Review by Zhou Ting-Fung

Review by Zhou Ting-Fung

The difficulty of writing about Beckett is that there is very little that can be said, that hasn’t been said already, and that having been already said, has ceased to carry its original meaning, becoming a mere appropriation, or transposition, of a meaning that previously existed, or perhaps, something felt but inarticulable through words, and so we clutch or crutch for an aphorism, a familiar expression, that really means little of what we really mean, but might communicate some sort of shared meaning in its familiarity. 

Perhaps then, I can borrow from Richard Ellman, the prominent literary critic, who said that Beckett ‘...has given a voice to the decrepit and maimed and inarticulate, men and women at the end of their tether, past pose or pretense, past claim of meaningful existence.’  That sounds alright.  Or maybe it would be better yet to skite the Nobel Committee’s appraisal upon presenting him with the Prize in Literature, ‘...for his writing, which – in new forms for the novel and drama – in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation’.  One cannot help feeling, if Beckett ever read such comments, he would find them grossly ironic.

To write about Beckett, indeed, to say anything at all, seems to defeat its very purpose, Beckett’s very ends: that language is unreliable, betrays itself, and ultimately inadequate in expressing anything that really matters or that can come remotely close to what it really is to live.  Did you notice I used language to say that?  If it sounds unnecessarily tautological or obstinately paradoxical, then that is the very point.  Here’s the rub: it’s pretty much all we have.  Bugger, no?  Nonetheless, this being a review, and of, specifically, the Gare St Lazare Players performance of Beckett’s ‘The End’, let us make some concession to the burden of necessity, and imagine, perhaps, that someone, perhaps a concerned pedestrian, had asked me if the play was any good.  Good?  I would ask, not knowing if her ‘good’ and my ‘good’ meant the same thing.  Does she mean ‘good’ like ‘is this a good pencil’, or ‘good’ as in ‘am I a good person’?  Yes, she would say, did you like it?  And then, perhaps from my staring silence at repeating the good exercise, she would ask me, a little frustrated now, but having been very patient, well, what was it all about?  Which, I would take to mean, understanding the convention of this question within language, that is, its shared meaning through its overuse, rather than what she really means, and taking her to mean what I think it means, I would say:

It’s about a man who has been expelled from a mental institution, perhaps, and who has had a frontal lobotomy, perhaps, but we’re not really sure, and he is telling us things, things that he goes through to fend for himself, things like how no one will rent him a room, in the end, because of his scalp and because he finds it difficult to tip his hat, or to not ‘omit consonants and prolong vowels’, until someone does rent him a room, in the end, a Turkish landlady who takes six months of rent in advance, and then disappears because she doesn’t really own the house she is renting out, things like just wanting a corner to lay down in, in the end, and being sick of one’s own retched stench, and scratching oneself being the pinnacle of pleasure because one is itching so much, and in the end never being able to admit we’re completely alone, or that we really will die, in the end.

Maybe then, perhaps, the concerned pedestrian would look at me like I was funny or something, mortified even.  Actually, it was very funny, I would tell her.

So did you like it?    

Yes, I would say.  Yes, I rather liked it. 

Samuel Beckett: The End
March 16-19
Herald Theatre, Aotea Centre

Auckland Arts Festival