Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Page 20

  In December of 1974, the San Quentin Drama Workshop gave a special performance of Endgame in Beckett’s honour at the American Cultural Centre in Paris. Again quite by chance, I was able to be invited to Berlin to direct a play at the Forum Theater; and as fate would have it, permitted to work with Beckett at the SchillerTheater on his own production of Godot, during January, February and the first week of March of 1975. Beckett, as a director, inspires awe. He is so much his own master, completely in control of his stage, knowing each step of the way exactly where it is he is going. He seems in command of a special art form; one must observe his work with actors in order to realize how simply he unlocks the difficult problems inherent to the staging of his plays.

  Beckett with members of the san Quentin Drama Workshop, 1984. Back row: Walter Asmus; John Jenkins; Seated, middle row: Bud Thorpe; Samuel Beckett; Rick Cluchey; Lawrence Held; Seated on floor: J. Pat Miller; Louis Beckett Cluchey.

  Theatre legends abound with warnings to the writer who would attempt the direction of his own plays. Yet with Beckett these admonitions are meaningless. However, I agree that it is a rare occasion when one finds an author who can place his work before the public in its most dramatic context, and Beckett is that man. In the hands of other directors, his work appears untidy, flat, too realistic and unpoetic. With actors other problems are manifest; perhaps it is mainly the fault of a lack of understanding of Beckett’s special form, which has caused his work in other hands to seem so ponderous upon the stage. Perhaps it has been this lack of understanding more than anything else, which seems to have so maligned Beckett’s theatre plays. Certainly the critics would agree now that these plays which in years past have caused controversy and hard criticism, have become more recognizable and fluent to the public. Maybe we had to catch up with Beckett? I believe Beckett rightly knows his own work and in this he is unique. But then so are the characters of his drama unique in all of modern literature.

  His Schiller-Theater production of Godot set standards for all other productions, many of which are now being produced in other parts of the world by people who came to Berlin to discover how Beckett did it. His Godot succeeded finely because it was Beckett the artist in full control of his canvas. The shape and style of his Godot, with its musicality and mime, the beauty of tone and sound, its movement and silent landscape merging, flowing richly, gracefully like the form of a fine mobile at play in the wind.

  I know of no other dramatist who could do this with his own work on the stage. Following the Schiller production, I went to Paris to observe Beckett’s work-in-progress with a young French actor, [Pierre] Chabert, who was then doing Krapp. But after some days in Paris my good fortune ran out and I was forced to return to the USA. I vowed, however, some day to do the role of Krapp again. [And he did - on many subsequent occasions.]

  Alan Mandell

  Alan Mandell (1927-) has worked as a producer, director, actor and manager on and off Broadway and throughout California and Europe. He was general manager for the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop and for the Repertory Theatre of the Lincoln Center, for whom he also acted and directed. He co-founded and toured with the San Quentin Drama Workshop, performing in Waiting for Godot and Endgame directed by Beckett. He also performed in Beckett’s Stirrings Still and starred in the English-language premiere of Company. He has appeared in numerous films and television series and is the recipient of many awards for his work. Contribution written especially for this volume.

  Meeting Beckett reduced me to silence. My first experience of working with him was in 1980 with the San Quentin Drama Workshop production of Endgame, in which I played the part of Nagg. Although clearly in awe of him, he quickly put me at ease by telling me that we were colleagues and I was to call him Sam rather than Mr Beckett. During our rehearsals of Endgame, I was fascinated by Beckett’s description of actions in musical terms. As a director, he seemed to conduct with both his hands raised like wings at about chest level, and to signify the end to a pause or silence, he would raise the ring finger and the pinky on either hand. These for him were the equivalent of musical dynamics - a pause was a beat; a silence was a rest.

  Beckett described Endgame to me as a chamber piece in eight movements and when I took over from Greg Mosher, who had been carrying the book and keeping Beckett’s notes, I began marking the script as Sam had indicated with eight distinct movements. I also incorporated his directorial comments. In the opening of Endgame, Clov says, ‘Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.’ Beckett asked for these lines to be done legato, slowly. Rick Cluchey played Hamm. Beckett asked that he pronounce the word ‘wonderfully’ in four distinct syllables, which took Rick quite some time to perfect to Beckett’s satisfaction.

  I recall asking him if he could tell me something about Nagg’s character, who he was and what had brought him to his current situation, on his stumps in an ashcan. Beckett stared at me intensely and with a long sweep of his hand said, ‘He’s greeeyy!’ It wasn’t the response I was expecting, but I jumped back into my ashcan thinking ‘Grey’. Later, when Beckett asked me to work with Tere [Teresita Garcia] Sauro, who was playing Nell, I asked him if he could tell me something about Nell’s character. After a pause he said, ‘She’s not there.’

  Beckett was a tireless editor, making many cuts and changes in the text during the rehearsal period. ‘There’s too much text,’ he would say with irritation in his voice, and then he would make a cut. It had to do with the way a line scanned, so that a change in a line, though minor to the actor, was major to the playwright. For example, Nagg’s line, ‘Your sand then. It’s not important’, was changed to, ‘It isn’t important’. With Nell’s response, ‘It is important’, it created a better rhythm and, also made the moment clearer.* He would stop an actor who said ‘it is’ when the text read ‘it’s’. He never needed to consult the text; he knew precisely what he had written.

  At the end of the rehearsal period we gave a party at our London flat. I asked Sam what he thought it would be like when we opened in Dublin at the Abbey Theatre. He told me he wouldn’t be going, which quite surprised me. ‘But we’ll need you there when we mount the production’, I said. ‘No’, he replied, ‘you’ll be fine, just make a tape of your performance and send it to me. I’ll know just how it’s going.’ I asked him why he wasn’t coming to Dublin with us and, in his wonderfully musical Irish voice with a slight lisp, he said, ‘They’d eat me up alive.’ After I’d been in Dublin for a couple of weeks I understood what he meant, for Dublin was a small town where everyone seemed to know everyone’s business, and presumably he preferred more privacy. When I asked what he was going to do now that the play was over, he said he was going back to France, to a ‘shack’ he had in a place called Ussy, where he would write. Apparently, he had not been writing for some time. I said I thought it was wonderful that he’d begin writing again and he said, ‘No, no, it’s very painful, very difficult.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because it gets harder and harder to write a line that’s honest.’ His response had such an impact on me that I found myself unable to write to him for almost a year, questioning the honesty of the words I put on paper.

  Long before meeting Beckett, I had played Lucky in Godot, Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape and Nagg in Endgame. In 1957, I had arranged for the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop production of Waiting for Godot to be presented at San Quentin Prison directed by Herbert Blau, who had introduced me and many others to the work of Beckett. But much later, when returning from Spain where I had been performing Stirrings Still and Company, Beckett and I arranged to meet for a coffee and a chat at Le Petit Café, along with Pierre Chabert and two others whom I can’t recall. Someone suggested I see the new all-star production of Waiting for Godot at the theatre in Montmartre and, since I had one more day in Paris, I said I would go the next day and get a ticket. Someone said that would be impossible as the show was booked solid. I remarked that perhaps for a single ticket I might be able to get in, and that I would go and wait in line
, to which Beckett said, ‘Alan, do you have a card, a business card?’ I took out an old business card, on which he wrote, ‘Une place, s’il vous plaît, pour mon ami. Merci’, and signed his name, with the date 9/05/85. ‘Show them that,’ he said. ‘Maybe it will help.’ The next day I went to the theatre early. There was already a very long line of people waiting for cancellations, but when I showed the rude box-office person my card, he cried I, mon dieu!’ and I was told to wait. After a few minutes I was presented with a seat, fifth row centre, although what I really wanted more than I wanted the ticket to the play was my business card back with Sam’s note on it.

  His many kindnesses and his generosity to me, to members of my family and to so many others will always have a special place in my heart, in my thoughts.

  Lawrence Held

  Lawrence Held (1948-), seen here as Estragon. Australian writer and former actor with the San Quentin Drama Workshop. The son of a Russian-Polish father and an Australian mother, he was born in India and raised in Australia. He acted Nagg in Endgame and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, when he was directed by Samuel Beckett. Contribution written especially for this volume.

  My first image of Beckett, the one that has stayed with me most clearly over the years, is of a tall, angular, somewhat mysterious figure who had the ability to appear and disappear at will: both before and after rehearsals and meetings at that large, very un-Beckett-like American hotel near his apartment in Paris. [The PLM Hôtel Saint-Jacques.] The fact that he was not particularly tall and was made of flesh and blood has in no way diminished my sense, in the intervening years, of his loftiness and ethereality.

  I first met Sam the day after a performance of Endgame at the American Cultural Centre in Paris in the early 1970s. I had recently joined the San Quentin Drama Workshop and the one and only performance of Endgame was presented ‘for and in honour of’ Beckett. Needless to say he didn’t turn up, but instead sent his niece. (If he doesn’t - or didn’t - have a niece, then it is my memory that is at fault, but as far as I can recall someone with access to Beckett was sent to see the performance and reported back favourably on it.) The following day he turned up at our hotel with a present for Louis Cluchey, the workshop director’s son, and an invitation to Rick Cluchey to join him in Berlin for rehearsals of Godot at the SchillerTheater.

  It was not until the late ‘70s that I actually got to work with Sam on a San Quentin Drama Workshop production of Endgame at the St Matthäus church in (West) Berlin, which he graciously agreed to ‘clean up’ for the Festwochen theatre festival. Before starting on the renovation, he asked us to perform it for him. I was playing the part of Nagg, the irascible old man in the barrel. All of us I think were a little nervous, but because I had been sealed in my barrel prior to my first ‘entrance’ I had been denied the surreality of the situation. On emerging, I looked out to see the wraith-like figure of Sam sitting alone in the middle of the church, his head tilted a little to one side, as if in deep contemplation. I did my best to entertain him with the tailor’s speech while he sat perfectly still, in that same contemplative pose. It is another very powerful image I have of him: his remarkable aptitude for stillness.

  After the performance he suggested a few areas of concern, adding (in that barely audible, gentle, Irish-accented voice of his, but - as I recall - with a twinkle in his eye), ‘Otherwise I’m afraid your run will be dull, flat and unprofitable.’ He knew, I think, that we relied upon the box office to pay our way, and that therefore an unprofitable run would be as unappealing as bad reviews. In the event, the reviews were excellent and the houses full. The vision of Sam sitting trance-like in the church as I hurled the tailor’s speech at him was only equalled by the droves of serious young Berliners who sat in the church night after night with the scripts of the play in their hands in which they followed every word being said on stage.

  What I hadn’t realized during the course of the rehearsals (I was an unworldly young man, recently out of drama school) was Beckett’s intense dislike of discussing his work. This being the case I asked him what Endgame was about. (I should mention that a world championship chess tournament was at that time underway, and it was not until later that I discovered that Sam used to return to his atelier at the Akademie der Künste every evening and replay the moves from that day which were included in the newspaper.) Beckett looked pained for a moment, then said, ‘Well, it’s like the last game between Karpov and Korchnoi. After the third move both knew that neither could win, but they kept on playing.’ I was satisfied, and went away feeling that I had uncovered a secret - that a secret had been shared with me! - that was beyond the ken of most other mortals. Later, on the way to Sam’s atelier in Rick Cluchey’s old Mercedes, I asked him what he most liked about Berlin. I had heard that he felt drawn to the city, which I also had come to like very much. Once again there was a pause. ‘I like the spaces between the houses’, he said. I had never particularly noticed the spaces between the houses, but now I started to see them as just as much a part of the city as the architecture. It also occurred to me then that Sam’s liking of the spaces between the houses said something about his writing: the spaces he allows between the bits of dialogue, the spaces between the bits of the set, even the spaces between the characters (also the characters and the set, the characters and the audience), which are as much a part of the characters as their own corporeal existence.

  Skip to 1984. Some friends and I in Australia put together a production of Waiting for Godot to be directed first by Walter Asmus in Chicago and then by Beckett in London. During discussions at that same very un-Beckett-like hotel in Paris between Sam, Rick Cluchey and myself, Sam begins recounting a story told to him by a friend. The punchline of the story relates to an American academic saying of Beckett, ‘He doesn’t give a fuck about people. He’s an artist.’ At this point Beckett raised his voice above the clatter of afternoon tea and shouted. ‘But I do give a fuck about people! I do give a fuck!’

  Skip to rehearsals for Godot at the Riverside Studios. I am sitting by the Thames, thinking about my part (Estragon). Sam appears mysteriously out of nowhere. ‘Hi Sam’, I say, ‘what are you doing?’ ‘Watching the mud and the gulls’, he replies; then - he disappears! Perhaps it was simply that I had returned to my ruminations. I am sure it was that. How else can I explain it?

  Sam as a director. It is not news that he was different. This, also, I think, is why he had Walter Asmus begin the work. Walter understood what he wanted on stage. This was not method acting, not Stanislavski: when the characters (if they could be called characters) left the stage, they left the stage. They went nowhere but backstage. They ceased to exist. Later they came back on and began to exist again. Both Sam and Walter, I think, liked the fact that we understood this. Perhaps it was simply laziness: it is relaxing to be offstage and not have to worry about whether you’ve gone to a shop for a packet of cigarettes or to your mother’s funeral. The acting is at times more vaudevillian, certainly less cerebral. It is also more precise. During one of the rehearsals of Godot at the Riverside Studios, Sam took Bud Thorpe (who was playing Vladimir) and myself aside and said, ‘When the moon rises at the end of the first act, I want you to talk with the tone of moonlight in your voices.’ We knew exactly what he meant.

  Bud Thorpe

  Bud Thorpe (1951-), seen here as Vladimir, acted with the San Quentin Drama Workshop and was directed several times by Samuel Beckett, twice in Endgame, then in Waiting for Godot. He was also lighting designer for the San Quentin productions of Krapp’s Last Tape and Waiting for Godot, and stage and lighting designer for Endgame. Interview with JK.

  The first time I ever met Sam Beckett was with Rick [Cluchey] and Rick’s boy, Louis, who was, what, two or three: still in his arms. We were going to meet Sam after a show at the Schiller-Theater. I don’t know what was playing, I couldn’t tell you, but Sam was working at the Werkstatt. Off we went, and as we walked down one of the side-streets near the back entrance, all of a sudden we saw this figure come out of the
stage door. Sam was always at places at specific moments; I was aghast that he would walk in as the bells were chiming six, and he was supposed to be there at six. He goes under a pool of light and lights up a cheroot. All you can see is the shadow of a man with his hands as he lights up a cheroot, and, as we walk up, Rick goes, ‘Sam’, and all of a sudden Sam says to Rick, ‘Louis’. Sam picks up Louis, and Louis starts to comb Sam’s hair. I was introduced to Sam: it was very short. He did not know who I was.

  [Because of his growing friendship with Cluchey, Beckett then agreed to help the San Quentin group with the production of Endgame in the St Matthäus Kirche in Berlin. Thorpe recounts first his experiences playing the part of Clov and then the advice that Beckett gave him at rehearsals.]

  In the beginning, it took a little bit of time to realize that he was not going to be Elia Kazan! He was not going to be one of those directors who would give you a lot. But I was very surprised at how much he wanted to participate as an actor in the production. He would go up on this little podium area, a little raised area more accustomed to a grand piano concert than to a production. So he would go up there and say, ‘Bud, now, it’s the attitude, it’s the attitude’. He’d sort of take his hand, and, say, ‘move aside’. We got that quickly enough. And he would do it. He would sit there and go: ‘Is it not time for my painkiller?’, doing it in an Irish accent. ‘That’s not enough for ya?’; never ‘you’, never ‘not enough for you’ but ‘that’s not enough for ya’. You saw, even before he really directed it in 1980 that the cadences were Irish, and they connected better with Irishness to them. So, he would go up there and say, ‘Bud, Bud, don’t lose the attitude. He [Clov] is a dog; he is a beaten dog. He has his place: the wall, the kitchen, his light. That’s his haven.’ Mainly he was going for attitude, and he said, ‘You are subservient to Hamm, but you can retaliate.’