little catastorophes
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 narrow 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.
Castrostophe,
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 Mament’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 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
Although she was
born in New Orleans and danced with several companies in New York,
choreographer and performer Meg Stuart now lives in Belgium where she has
worked on over 30 productions, including Visitors
Only, Built to Last, UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP, and, with
Phillipp Gehmacher, Maybe Forever,
performed at Redcat in 2009.
When one finally felt that, after all of
these numerous movements, she must be exhausted,
Stuart picked up a microphone and began a kind of long monologue about speaking
itself, a future devoted to political marches, and aspects of her past life,
including the meaning of her own name—all of these seemingly improvisatory,
which helped, like the movements before it, to create a immense rapport with
the audience, implicitly suggesting that if she were on the “hunt” for who she
was, is, and will be, that we must, at least mentally, join her.