What is your Samuel Beckett like?

Question

I am writing my MP on Beckett's drama Endgame, and I am very curious what is his/ its reception today.
Have you seen any of his plays? Have you directed or acted in any of his dramas (be that professional, experimental, or school play)?
What was the most difficult thing about it? What did you like the most? How did people receive it?
What is your approech to his work?
Thank you!

Answer 1

I played the role of Hamm in a production of "Endgame" several years ago. It was an AMAZING piece to work on -- funny, moving, frightening, etc. -- but, I have to admit that I was very concerned about how our average audience would respond to it. It was such an intellectual challenge for those of us who worked on it...would the audience be able to follow themes that had taken us weeks to work out?

I needn't have worried. Whatever else he was up to, Beckett was always a very shrewd man of the theatre, and audiences absolutely LOVED "Endgame."

In terms of an approach to his work...the key is to do it the way he wrote it. Remember, Beckett once tried to shut down a production of "Endgame" in New York, because the director opted to change the setting from Beckett's carefully scripted stage directions. That production (you can find photos of it) was sort of a post-apocalyptic thing...set in a bombed-out subway station. Okay, fine. As a working image for the play, I suppose that works. But, I suspect that Beckett kept his settings vague and amorphous for a reason. After all, why FORCE everyone in the audience into only ONE interpretation, when the text of the play offers the possibility of so many more...?

Answer 2

While I have not actually performed in any of Beckett's plays, a professor gave me an enlightening outlook on his texts. As you probably know, reading Beckett can be just as difficult as performing.

One thing I was intrigued by was Beckett's embrace of vaudeville, which is ever-present in plays like Waiting for Godot and Endgame. His characters are trapped in a vaudeville routine, forced to move through the same actions hour after hour despite their hopelessness.

This gets at the main theory behind all of Beckett's drama. How our comfort and our society places us in a routine that deprives us of higher consciousness (see Godot for reference) and prevents us from escaping from our problems.

The most challenging thing about Beckett is that his plays are almost plotless. The stories stagnate after building to what seems to be a climax. So many directors, then, ruin Beckett's works by attempting to give the plays some convoluted image of meaning and story when there is only the written word on the page. When this word is not followed, the audience is left empty.

The vaudeville routine is an objective for an actor that suddenly allows action in the play without forcing plot upon it. Beckett's plays become comedy shows of despair, clowns making jokes to hide their pain. It is the most logical way I have found to read his plays, and one of the few ways a modern audience can digest it, specifically in a world that drives almost all of its entertainment through plot and action. In a world with such a low attention span, it is difficult to perform Beckett any other way.