a certain point; he’ll get tired and that.’ But Sam really didn’t want Ruben to go at all. So poor Ruben was caught in the position of having made this pact to go and Sam looking at me and saying, ‘Why is he going?’ ‘Because I told him to!’ Laughter.

  I wrote and asked Sam what of his could we do to go with my father’s play, Figuro in the Night and I said that it would be good for us if it were a première of something because Figuro had never been done before. It was a première evening and that’s how we were selling it. I said that Figuro is a certain length, so yours doesn’t need to be too long … It was then that Sam suggested that we might do [an adaptation of his prose text] Froman Abandoned Work. It was his suggestion. I think he even sent me the script or he told me where to get it. And he sent a letter suggesting how we could do it. It’s a long typed-out letter, which for him is very unusual. It’s very clear. The nice thing about it is that he described - you know, it isn’t like, ‘Walk three steps here and three steps there’, it’s not detailed like that. All it suggested generally was that this old tramp comes on, rummages for food in a bin, finds this bit of old paper, sits down on the bin, or beside it, whatever, reads it out loud, then finishes and thinks, ‘Well, I don’t think much of that’ and crumples it up, which is very humorous, I think, and chucks it back in the bin. Sam gave it to us. We didn’t pay any royalties, nothing; he didn’t expect that because he gave it to us as a gift, really.

  Our meetings were very infrequent. In Paris we would go out to dinner. I think I met him twice and Eileen never met him with me because I never went to Paris with her when meeting Sam. She would meet him separately. She went to Paris and I said you ought to look up Sam and she did. She didn’t go over many times either, really. She must have met him about two or three times. It wasn’t a great, close friendship but somehow it was in a funny way. I always felt and I suppose many people did because he gave you so much of himself when you met him. You always felt you could go to him for advice. He was very sympathique. I always felt he was there, and that was why his death was such a loss. And the feeling that you’ve got to keep going, you know you are right, do it. He always gave me that advice and that was nice. ‘Bon courage’, he said. In a way he took over from Seán, being positive like that.

  After Sam died, I wrote a little article and it described him as being birdlike, very similar to Seán. They both had this birdlike quality about them. They had these very piercing eyes that looked right into you. Funnily enough, they both had trouble with their eyes. Even at the very end, when he was clinically blind, Seán still had these piercing eyes. They were both skinny and they both had this way of walking, and the grasp. They were from very different backgrounds: one upper-middle class and the other very low class. They were both brought up Protestant, I suppose, and they both had this great empathy and love of other people.

  Beckett with his cousins, Sheila Page and Mollie Roe, at Sheila Page’s house, Sweetwater Cottage, c. 1959.

  Beckett on a seat at Sweetwater Cottage, c. 1959.

  * Alain Robbe-Grillet, published like Beckett by Les Editions de Minuit, was one of the leading figures in the Nouveau roman. Considered as a radical innovator in the form of the novel, he was the author of Les Gommes, Le Voyeur, La jalousie, Dans le labyrinthe and La Maison de rendez-vous. He also wrote the film script L’Année dernière aa Marienbad.

  * Letter from Samuel Beckett to Avigdor Arikha, 18 Nov. 1958.

  * Thanks to Martin Esslin this recording was placed, after Beckett’s death, in the Archive of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading.

  * John Gibson was a producer with BBC radio who, with his French wife, Amy, became friendly with Beckett in the mid-1950s.

  6

  Beckett as Director

  Beckett directing Klaus Herm and Carl Raddatz in Warten auf Godot at the Schiller-Theatre, Berlin, 1975.

  Biography

  Samuel Beckett took a keen interest in productions of his plays from the very beginning of his career as a dramatist. In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, he attended rehearsals with Roger Blin and Jean-Marie Serreau in Paris and came over to London to help the directors of several productions at the Royal Court Theatre: George Devine, Donald McWhinnie and Anthony Page. Then, from the mid-1960s on, he began to direct his own plays, in London and Paris, but especially at the Schiller-Theater in Berlin. He also directed his television plays in Stuttgart with Süddeutscher Rundfunk, ending his career as a director of his own work only at the age of eighty.

  In the first part of ‘Beckett as Director’ we publish interviews with some of those with whom he worked at the Royal Court Theatre. Two of them, Billie Whitelaw and Jocelyn Herbert, were to become really close friends.

  In the second part, we look at Beckett through the eyes of some of the major German actors, the Schiller-Theater’s dramaturg, Boles-law Barlog and Beckett’s theatrical assistant, Walter Asmus. We also print the memories of a doctor friend, Gottfried Büttner, who attended a number of rehearsals at the Schiller-Theater.

  In the third part, we explore a surprising aspect of Beckett’s life when he went on to direct his plays with a small theatrical company called the San Quentin Drama Workshop. This came about through a strange friendship which evolved over the years with the founder of the Workshop, a former prisoner, Rick Cluchey. Cluchey received a life sentence in 1955 for a kidnap, robbery and shooting incident and served twelve years in the notorious maximum-security prison of San Quentin, until his sentence was commuted to one which allowed for the possibility of parole. He was later given a full pardon. While in prison, Cluchey had become heavily involved in drama and acted in several of Beckett’s plays. Then, when he came out on parole, he travelled to Europe with his own play, The Cage, and met Samuel Beckett, who, intrigued by the man and his background, agreed to direct him in Krapp’s Last Tape at the Akademie der Künste for the Berlin Festival in 1977 and went on t
o befriend him for the next twelve years. He worked with the group again in 1980, directing Endgame in London, after advising them on an earlier production of the same play in Berlin, and then directed - ‘supervised’ was the word that Beckett himself used -Waiting for Godot with them at the Riverside Studios in London in 1984, a production which Walter Asmus had begun in Chicago. We bring together here for the first time the memories of four members of the San Quentin Drama Workshop with whom Beckett had extremely relaxed, cordial relations. With them he became once again one of ‘the boys’ and, in spite of the big age difference between them, had genuine fun.

  THE ROYAL COURT THEATRE, LONDON

  Brenda Bruce on Happy Days