Samuel Beckett was told about my work. I was delighted to receive a beautiful handwritten letter from him suggesting a time and a place for a meeting. When we met he asked me questions like, ‘What happened to my play when you gave it to people who live in darkness? What happened with the silences in the play? What happened with the rhythms?’ I answered that, when we rehearsed, the actors worked and worked until they made the words their own. This resulted in the performance becoming believable, beautiful, and sensuous as the actors reached the very heart of the play. Samuel Beckett looked me straight in the eyes and his gaze went straight through me. He nodded quietly with a warm smile. ‘Why did you only perform the first act?’ he asked. ‘Did they not like the second act? Was there something wrong with it?’ I answered that they loved the play, but that we did not have the money to pay for the rights to perform it all. ‘So, the whole problem is financial, is it?’ Sam asked. I answered that this was indeed the case. Then he quickly took a serviette from the table next to us, folded it out and wrote in his beautiful hand that he gave me the rights to set up the production of the whole play. Tenderly he folded the serviette and gave it to me, saying ‘Take care of this serviette. Go back to these people … do the whole play … take them on the road … then come back to me and tell me what happened …’!
Extremely pleased I returned to Kumla prison to meet my brothers and, with strength renewed, we began work on the whole play. This time it was easier to get to its heart. We had been there before. There was a new tour; we were to visit three places, with a première at the Stadsteatern in Gothenburg. After a press conference, four of the five actors, quietly and unnoticed, left through the stage exit, and quickly made their way across Europe! Chaos broke out at the theatre and there was a national alarm about what had happened. All the tickets were sold out, the audience were waiting in their seats, oblivious to what had happened. With a cool head but a body in turmoil, hungry, thirsty and almost blind without my spectacles, I went on to the stage, with a chair in one hand and a Perrier in the other and blurted out, ‘Welcome to the Gothenburg theatre. I’m sorry we will not be performing Waiting for Godot tonight. Four of the five actors are at this moment not in the building.’
It seemed as if the audience had stopped breathing. An elderly man on the first row with thick spectacles and a hearing-aid got up from his seat and asked me, ‘I’m sorry … what is it that is not here?’ ‘THE ACTORS!’ I shouted back at him. I stayed on stage, between the stone and the tree on Beckett’s country road, and told the story of my time at Kumla prison to the shocked audience.
Soon I was sitting in front of Mr Beckett again in Paris. He took one look at my face before asking me softly, ‘Whatever happened?’ I answered in a low voice, ‘Six hours before curtain-up all of them except Pozzo escaped …’ For a short moment Sam held his breath, then he burst out laughing and said softly, ‘That’s the best thing that has ever happened to my play since I wrote it!’
News of my production in Kumla reached the management at San Quentin state prison in California and, after a preliminary meeting, Jim Carlsson, who was the chief of the ‘Arts in Correction’ at the prison, became my contact person to work with me in giving Sam Beckett’s play to a group of inmates there to see what would happen.
I returned to Sam in Paris, and with great enthusiasm told him about it. I told him that the inmates at this prison are sentenced to live the rest of their entire lives there. He answered, ‘If they ask you to stay there and set up a production of my play, please do me a favour. Go for it! Find out again what happens when the play is given to people who have no hope of being pardoned’.
I returned to San Francisco and to the gigantic place that is San Quentin. There I met hundreds of inmates desperately seeking some form of self-expression, some way of bearing their existence in their small cells. After months of intensive conversations and readings, I finally found four people whom I identified with the play’s characters. I found everyone apart from Pozzo, so I used to read his lines. One day, there were about ten of us sitting round a table when the door to the room slowly opened. No one in the room noticed this, everyone was looking at his script. Slowly a face appeared, partially hidden by the doorframe, a face behind a pair of big sunglasses, filled with silence and deep concentration. I felt as if the room stood still. I felt that this was my Pozzo. I began reading Pozzo’s lines, looking occasionally at the face and I saw something happening in the man. He listened intensely to what Pozzo was saying. It was as if the text was shooting out of my mouth, spearing across the room and hitting the man right in the heart. Carefully I wrote a note to Jim Carlsson, beside me, folded it and slowly gave it to him. I wrote, ‘Jim, do you see the man in the doorway? I want him as Pozzo’. He wrote back, ‘You can’t use the man in the doorway. He is not talking. He has nothing more to say. Nobody in the prison has heard his voice for the last three years’. I wrote in return, ‘I still want him as Pozzo’.
The following day, about half an hour after we resumed our reading, the door opened once more, and the same man came in and positioned himself wide-legged, filling the doorway with his entire body, smoking and concentrating as before on what I was conveying to him through Pozzo’s text. The next day he appeared again with the same attitude in the doorway. The next day he entered the room. Throughout the week he came further and further into the room. The seventh day he appeared with a newly lit cigarette in his mouth and carrying a chair on his shoulder. He sat down behind Jim and me, finished his cigarette, put it out, came over to me and placed the back of his chair against the back of mine taking great care to ensure that the two chairs were touching each other. He sat down on his chair, and stared straight into the brick wall in front of him and stayed silent. I interrupted the men’s reading and quickly found a part with Pozzo’s lines. I read the following out loud, ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’. Quietly and firmly, the man pressed his chair against mine in such a way that my chair moved forwards a few millimetres. Quickly we both got up and moved our chairs to the side and faced each other in silence. Legs wide apart he stared at me from behind his shades, lit another cigarette and smoked it slowly. He has all the time in the world. Time is not rushing him. Then he put out the cigarette, took off his shades, put them in his pocket and looked me straight in the eyes for a while. Suddenly he put out his hand and we shook hands.
Spoon Jackson (left) as ‘Pozzo’ and Twin James (right) as Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, San Quentin Prison.
‘My name is Spoon Jackson,’ he said. ‘Are you coming back to this prison to do this play?’ I answered, ‘Yes, I am.’ Spoon continued, ‘Can you do me a favour? Can you give me the part of Pozzo and help me express myself? Can you give me my life back?’ I answered, ‘I would love to help you express yourself, and give you your life back.’ Spoon asked, ‘Can I trust you?’ ‘Yes!’ I answered. Proudly he took a script, put it under his arm, put his shades back on and lit another cigarette, exclaiming, ‘All right! Have a nice weekend. I’ll see you on Monday morning!’ Jim asked me, ‘How in Christ’s name did you do that?!’ I answered I did not know, the feeling was overwhelming. On Monday morning Spoon Jackson was back. He had somehow opened his door onto the world. He sat down and began to read the role of Pozzo as if he had written it himself.
We had been given a beautiful redbrick room for our rehearsals. But not far from there was ‘Death Row’ and the gas chamber. Heavily armed guards were everywhere and outside among the lush, trimmed lawns were gun towers from which faces would follow every step taken, every move made, through powerful binoculars. Posters declared No Warning Shots. This was the setting for our beautiful mission - to set up a production of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot.
During our work I frequently travelled to Paris to see Beckett and keep him informed about our progress. I told him that the men were now communicating with each other through his words, but with a rhythm and a way of listening that they had grown
up with. I told him that sometimes they would finish their lines by saying, ‘You dig what I’m saying?’ And, after finishing a dialogue, they would sometimes ‘give each other five’.
Proudly we built our stage in the prison’s large sports hall. The costumes and props were loaned to us by the ACTtheatre in San Francisco. Everything was falling into place. The prison management believed in this project, and with their support and Jim Carlsson’s presence we reached the première. The men’s family members were seated on the first row. The men got to tell their stories to their mothers, the women who had given birth to them, and who probably were the only ones to love them unconditionally. ‘Happy’, who performed the part of Estragon, opened the play by sitting still on a stone, looking his mother straight in the eyes and saying in a calm voice, ‘Nothing to be done’.
Barney Rosset, Sam’s publisher in America, came to see our production. At Sam’s request, our three performances were filmed, not by professionals but by other inmates engaged in the prison’s ‘Arts in Correction’ programme, people whom the actors could trust. Barney Rosset made sure that Sam got to see these films.
Eventually I dragged myself away from San Quentin. Once more I found myself in Paris, sitting in front of Sam. He held up a bottle of Jameson’s, looked me in the eyes and said, ‘Help yourself!’ Then he asked me, ‘Why have you done all this?’ I answered, ‘Because I love the silence in your work. I even love the silence in your face.’ We got up and Sam kissed me on my forehead and said, ‘I saw that you have got to the heart of my play. Do me a favour; go back to these people, taking my Endgame with you.’
Anthony Minghella
Anthony Minghella (1954-). Writer and film director. His films include Truly Madly Deeply, Mr Wonderful, the Oscar-winning The English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley, Cold Mountain, and, most recently, Breaking and Entering. He directed Beckett’s Play for the series Beckett on Film. Contribution revised in 2005 especially for this volume from an original text by Anthony Minghella.
I was the worst kind of Beckett anorak. I began reading his plays and novels when I arrived at university. I was at my most porous and, for the next four or five years, my thinking, my aspirations, even my handwriting was somehow defined by Beckett. I became obsessed with his writing - its mixture of austerity and romance. He’s like Bach for me. And if there are two artists who have provided a lifelong compass it would be Beckett and Bach. Both are noted for their severity of line, the dry surface, but underneath there’s a volcano, there’s lava.
My unfinished doctoral thesis was on Beckett. Play was the first play I ever directed in the theatre, in a double bill with Happy Days. For several years, I read Beckett almost on a daily basis.
Ironically, when it came to make the film of Play, the way I worked with the actors was antithetical to everything I believe in when directing my own writing. Generally, I don’t have much interest in being a martinet. The most pleasure from making drama comes from collaboration, from empowering the actors. But with Play, I found myself invading their process and trying to annihilate psychology, annihilate the organic creation of the moment. Play is not about psychology - it’s a score in some way. And we’re all hostage to it.
If you are making a film of Play, you have to find a cinematic correlative to the interrogative light, which the stage directions specify as prompting every speech; otherwise the only alternative is to lock off the camera and record a live performance. You can’t have a light moving and a camera moving - one has to be still.
When I was teaching dramatic literature, I would sometimes say to students: look at the last page of Beckett’s Play and the stage direction ‘Repeat play’. There’s no way you can experience that on the page; nobody’s going to return to the first page and read again. In a novel the reader can fully experience the author’s intention by reading, but with a play or with a screenplay, a core element of the dramatist’s art comes from the manipulation of time and space. Time is experienced in a very specific and pungent way when you’re sitting in front of a play which repeats itself. And obviously the Dantesque idea of Beckett’s is that in purgatory we’ll be forced to revisit the same trivial episodes of our lives again and again, in some kind of ironic rehearsing of life.
The interesting thing here is that the process of making a film mirrors Beckett’s conceit for Play. Film employs repetition; actors repeat their lines and actions until they are correctly captured on film. Often the camera angle will change and the same sequence will be photographed from this new position, again requiring the actors to perform their lines and movements correctly before the next position. Essentially this is what the characters in Play are doing: they’re saying things again and again, hoping they might be allowed to move on and, like actors, fearing that this might never happen.
My technique for shooting Play was not simply repeating the first iteration of the text, looping the same piece of edited film. The repeat comprises a different version of the same words, but with some recognizable and formal choreographies to allow the viewer to engage with the repetition, perceive it, experience it. The text remains exactly as it’s written, but I’m looking to get a layered quality to the film, not just pressing the rewind button. I’m trying to find a film correlative to actors repeating the piece twice. In the theatre, a black-out can be used as a powerful form of punctuation, and this is what Beckett asks for, but you can’t do that in film. Black in film means nothing. Instead, I’ve tried to use run-outs, lead-ins, fogging, clapperboards and other methods for the filmic equivalent of punctuation. They are the same kind of distancing devices.
It’s bleak, but what I think is healing in Beckett is laughter. There’s a constant movement towards farce in his plays - the frozen grin of farce. It’s farce from repetition - first time round, you laugh, and next time round it’s harder to laugh. I assume if it kept repeating the experience would get more and more terrifying. When the actors have been trapped in urns for two or three days, you start to sense their growing claustrophobia. It becomes very clear that the governing idea of this writing is terrifying and remorseless. I think the healing gradually disappeared from his writing.
Everybody who loves Beckett will say the same thing: no matter how miserable or dark or cruel it appears, his work is also profoundly uplifting. It’s honest, naked, leavened with mischief. And full of pity.
* Beckett’s personal concerns and his involvement in various campaigns for political justice and human rights are more fully charted in Damned to Fame, pp. 636-43.
* Frank Woolley (1887-1978) an elegant left-handed batsman and bowler, he played in sixty-four test matches for England from 1909, until, amazingly, he returned to play against Australia in 1934-5 at the age of forty-seven.
* In extended form, this was to become Stirrings Still, illustrated by Louis Le Brocquy, New York, Blue Moon Books; London, John Calder Publishers, 1988.
* Accused of collaboration, Louis Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) fled France in 1944 to live in Germany at Sigmaringen and then moved in 1945 to Denmark. Condemned in his absence in 1950 to a year of imprisonment and declared a national disgrace, Céline returned to France after his pardon in 1951.
* The parts of Vladimir and Estragon were played by Alec McCowen and John Alderton. Pozzo was played first by Colin Welland, then (after Welland had an accident) by Terence Rigby. Lucky was played by Peter Wight. In the end, the cast did not go to Paris to see Beckett.
10
In Brief
In this chapter we have assembled a few brief extracts from previously published tributes by several writers, a philosopher, a theatre director and a medical scientist.
Eugène Ionesco
Question: Among your contemporaries whom do you consider the best dramatist in France?
Answer: Samuel Beckett. We see each other rarely, but we’re good friends. Beckett is a fine fellow. He lives in the country [his cottage at Ussy-sur-Marne] with his wife, but we see each other when he comes in, at the theatre, in cafés, in brasseries. We d
on’t talk about anything much. He is a very generous man, very loyal. Those are rare qualities. I was told that for a long time his principal preoccupation was to play chess with himself. [From The Playwrights Speak, ed. Walter Wager, London/Harlow, Longmans, Green and Co., 1969, p. 131.]
Tom Stoppard
There’s stuff I’ve written I can’t bear to watch. They get rotten like fruit and the softest get rotten first. They’re not like ashtrays. You make an ashtray and come back next year and it’s the same ashtray. Beckett and Pinter have a lot more chance of writing ashtrays because they’ve thrown out all the potentially soft stuff. I think Beckett has redefined the minima of what theatre could be … In 1956 when Waiting for Godot was done in Bristol, Peter O’Toole was in the company. I was immobilized for weeks after I saw it. Historically, people had assumed that in order to have a valid theatrical event you had to have x. Beckett did it with x minus 5. And it was intensely theatrical. He’s now doing it with x minus 25. I think Pinter did something equally important and significant. He changed the ground rules. [From Mel Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, interview with Tom Stoppard recorded in April 1972, London, Nick Hern Books, 1995, p. 6.]
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