The Gentrification of Sam Beckett

It must be climate change, it’s raining Becketts. Earlier this year there were eight presentations of Samuel Beckett’s plays in four states. Two productions of Endgame were playing at the same time in Melbourne and Sydney, and on successive nights I saw both performances. They were dollar a minute, one-act plays staged by the Melbourne and Sydney Theatre Companies. Endgame isn’t the one about the meaninglessness of life with the two tramps waiting for someone who never turns up, or the one about the meaninglessness of life with the woman buried up to her neck in sand, it’s the one about the meaninglessness of life with Hamm (the blind man who can’t walk), Clov (Hamm’s servant who can’t sit), and Nagg and Nell (Hamm’s legless parents who live onstage in separate dustbins). It’s sometimes described as the greatest play of the last century, and a comedy (sort of). If Ern Malley had written a play, this would have been it.

I start in Sydney. Hugo Weaving is outside the theatre. He’s a bearded and serious-looking fifty-five-year-old in a decorative red jacket who doesn’t look as though he’s having much fun: “Hugo Weaving in a Modern Masterpiece”. The same photo is used on the program cover. Inside the theatre there is a friendly buzz of noise before the play begins. The lights dim, most conversations stop and on stage Beckett’s “bare interior” is revealed to be a grey-walled concrete room inside a tall, conical silo. Beckett was notoriously exigent that his plays are performed exactly as written, and director Andrew Upton, known for his lethal direction of classic play adaptations, is restrained in what he can do. Beckett’s two open windows are there and they have been joined by others which have been bricked up. There are two metal bins, inhabited by Hamm’s parents: an American theatre company got themselves into hot water when they substituted a Dumpster for the bins. An armchair with castors covered by a sheet is centre stage. The picture still hangs, face to the wall, near the door. The small Beckett stepladder has become a tall Upton ladder. Minor novelties that won’t arouse Beckett Estate wrath.

Almost immediately, for no sane reason, there are scattered outbreaks of Babbitt laughter as the young servant, Clov (Tom Budge), wanders about the stage and leads us into a land of pauses and repetitions. The text directions for what the actor is doing are as boring to read as they are to watch: “He looks up at window left. He turns and looks at window right. He goes and stands under window right. He looks up at window right.” And on and on for about five minutes. Sparks of forced laughter, for a fire that never ignites, occur around the theatre.

For a while I wonder if Clov is meant to be human or if we are being offered some quite new interpretation in which he has become a different, nuclear-winter genetically modified species. The actor does some strange business with the ladder to go with his constrained stage walk. To pick up the tall ladder he sinks low down and grasps it somewhere near the base and then half rises. It is an unnatural performance and, even after we have seen it done several times, remains unfunny—except for the Babbitts who seem rather amused each time it happens.

Covers on the two metal bins and the chair are removed. The pace is slow as the sheets are folded away and the play heads towards the words. Clov’s almost silent soliloquy has been staged as a NIDA audition piece. Hamm is uncovered in the chair. More laughter from the Babbitts. The program says it’s Hugo Weaving. It may be his sit-in (the character never moves). The disguised actor is topped by a toque, and below that are sunglasses covered in white stuff and then a beard. It’s a hipster rendition: Hamm as a cool geezer. He can’t walk and doesn’t move much. The performer could have been replaced by a tape recorder (anticipating Krapp’s Last Tape). The glasses come off and I’m still not sure it was Hugo Weaving.

Heads pop out of the bins. Bruce Spence is definitely in one of them. Stork is sixty-nine. From middle distance it is hard to see what he is doing as his face is covered in white stuff. He’s Nagg, Hamm’s father. Six foot seven inches (now minus legs of course) and living in a tin bin. His wife Nell (Sarah Peirse), is also there, and also whitewashed. The line in the performance that gets most laughter occurs when they are talking:

Nagg: Our hearing hasn’t failed.

Nell: Our what?

Nagg: Our hearing.

Fifty-eight years after its first production audiences still find it necessary to show us they get a joke that was perhaps deliberately chosen for its staleness. The middle-class audience may be laughing at a joke on middle-class audiences who laugh at anything for which they have paid for a ticket. There is more comedy when a can of disinfectant to kill a flea in Clov’s crotch unleashes enough floating white powder to fog the stage.

Four people in a bare room for a hundred minutes, conversations at the end of a world: a three-legged stuffed dog, a dropped telescope, a biscuit, Nagg wants his pap, arguments, deaths, “My kingdom for a nightman”, “There are no more bicycle wheels”, “Something is taking its course”, and so on until Hamm “remains motionless”. With Beckett, as with Sidney Nolan, you could wonder if the great career began with a private joke that was taken very seriously by the public or those close to him, and then by the creator: the first Ned Kelly painting in Nolan’s case, and Waiting for Godot in Beckett’s.

Near me are two serious admirers. Before the play begins they are talking a little loudly, but with great enthusiasm and knowledge. During the performance they mark some points with audible laughs. They also yawn. The two actions, the laughter and the yawn, state a serious intellectual argument. Endgame is a masterpiece, and is as boring as hell. Of course, another argument could be that their laughter and yawns represent the victory of audience pretentiousness over audience boredom, and a play which elicits this response is poor theatre.

Two curtain calls and we are released. Leaving the theatre a person I suspect of Irish descent whispers to me, “No matter how bad you expect Beckett to be, it’s always worse.” It’s the best line of the night.

Beckett came to public notice as a playwright when En attendant Godot was first played in a small seventy-five-seat Parisian theatre in 1953. It aroused enjoyable controversy. Written in French by an Irish writer resident in France, it came from a familiar and always vibrant French avant-garde tradition. Somewhere in the background is Jarry and earlier French literary movements, and there are connections with the theatre of Genet and Sartre. Much further back is an 1847 play by Balzac in which the characters are “waiting for Godeau” who never appears onstage. Beckett said he hadn’t known of the play when he wrote his own, though that seems unlikely. Seen as part of French theatre tradition, the comment by Jean Anouilh that its opening was the most important since the first night of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author in 1923 makes good sense and places it within French theatre practice and traditions. It was fitting that the first Australian performance of Waiting for Godot in 1957 featured a young Barry Humphries: always more at home in Dada than Camberwell.

In England there was not the same tradition of avant-gardism and Waiting for Godot was at odds with theatrical traditions of comic wit, narrative storytelling and entertainment. Godot’s success made boredom bourgeois.

On the first night of Waiting for Godot in London there was dismay and extreme anxiety backstage after the performance. The reviews the next day were bad and the theatre owner wanted to take the play down. The director, Peter Hall, asked that he at least wait until the Sunday reviews appeared. Theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay, who had been in the audience, suggested Hall immediately send a copy of Beckett’s novel Watt to the Sunday Times critic Harold Hobson to deepen his interest in the work. The gift may have also suggested to the critic that a bad review on his part, of a play already praised in Europe, would be placing himself on the wrong side of the modernist revolution. Hall sent the book and attributed Hobson’s “complete Pauline conversion to Beckett” to his action. His choice of words suggest the critic changed direction between seeing the play and publishing his review. The Sunday article was everything a young director could have hoped for: “Hobson’s notice began with a reference to Watt, and then developed into the kind of panegyric that theatre people imagine in paradise … Hobson saved Godot.” When Hobson himself later wrote of the event he did not mention being contacted by Hall:

One sometimes wonders mischievously how many of the university professors who now write books on the works of Beckett, and the PhD candidates who prepare theses on him would have recognized his greatness as a writer if Ken Tynan and I had not been in the audience that first night to recognize instantly his greatness and to proclaim it far and wide; and how many of them, if they had come to it without instruction, would have been on the side of the Philistines.

Once converted, Hobson followed up with a series of articles on Godot. In one he dealt with what he thought was a very Christian moment when Vladimir said, “Christ have mercy on us,” and raised his bowler hat. The business with the hat was Hall’s idea to help an actor who was having trouble with his costume.

Kenneth Tynan’s original review made an assertion many playgoers would agree with, though it could lead them to a conclusion completely opposite his. Tynan suggested that Godot succeeded “by appealing to a definition of drama much more fundamental than any in the books. A play, it asserts and proves, is basically a means of spending two hours in the dark without being bored.” But for many in the audience Godot bored, and still bores.

Early negative reviews were not because of philistinism, and the audience members who expressed their dislike do not deserve the epithets of “smug” and “stupid” which are used to describe them. These were theatregoers who had recently and enthusiastically welcomed the arrival of Brecht. The first-night Guardian reviewer found the language “flat and feeble in the extreme”. Though Tynan was offering praise, he and the Guardian critic were clearly describing the same thing both had seen: “human speech half-heard and reproduced with all its non-sequiturs absurdly intact”. So was American journalist Marya Mannes in a despatch for the Reporter in New York:

They talk gibberish to each other and to two “symbolic” maniacs for two hours, their dialogue punctuated every few minutes by such remarks as “What are we waiting for?” “Nothing is happening,” and “Let’s hang ourselves.” The last was a good suggestion, unhappily discarded.

A modern drama textbook teaches that Godot “was both so brilliant and so different from anything that audiences were accustomed to that it became a great talking point in cultural circles”. That younger generations have been taught these misleading platitudes is misery-making. They should be made aware that other opinions are permissible. In 2014 a new-generation Guardian writer demonstrated the power of education over common sense when describing the language of Godot as “irreverent, scatological, yet profound”.

Godot had a major influence on mid-century theatre: it distanced theatre-makers and theatregoers. This was a bad lesson, which many bad playwrights learnt well. Better playwrights like Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, who claimed to have been influenced by Beckett, took whatever they thought they had learnt forward into the theatrical mainstream.

Now, while drama school wannabe Becketts are dreaming of 1950s theatre redux, the plays themselves have been subversively undermined by the introduction of ham. The Beckett Estate does not seem to have a ruling against this. The divisive avant-garde plays have become star vehicles for big talents, and egos. Audiences scurry forth to see film and television stars as tramps, or heads popping out of trashcans. In Sydney there was Hugo Weaving in Endgame (playing Hamm), and Godot, with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, has been an international touring success. Audiences flock to fame. They are told that Beckett plays are famous, and they know the actors are—the plays are presented as crowd-pleasing entertainment. In a wonderful irony, Sam Beckett touches new audiences because of Star Trek, X-Men, The Lord of the Rings and Priscilla. Also, of course, because of education systems which teach him alongside Shakespeare and Euripides.

In Melbourne I walked past the National Gallery. Anzac Day was coming and the great walls were covered in changing projected images of names cut into stone war memorials, paintings and photos. It was marvellous and moving. Bright colours reflected from the moat at its feet. At the theatre there is a roped-off space in the foyer for schoolbags. Endgame is being studied this year and being used to persecute another generation of students.

A BIG iron-sheeted curtain shields the stage. In the auditorium the loud cheerful chatter of adolescent depravity. Curtain up and silence. Immediately, there is a very different atmosphere to Sydney last night. Much, much less Babbitt laughter. Where Andrew Upton favoured novelty, Sam Strong’s direction is clear and firm. I’m sitting closer to the stage. Colin Friels is in the chair. Strong calls himself a “Beckett nerd” which, in his case, is almost forgivable. He takes the language seriously and his actors don’t need covering in white paint. The set is simple and bleak. Clov (Luke Mullins) does his opening routine faster than Sydney. Friels (Hamm) is loud and clear—Shakespearean in delivery but dismally Beckett in content. The costumes are simpler, and cleaner. Andrew Upton’s production was directorial novelty to divert attention from the text, Sam Strong’s concentrates on it. Nagg and Nell in their bins (Rhys McConnochie and Julie Forsyth) are closer to me and clearer—their faces not covered in white stuff. Nell is amusing. She has a high-pitched voice, mischievous sexy looks. Lots of face pulling by Nagg. “I’ve lost me tooth,” he says, and I watch and watch to see he’s lying.

Around me are the students being introduced to Beckett, and theatre, and from the contorted positions they adopt in their seats as the play progresses neither seems a pleasure. Decrepit plays that deserve euthanasia are kept alive by discovering new dogmas in old words. Jonah Goldberg, in Liberal Fascism, describes the new interpretation applied to a well-known anti-McCarthy warhorse:

Arthur Miller’s propagandistic play The Crucible has become a classic statement of the left’s obsession with the “sex panic” of the right … Powerful men who can’t handle sexually autonomous women use the tools of the state to launch a witch hunt.

Tonight an information note, probably intended for the kids, is available as you enter. It places Endgame within the Cold War and fears of a nuclear outbreak then pushes it towards more recent concerns: “our notion of apocalypse having shifted more towards the environmental”. Endgame and climate change seem made for a senior school essay:

Hamm: Nature has forgotten us.

Clov: There’s no more nature.

Hamm: No more nature! You exaggerate.

Clov: In the vicinity.

Hamm: But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals!

Clov: Then she hasn’t forgotten us.

Despite the writing, the simple staging of Beckett’s plays makes striking images. The marvellous, posed black-and-white photographs from Godot’s original London production, mortuary photos of twentieth-century theatre, don’t show how boring the play really was. Now, as Hamm heads into his final monologue, Clov is leaving. He had disappeared offstage and reappears in the open doorway: the door has banged loudly every time it has been used. He stops still and, as Hamm talks, stands rigidly in the doorframe like an exclamation mark. The costume is completely unexpected. He is wearing a wide brimmed hat, a jacket, carrying a coat and holding a white umbrella—the umbrella is fat and bulges like a cartoon image. It suggests a personality completely unlike that of the young servant we have been watching during the performance. It is not a Sam Strong invention—this is how Beckett described the scene, and you wonder, “Why?” It is so different from what has come before that Hamm’s voice fades into background noise as you sit and read the image. Of course, there is no answer. It just is.

In 1938 Sam Beckett was punctured with a knife by a high-strung Parisian pimp named Prudent. When he recovered he was able to ask the man, “Why?” His own plays deny audiences the right to ask, “Why?” In Beckett there is no reason for anything, he explains nothing: critics invent everything. This is the reason he has been so successful.

Of the two productions, Melbourne’s is better: it’s shorter. One curtain call and freedom. Outside, the Anzac images have gone from the gallery walls. Walking towards Swanston Street the roadway ahead is flanked by two large billboards. From high up on St Paul’s Cathedral a sad looking little girl looks towards the viewer: “Let’s fully welcome refugees.” The other, above Young and Jackson’s pub, shows an almost naked Justin Bieber in Calvin Klein underwear. I don’t think it’s Godot they are waiting for, and neither are we.

The Sydney Theatre Company production of Endgame played at the Roslyn Packer Theatre from April 17 to May 9, and the Melbourne Theatre Company production at The Sumner from March 21 to April 25.