Beckett’s brilliance waits for no man!

ANYONE reading this has either seen or heard of the film Reservoir Dogs. The classic mob movie features a gang of criminals stuck in a room waiting for information that never arrives which leads to increasing tension and a grand crescendo of operatic violence. What fewer people know is Quentin Tarantino’s gangster classic is simply Samuel Beckett’s Absurdist Play Waiting for Godot reimagined in a mobster setting. If you get Tarantino’s films and his characters’ use of everyday dialogue which is employed to alleviate the underlying tension, then you will understand Waiting for Godot (above), which has just completed a successful run at the Citizens.

Sam in Éire

Tarantino has made some classic films; however, Samuel Beckett’s life reads like a movie script. Indeed, so extraordinary was Beckett’s life that it was turned into a biopic. Gabriel Byrne played the writer in the critically acclaimed Dance First (2023). Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in Foxrock, County Dublin on Friday April 13, 1906. The actual day of his birth fell on Good Friday or as the Irish ironically refer to it, Lucky Friday. Beckett appreciated the black humour of his birthday.

The ironic quirks of Beckett’s fate would continue when he won a scholarship to one of the most prestigious public schools in Ireland, Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. The school’s most famous/infamous old boy was Oscar Wilde. The uncanny coincidence that the greatest playwright of the 19th century and the most influential dramatist of the 20th century attending the same school was not lost on Beckett, the master of the Theatre of the Absurd movement.

Although 50 years apart, Beckett would follow in Wilde’s footsteps and attended Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Like Wilde—who was a champion boxer at Trinity—Beckett would excel at sport and is the only Nobel laureate to play first class cricket having played for TCD during the season 1925-1926. Such was Sam the student’s cricketing prowess, that he is recorded in the cricketing bible Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.

French connection

When not playing first-class county cricket, Beckett was excelling academically and, in the early 1930s, he was offered a prestigious teaching position at TCD. Ever his own man, the budding writer was not content to ply his trade in what he saw as the culturally claustrophobic Free State. When he turned down the opportunity of academic career in Ireland’s greatest university, he quipped that Trinity was filled ‘with cream of Ireland, rich and thick.’ Upon committing academic suicide most fledgling writers would have sank into relative literary obscurity, not Beckett. He headed for Paris and he was befriended by James Joyce who became his mentor and would offer Beckett a room in the Joyce family home.

During the 1930s, the greatest writer and the most influential playwright of the 20th century would collaborate and nurture each other’s creativity. The product of their partnership would be Finnegan’s Wake. Beckett helped the nearly blind Joyce finish his novel. However, their friendship became strained when Beckett rejected the romantic overtures of Joyce’s daughter Lucia. At the time handsome Sam was in a relationship with the American heiress and founder of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, Peggy Guggenheim. Although, the two writers were divided by love loyalties, the coming Second World War united them in defiance of the Nazis.

Resistance

Until his death in 1940, Joyce would offer sanctuary in his Parisian home to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. However, Beckett’s wartime bravery would trump his former mentor’s humanitarianism and read like a Bond novel. Whilst other Existential writers, such Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir, did little but wait for liberation during France’s Nazi occupation, the Irishman sprang into action and joined the Resistance.

He and his future wife, the pianist and left-wing activist, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, became members of the fearless Resistance cell “Gloria SMH.” Their activities included translating Nazi documents from French into English and smuggling them to the Allies. When an informer betrayed them, they narrowly escaped the Gestapo and left Paris for Roussillon in the unoccupied South. Making their way through Nazi occupied territory to Vichy France, the couple slept in haystacks by day and travelled by foot at night. This perilous journey was said to be the inspiration for Godot.

When they arrived in the south they continued their activities for the rest of the war. After the war, Beckett was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Resistance for his courage. When the Irishman was asked for comment on his wartime activities the famously modest Dubliner replied: “It was boy scout stuff” and later wryly comment that: “France at war, is Ireland at peace.”

Plot

Waiting for Godot has just completed its three-week run at the rejuvenated Citizens Theatre in the Gorbals, Glasgow. It is directed by Dominic Hill and stars Mathew Kelly as Vladimir and George Costigan as Estragon, who are the lead characters in the Absurdist masterpiece. The play opens with Vladimir and Estragon, two tramps, waiting beside a leafless tree on a barren country road. Both are worse for wear and begin to discuss their ailments and the pointlessness of waiting for Godot and contemplate leaving. Their conversations go from their failing bodies to the nature of existence.

Whilst the pair are waiting, they encounter Pozzo and his slave Lucky. Pozzo is a domineering brutal bully who is utterly cruel in his treatment of Lucky. Lucky, who is mostly mute throughout the play, yet begins to speak and gives a long-disjointed monologue about the meaning of life. The speech is uniquely Irish in tone and in content. Anyone, who has spent time in Heraghty’s pub on a wet Wednesday night in January, will have heard a variation of this speech being delivered by a friend or regular. After Pozzo and Lucky leave, a young boy arrives with a message from Godot saying that he is not coming, but promises to arrive tomorrow.

In the second act, the same scenario repeats itself with slight variations. Pozzo returns, now blind, and Lucky is mute. The boy again delivers Godot’s message that he in not coming, but will arrive tomorrow. Vladimir and Estragon continue to wait, debating suicide and questioning their existence, yet they wait as the curtain falls. In 1953, when Godot was first performed in Paris’ Left Bank, the critics were dumfounded by its lack of conventional theatre structure. One reviewer famously quipping: “Nothing happens, twice.”

Godot in Glasgow

Kelly and Costigan are spellbinding as Vladimir and Estragon. Their theatrical chemistry draws the audience in to their absurd, but very real predicament. Whilst Gbolahan Obisesan is suitably cruel as the brutal slave owning Pozzo, it is Michael Hodgson who entrances the audience as Lucky in his delivery of one of the great monologues of modern theatre.

It is in this soliloquy we hear the sound Beckett’s truly Irish voice, where all manner of things is discussed—in particular, the mythical importance of Connemara and its symbolic place in Celtic Ireland. Anyone who is from an Irish background who has spent time talking where big and small issues are aired, will get this speech without necessarily fully understanding it. The monologue whilst having universal themes is uniquely Irish in its lack of conventional structure and delivery. When you hear it, you can imagine your friend or uncle delivering it in your local pub. Is the speech absurd? Maybe! Is it Irish? Definitely.

Sam plays San Quentin

Waiting for Godot is the Citizen Kane of theatre. All modern playwrights reference it; some steal from it, but none of them equal it. It is simply a masterpiece yet to be surpassed since its first performance. When it premiered in 1953 in a small theatre in Paris’ Left Bank, the critic Vivian Mercier wrote that the playwright ‘has achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats… he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice.’

Such is the impact of Godot that it has toured prisons to mass acclaim from the inmates. In 1957, when it was performed in San Quentin in California. The prison audience found it profoundly relevant to their incarceration. One former prisoner, Ed Reed, a jazz vocalist who provided the musical accompaniment for evening’s entertainment, when the play premiered said: “Godot was pretty special,” he said. “Everybody loved it.” From the darkest depths of prison to the silly heights of children’s comedy Godot has had a cultural impact. Sesame Street’s, Monsterpiece Theatre slot on the show, featured Waiting for Elmo. Beckett’s masterpiece has had an artistic reach that ranges from Tarantino’s mean streets to Sesame Street.

Beckett’s Absurdist life

Not content with co-authoring Finnegan’s Wake, awarded France’s highest Resistance medal and writing the most influential play of the century, Beckett continued his Absurdist life journey. After Godot premiered in 1953 the Dubliner built a farmhouse north of Paris and was helped by a local farmer to construct the buildings. They were assisted in their building endeavours by the farmer’s tall son Andre. The playwright and the boy bonded over sports with Beckett teaching Andre cricket and wrestling. The boy grew up to be Andre the Giant, the 7ft 4in, the national wrestling champion of France. In his unusual career, Andre the Giant competed against Hulk Hogan and starred in numerous films including the Hollywood fairytale, The Princess Bride (1987). Both in his professional writing life and in his personal life, Beckett was truly the master of the absurd.

When not teaching giants to play cricket, Beckett was collaborating with Buster Keaton, the silent movie comedy genius from Tinseltown’s golden era. In 1965 the playwright penned the script for the avant-garde movie Film which starred the 70-year-old Keaton. Although the movie flopped Beckett called it ‘an interesting failure.’ Later in the decade, in 1969, the Dubliner won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The publicity shy Beckett refused to accept the award in person and gave the considerable prize money to his alma mater Trinity College.

Ireland beckons Sam

In the late 1970s, the Dubliner returned home to direct Waiting for Godot at the Abbey Theatre. Ireland’s prodigal son took his masterpiece to the centre stage of Ireland’s National Theatre to great critical acclaim and commercial success. The writer died in Paris on December 22, 1989, six months after his lifelong love and wife Suzanne. In his extraordinary life, Beckett had helped to redefine theatre and modern culture with his classic play. When it was first premiered, Waiting for Godot was not an immediate success, yet Beckett persevered with his masterpiece and lived by his own motto to the full when he said: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Dr David McKinstry is a teacher and poet whose poems are widely published and broadcast across Ireland and in the UK. If any readers wish to share their literary output with him, they can contact him at: davmick38h@yahoo.co.uk