A Film Review/Essay by Dan Boyle
Dance First (2024), Directed by James Marsh
In a splendidly attended dream sequence in James Marsh’s film biography Dance First (2023), Samuel Beckett is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. – ‘Quelle catastrophe!‘ He mutters. Whereas the floor might well have opened beneath him, tumbling him downwards into the circles of Dante’s Inferno, this Samuel Beckett curtly breezes past the M.C. and ascends a stage ladder to his own private Purgatorio, his angst-ridden past. The metaphor is apt. In Fair to Middling Women (1932), and More Pricks than Kicks (1934), two of his initial attempts at the novel, he continually references Dante’s Purgatorio.
Often in filmed biography, some unlikely upstart is given interrogatory agency. A disgruntled pleb or nosy reporter. In this film, screenwriter Neil Forsyth manifests a vindictive, accusing, counter-self for Beckett, tickling his catastrophe for all it’s worth. This tweedy, louche Sam holds to account Nobel Prize winning Sam, in his disappointed tuxedo, anguishing about Swedish filthy lucre. Recently I came across this quote from Aristotle. ‘Catastrophe is an action that brings ruin and pain on stage!’
The only theme filmmakers think worthy of attention, is their subject’s emotional life. Love and its absence. Beckett’s considerable literary achievements are barely noted. His life is reduced to a series of emotional triangulations. I shall endeavour to fill in the gaps.
Beckett’s life, gravely played by Gabriel Bryne, unspools magnificently in a sequence of austere performed memories. There’s Beckett as a boy with his adored dad (Barry O’Connor) and then, coming a cropper with his cold, unloving mother (Lisa Dwyer Hogg). There’s the young Beckett (Fionn O’Shea) peering myopically at the world. Looking inwards is to be the better option. Privileged son of the Protestant ascendancy, Beckett travelled to Paris and Germany from Ireland and met the greats of his day. He had an unacceptable romance with his first cousin, Peggy Sinclair, the girl who died. Curiously this episode has been dropped from the film. He was an eyewitness to history, the cultural whirl of Paris in the ’20s, the rise of fascism and the Third Reich in the ’30s, till finally, the horror of the Second World War. Famously he absconded from his academic career in Dublin to strive to write.
So, what was the writer Beckett concerned with? Well, he was in a sort of contest with James Joyce. Joyce (Aidan Gillen), of course, was the presiding literary genius of the interwar period. Stationed at his petits pieds, Samuel Beckett learnt the power of spite and the way of working up petty grievances into universal condemnations. Joyce fell out with Beckett as he did with everybody, leaving him rudderless. Sam had failed to do right by the guvnor’s daughter. In this film, Lucia Joyce is presented as a charming though headstrong girl (Grainne Good), a victim of a cold, unloving mother, Norah. Slander. It’s a wonder Joyce let this this prince of Orange through the door in the first place. Perhaps his intention had been a course of professorial humiliation for ‘Foxrock’ Sam!
How to define the Beckettian? Human beings are hard-wired to expect the worst. When the worst does occur, we find it strangely gratifying. Yes, we were indeed wise to expect the worst. Beckett wanted to distance himself from Joyce’s increasingly rarified concerns. Beckett’s fallback position was his own rejection of showy learning. He was doggedly determined to present a flailing, incompetent self, struggling to function at the most basic level. He devised a series of oddball literary alter egos to this end. But was it edifying? All writing is auto-biographical. Joyce’s reach was global. Beckett was to remain isolated, mundane and introverted. Beckett’s early novels were unloved.
Jean-Paul Sartre said something like ‘Hell is other people’. L’infer, c’est les autres! He also referred to the occupying Germans as les autres, the others. In Hitler’s Inferno there was no distinction between innocence and guilt. No elaborately ordered program of just punishment. No degrees of culpability. Atrocity did not discriminate. Crazy brave, Beckett remained in occupied France to fight the great fight. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre.
Beckett’s wartime experiences unlocked something within him. Apres l’ holocauste, cest,moi! Writing for the stage, En Attendant Godot (1953), freed Beckett from the tyranny of the scribbling self. Irish fatalism converses with Schopenhauer’s pessimism to produce two vagabonds considering our earthly predicament with inspired comic banter in a bombed-out French landscape. With a little distance, the fascist Pozzo is completely ridiculous. Still the Pozzos continue to work their oppression in the world!
Beckett was finally a success. He had found the theatrical formula for success. What next? A writer mines their life and memories. The unhappy relationship with James Joyce? Ham and Clov in Endgame (1957) with their gallows banter. Happy Days (1961), the bourgeois pretensions of James and Norah Joyce, stuck right up to it in the mullock heap. Extracted gold! Then a little tired of the hollow mockery he gave us Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) to upbraid himself. He remembers his dead love. The girl who died. All’s cheerless, dark and deathly. Life is brutish and short for some. For others, lasts too long. Old age ushers in oblivion. Beckett’s plays and texts Not I (1972), Footfalls (1976), Rockabye (1981) became increasingly spare, mannered and emptied of humour, unless we regard the stately procession towards extinction to be a ghastly joke.
After Beckett was rather existentially stabbed by a pimp in 1938, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil entered his life. A rather formidable woman along the lines of Nora Joyce (Bronagh Gallagher qui est formidable!) Suzanne became his wife, accomplice a ’La Resistance and his champion. It was her persistence that allowed the always-rejected Beckett to be eventually published. In James Marsh’s biopic, Dance, first she is simperingly played by hottie (Leonie Lojkine), then by the great Sandrine Bonnaire. Success for Beckett meant also adulterous opportunities. Barbara Bray played by (Maxine Peake) became the other woman in his life. What price success! Beckett couldn’t resist putting it all on stage in the bleakly comical funerailles `a trois ‘Play’ (1963).
From this distance it is amusing to realise that Beckett’s works were never the succes des scandales they ought to have been. For the simple fact, that audiences and critics alike were completely baffled by them. The level of ridicule was lost on them. They thought they were watching a new incarnation of Dada theatre, irrational and non-sensical. What does it all mean? Art is hard. The term ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ was coined by critic Martin Esslin in 1960 with a bit of a Gallic shrug towards Camus’ ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’. ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ was an umbrella term to categorize the new leading lights or perhaps, deathly hallows of French Theatre post-WWII and their concern with non-realistic performance filled with existentialist angst. Beckett rejected this label. They all did.
Nevertheless, Beckett used absurdism as a theatrical conceit to disguise his emotionally charged sub-texts. Beckett the intellectual, however, distrusted emotion. From his master, James Joyce, Beckett learned the cat and mouse game of ‘the author’s intention’. The success and influence Of Samuel Beckett was a post-WWII phenomenon. Artists and creative people danced in the bomb craters and awaited the extinction of life on earth. Last dance. Sweet release.
Like all survivors of war, Beckett had a raging survivor’s guilt. A psychiatrist, in this day and age, could probably pinpoint his symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a mind beset by intrusive memories, the anguish and bitterness that fuelled his literary career, and the carping humour that at times verges on hysteria. Or perhaps he was always something like that. Writers are ahead of the game when it comes to trauma. It’s worth noting that the young Beckett disputed the concept of ‘involuntary’ memory in his essay on Proust (1930). Older Beckett, otherwise Krapp, instructed him otherwise! To be awarded finally with the Swedish Meatball for Literature must have seemed the mockery of ghosts. The joke was on whom?
If Beckett had been tempted to make an early rendezvous with death, in the end, he stuck it out. Death kindly stopped for him and Suzanne in 1989. Samuel Beckett’s great lesson is, I think, to endure, to bear affliction, to face the end with stoical acceptance and wry humour.
Beckett’s departure provoked a revival of his works. There were TV adaptations, new publishing runs, stage festivals with everyone and their dog productions of ‘Godot’. Hopefully James Marsh’s fine film will have a similar effect.
So, what is the relevance of Beckett in 2024? We survived nuclear war. Will we survive CO2, the screen queen comeback of Fascism, the muzak of Trump? What about International Refugees? We will and must go on. Breathe.
Dan Boyle
Daniel Boyle is a Melbourne actor/performer/ director who has done everything from Shakespeare to the Broadway musical
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