Plain Talk
By
Nursi Saad El-Din
Biographies have long enjoyed immense popularity, and it appears not to be waning. The Culture Review of last week's Sunday Times carried reviews of several newly published biographies including Orson Welles by Peter Conrad, The Rose of Martinique: A life of Napoleon's Josephine, by Andrea Stuart, Nehru: A Political Life by Judith Brown and A Double Life, a biography of Charles and Mary Lamb. The title that interested me most, though, was James Knowlison's Images of Beckett. I first saw Waiting for Godot in London, some time in the mid-1950s, at which point the only thing I knew about the playwright was that he was an Irishman who had long settled in Paris.
Godot, which was first produced in January 1953 in Paris and later moved to London, is the play that established Beckett's reputation. Although I confess Waiting for Godot did not overwhelm me, it sparked sufficient curiousity that later I was keen to read the author's other works, including Endgame, Happy Days, Krapp's Last Tape and others.
It is interesting how Beckett's reputation appears to fluctuate. In 1991 there was a Beckett festival in Dublin, which eventually transferred to New York in 1996. In 1999 A Beckett Festival, comprising all 19 of his stage plays, was organised at London's Barbican theatre.
Now there is a Beckett exhibition in London, a selection of photographs of the playwright together with some of productions of his plays, accompanied by essays by Beckett's biographer James Knowlison, author of Damned to Fame, a major posthumous biography. That, together with Anthony Cronint's Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, are essential reading for those interested in the writer.
Beckett's plays were always open to various interpretations. Some critics regard Godot's two heroes, Vladimir and Estragon, as tramps, though Beckett never described them as such.
According to Vicki Makaffy in her book States of Desire Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot without any evidence that this person actually exists. Makaffy believes that Beckett exploits the process of discovery that precedes the formation of habit. The only sparks of vitality in Godot, she goes on to say "are associations not with experience but with experiment, with the kind of discovery that becomes possible when we abandon the intentions, goals and expectations born of experience."
Vladimir and Estragon expect Godot. They are so preoccupied with their appointment with the unknown, which they faithfully await, that they miss the opportunity to analyse or learn from the present. Beckett was aware of the ennui that is the result of repetition. We find Vladimir in Godot saying "We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener -- habit however delightful or indiscreet."
During the on-going celebrations accompanying the exhibition a number of actors and directors have offered their opinions on Beckett.
"Among the major writers of the 20th century Beckett stands out by virtue of his uncompromising austerity and the purity of his approach to literature." His work, writes another critic, "though seasoned with bitter humour was a dedicated and courageous exploration of his stark perception of the transitoriness and insignificance of human existence in a bleak universe."
Sir Peter Hall, who directed the British premiere of Waiting for Godot in 1956 and of Happy Days in 1974 has this to say.
"Waiting for Godot revolutionised the whole western world in making us rethink what drama is. Sam moved theatre out of wooden naturalism and opened people's minds to theatre's imaginative possibilities, to metaphorical theatre."
John Calder, Beckett's publisher, writes that "there are four great 20th century writers: Joyce, Proust, Kafka and Beckett, who brings together the strands of the other three."
Beckett, who always shunned publicity, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. He accepted, though typically he did not attend the award ceremony.
