Just like Waiting for Godot’s existential double act
Vladimir and Estragon, Samuel Beckett has waited a long time to be fully
embraced by into the metaphorical kirk of Edinburgh International Festival. For
an artist whose sense of exile and outsiderdom has his detractors as much as his
champions, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Beckett’s theatre work
has largely been seen on the Fringe, where even then it has felt hidden away in
back-street venues.
The appearance of Druid Theatre’s internationally
acclaimed production of Waiting for Godot at this year’s EIF, then, suggests
that Beckett’s work has at last come out of the wilderness. This has been
brewing for a few years now by way of a series of productions under former EIF
director Jonathan Mills’ tenure. Since the baton was passed to Fergus Linehan, however,
the links feel umbilical. Growing up in Dublin with an actress mother and an
arts journalist father, Beckett’s shadow loomed large. While Linehan’s mother
Rosaleen Linehan appeared buried up to her neck in sand as Winnie in Happy Days
both on stage and screen, his father’s encounters with Beckett were more random
affairs.
“My dad was arts editor of the Irish Times,” Linehan
says of his father, also called Fergus, “but Beckett wouldn’t do any
interviews. He would meet various journalists, but on the proviso that the
conversations weren’t recorded or written down. My dad would go over to Paris
to meet him, and he’d have all these questions with him, but all Beckett wanted
to talk about was the Irish rugby team, cricket and football.”
The earliest sightings of Beckett’s work at EIF was in
1984, when a ten-day mini Beckett festival featured New York’s Harold Clurman
Theatre in residence at the Churchill Theatre with a triple bill of Ohio
Impromptu, Catastrophe and What Where. Another double bill by the Harold
Clurman Theatre featured performances of A Piece of Monologue and That Time.
Also at the Churchill, and in portents of things to come, seminal comic actor
Max Wall, who had appeared in Waiting for Godot in 1979 and Krapp’s Last Tape
in 1984, performed Malone Dies.
The second part of Beckett’s trilogy of novels,
Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable, all three would later be adapted and
performed on the Fringe two years later by Barry McGovern under the title, I’ll
Go On. Twenty-seven years later, McGovern would revive this solo tour de force
for EIF as part of the most extensive Beckett season since 1984.
The groundwork had been done in 2012, when McGovern
performed the Gate Theatre, Dublin’s staging of Beckett’s 1953 novel, Watt, at
EIF. With the interior monologues of Beckett’s prose inviting themselves to be
spoken out loud, the 2013 season focused, not on Beckett’s stage plays, but on
renderings of prose by way of I’ll Go On and Peter Egan’s performance of a
short story, First Love, plus rarely seen and heard TV and radio works.
A wordless Michael Gambon appeared in Eh Joe, haunted
by Penelope Wilton’s disembodied voice in a piece first broadcast on German TV
and o the BBC in 1966, and here brought to semi-cinematic life by Canadian film
director Atom Egoyan. Like I’ll Go On and First Love, Eh Joe was produced by
the Gate.
Another Dublin company, Pan Pan, gave audacious
stagings of Embers and All That Fall, radio plays both dating from 1957 which
can now be recognised as early examples of sound art which, in Pan Pan’s
renderings, more resembled immersive installations than theatre. It should be
noted that the original broadcast of All That Fall led directly to the setting
up of BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
As well as the five productions, EIF also hosted
screenings of Beckett on Film, an epic exercise that saw all nineteen of
Beckett’s dramatic works filmed utilising an array of maverick directors and
performers. This included a production of Waiting for Godot featuring McGovern,
David Mamet directing Harold Pinter, Rebecca Pidgeon and John Gielgud in
Catastrophe, and Breath directed by visual art provocateur Damien Hirst.
Beckett on Film was initiated and co-produced by
Michael Colgan, the former artistic director of the Gate who had previously
produced Becket’s entire dramatic canon onstage in Dublin in 1991. This was
restaged in New York in 1996, and then in London three years later. The Edinburgh screenings of Beckett on Film
was a neat sleight of hand that gave audiences a chance to see a wider spectrum
of work than might normally be possible.
In the flesh, last year, McGovern returned to
Edinburgh again to perform Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett’s tragi-comic rummage
through an old man’s audio diary. Druid’s presentation this year of Waiting for
Godot has been a long time coming.
“I didn’t think the world needed another production of
Waiting for Godot,” says Druid’s Garry Hynes, who previously directed the play
in 1982, “but the company wanted to do it., and when I looked at it again,
something had shifted.”
Hynes’ work with Druid has included DruidSynge and
DruidMurphy, marathon renderings of work by J.M. Synge and Tom Murphy. Might a
DruidBeckett be in the offing?
“I don’t think so,” says Hynes. “I’m not sure I’d want
to go into that world, or put the audience into that world, for so long.”
One of the
earliest sightings of Godot in Edinburgh was in 1967 at the Traverse, then in
its Grassmarket home, when Gordon McDougall directed John Sheddon and a young
Richard Wilson as Didi and Gogo. Half a century later, it seems, the waiting
has finally stopped.
Waiting for Godot, Royal Lyceum Theatre, August 3-12.
The List Edinburgh Festivals Guide - July 2018
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