little
catastrophes
by Douglas Messerli
Samuel Beckett Act Without Words II, Come and Go, Catastrophe, Footfalls, and Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett5) / Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, Sunday, January
29, 2017 / I attended the production with Pablo Capra and Paul Sand
The other day, upon the news of
British actor John Hurt’s death, I told my occasional theater-going friend,
Pablo Capra, that I had already seen two of Hurt’s performances of the great
Beckett play, Krapp’s Last Tape, one
in a film version of the Beckett on Film
series by Atom Egoyan and a second time, live at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in
Culver City, California—both of which I had reviewed.
The very next day, we were planning to attend another local production
of five short Beckett plays, including Krapp’s
Last Tape, at Los Angeles’ Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, and he questioned me
why might I want to see it again. I told him that, well, one simply could not
get enough of Beckett, and that, even though I’d thought Hurt’s performance the
highest pinnacle of that work, I’d probably be going back to Beckett plays, of
every sort, for the rest of my life.
I still feel this, despite the fact that the Odyssey production of some
of Beckett’s short plays, including Act
Without Words II, Come and Go, Catastrophe, Footfalls, and, yes again, Krapp’s
Last Tape was rather a mixed bag.
Let me begin by commending all of the actor’s and the theater’s
abilities and enthusiasm in reviving these wonderful plays. That is, in fact,
what brings me to the marvelous Odyssey many times. Their mix of classic plays
and new theater works is one of the reasons why the Los Angeles theater scene
is so very vibrant and unpredictable, and which allows me to see good and even
excellent theater without always having to trot off to New York or to other
cities.
But Beckett is difficult. First, he is so extraordinarily
particularized. What you might describe as his scenarios for theater,
especially—despite their seeming abstractness—demanding a kind of preciseness
of sets, costumes, and actions that might only be compared to the American
playwright Eugene O’Neill, who details his directions endlessly. Indeed, often
there are more theatrical instructions to Beckett’s works than actual words.
The other difficulty about Beckett’s plays is that, although they are
often about impossibly lost and frustrated souls, his figures are also clowns,
fools, and even idiots who demand that his characters not be played with deep
dramatic gestures. The very abstractness, for example, of Act Without Words II, in which two are buried in bags, each, one by
one, poked into life, is a challenge to any actor who desires to create a
character. In this production, Alan Abelew and Beth Hogan, each podded by Norbert
Weisser into temporary being, met with varying success.
Abelew presented his figure as a kind of tragic sad-sack, a bit like
Nagg in Beckett’s Endgame,
dramatizing the character in a way that, alas, made him more a existentially
troubled figure rather than a merely morose one. Hogan, as the kind of
happy-to-be-alive-again reincarnation, was much more successful—but that just
may have to do with the fact that she is a more outsized and joyful figure.
I think director Enda Hughes got this short work more precisely in his
narrowly framed film with Marcello Magni and Pat Kinenave, which I saw after on
the internet, where the characters, moving with a kind of silent-film
jitteriness, came to life in more a Butser Keatonesque manner
than Abelew’s and director Ron Sossi’s exaggerated
counter-hero.
Far more successful was Come and
Go, a play originally dedicated to my acquaintance, the British publisher
John Calder, with—in this production—the three actresses, Diana Cignoni,
Sheelagh Culler, and, again, Hogan, who, a bit more sparkly dressed
(particularly given their shoes, designed by Audrey Eisner), seemed to have
retained some of their charming youth, which had once connected them in their
early school days, despite their now gossip-mongering whispers (never heard by
the audience) about what appear to be unknown failures in their life and their
current marriages. I far preferred it, in fact, to the John Crow film, with the
more dowdily dressed Paoli Dionisotti, Anna Massey, and Sian Phillips. For this
play, Beckett even provided a drawing of how, at the end, the characters need
to entwine their hands in a symbolic Celtic knot, demonstrating just how
specific the playwright was with regard to the way he wanted his works to be
performed.
Catastrophe, also starring
Abelew, Hogan, and Weisser was also pretty loyal to Beckett’s instructions.
This play, often described as one of the playwright’s most political works—and
originally dedicated to the imprisoned Czech playwright and later President, Václav Havel—is even, in part, about how the
playwright’s intentions are too often distorted by the directors. Here, a
living emblem of sorts, a kind of figure that appears might be right out of the
Holocaust, is used as the subject of a soon-to-be-performed work in which the
Director’s Assistant is equally subjected to absurd instructions of how to
dress and undress, to whiten and light a living human being, as if he were
simply a prop. Here Abelew, with graceful agility, lifts his head in a kind of
final triumph against the directorial dogmatism, demonstrating a subtle
revolutionary expression that denigrates the “catastrophe” (in this meaning,
“an act of defiance”) in which he finds himself. And again, this short playlet
seemed far preferable to David Mamet’s transformed rendition in his Beckett of Film version—even though it’s
hard to imagine his better cast than Harold Pinter as the Director and John
Gielgud (in his final performance) as the living statue.
Diana Cigoni performed remarkably well in Footfalls, a play about a young daughter ritualistically pacing
outside her dying mother’s door. But frankly, this 1975 play is simply not one
of my favorite Beckett works. Perhaps it’s simply the metronomic structure of
the play, the nine steps forward and the nine creaks back that make it seem,
quite literally, a kind of creaking monologue, even though the “never have
done” pattern and the endless dying “viduity” of the mother has a great deal in
common with the author’s Krapp’s Last
Tape. Yes, it’s a musical work, and the patterns of language he uses here
are often quite beautiful, but, in the end, it all seems somehow much to do
about nothing. The woman, like Krapp, simply might have made more of her life
out playing lacrosse, her childhood sport.
During the intermission I discussed
these plays with my other theater-going companion of the evening, improvisatory
comedian Paul Sand, and we both agreed that, despite the noble intentions of
these productions and, my recognition of the remarkable directorial work of
Sossi (I’ve now seen dozens of his productions) that Beckett was simply better
with a lighter hand. And, as I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, I had
seen John Hurt do Krapp twice.
I truly admire the acting of Norbert Weisser, having seen him in my
friend John O’Keefe’s Nazi-period play, Times
Like These. And, given the difficulties of the work, I admire him for
attempting the nearly impossible Beckett monologue, indeed a brave undertaking.
But Krapp, unlike Weisser’s interpretation, is not a failed lover angry
with his past, but is, like so many of Beckett’s figures, an absolute fool, a
man who could only bother to gather up
his love for a single night’s
pleasure. And as beautiful as that one
night may have been, he is not a conventional hero, but an absolute idiot,
another clown whom Beckett even forces, temporarily, to fall upon a banana
peel—the banana being, apparently, his favorite and perhaps only—other than his
endless draughts of whiskey—sustenance.
Krapp, like his name, is not a secret Marlon Brando: no brutal beauty
like Stanley Kowalski or even a “former contender” such as Terry Malloy of On the Waterfront, so there’s no way to
act from your heart as if you were a student of Method Acting. Krapp is a
figure of his own imagination, of his memory; and playing him requires a very
precise precision: open a drawer, pile up the “spools,” eat a banana, and listen,
respond, drink, and listen. Impulsive anger, fits of sentimentality are
pointless in his world. He has already died before the play has begun.
All of this is not to say that I do not commend these actors and their
valiant performances. And I truly recommend everyone run to seem them. As I’ve
already stated, Beckett requires constant viewing. If I had no other plays,
movies, operas, and dances to attend to in the next few weeks (as, somewhat
regretfully, I do) I’d return without reservation.
Los Angeles, January 30, 2017
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2017)
