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Nearly a decade after Samuel Beckett died in Paris, Dear Conjunction theater pays tribute to the Irish Nobel laureate this month by performing his work for the first time in its eight-year history. The event is worth noting because, besides the writer's French wife Suzanne, Dear Conjunction's president, Barbara Bray, was probably Beckett's closest companion and associate for some 30 years. Consequently, among the productions now being planned to remember one of the city's great adopted sons, Dear Conjunction's program of three rarely performed short plays, "Not I," "Play" and "Rough for Theater II," on at the Petit Hébertot, can boast one of the truest readings of Beckett's now classic, ever troubling úuvre. It seems surprising considering Bray's long-standing relationship with Beckett, who wrote in both his native and adopted languages, that Dear Conjunction, which produces new plays in both French and English, should have waited so long to bring his work to the stage. It was a conscious decision, and not an oversight, Bray explained over coffee recently, arrived at in acknowledgement of her intimate relationship with the writer and his theater. "I didn't really want to be indiscrète," she said. "But it was about time that we did them. Our actors have been longing to do them, our directors have been wanting to do them. Because this year is the 10th anniversary of his death, everybody is doing the sort of obvious Beckett so this seemed a good time to do the less obvious ones." However well known, these plays are nevertheless inseparable from the rest of Beckett's theater. In "Not I," a woman's spot-lit mouth pours forth a painful tale of loneliness and lovelessness to a cowled figure. Written in 1973, the piece dates late in Beckett's work, at a time when he was paring the theater down to its most basic elements. With references to the more famous "Happy Days," "Play" presents two women and a man poking out of funeral urns who are forced, every time a harsh light is shone upon one of them, to rehash a triangle of mundane lives. Their story of adultery, comic in its banality, is played twice through. Finally, "Rough for Theater II" places two civil servants, one a by-the-rules guy, the other a humanist, in the absurd position of deciding whether a third man should jump from a window. Composed shortly after "Waiting for Godot," this most readily funny and accessible of Beckett's plays offers a different take on his theater of distress. The inevitable 10th anniversary productions now brewing in Paris, the city where audiences first stumbled, dazed and confused, out of "En attendant Godot" at the Théâtre de Babylone in 1953, could nonetheless hinder more than help audiences wishing to clarify their understanding of Beckett's work. Despite the playwright's rock-solid stage directions, his plays beg interpretation, not all of it well informed. Such missteps are at best incomprehensible to Bray who long observed the director Beckett at work. "If you want to show that you're the best conductor of Beethoven, you don't do it with mouth organs, you do it with the score it was written for and you show how much better you appreciate it than everybody else," she insisted. "As in lots of things nowadays, there is a bit of a fashion for personalizing everything and putting somebody else between the work and the audience, which I think is a bad thing." By finally performing Beckett, Dear Conjunction nevertheless is not setting out to preserve his work hermetically, but, rather, to pass on his singular vision. As Bray explained: "Whenever [Beckett] wrote for any medium he went straight to the essence of that medium and insodoing he created a number of intensely and uniquely theatrical images and uses of space which are still actually working their way into the general consciousness. I think one of the things we hope will happen with the performances of these slightly rare plays is that they will transmit to another generation the extreme force of these images." The Beckett series is part of an ongoing festival of English-language theater at the Petit Hébertot, which also features this month "Dumped," Daragh Carville's look at love and revenge presented by Britain's National Youth Theater. "Dumped," to May 8; Beckett's Shorter Plays, May 10-31; 7pm, Petit Hébertot, 78 bis, bd des Batignolles, 17e, M? Rome/Villiers, 50F, tel: 01.44.70.06.69. |
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