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| Show | Did He Like It?* |
Synopsis | |
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Ireland’s most celebrated Beckett interpreter, the inimitable Barry McGovern, delivers the soul of three Beckett characters through monologue in I’ll Go On, a distillation of the playwright’s post-war novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Click here for tickets. |
The Sheer Inconvenience, Let Alone Intrusiveness, of Life and Love
*By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: July 24, 2008
Hearts and flowers, moons and Junes do not figure prominently in the lexicon of Samuel Beckett, to say the least. When a besotted victim of Cupid’s arrow does feel the need to inscribe the name of his beloved on the world in the short story “First Love,” he does not go looking for the nearest tree trunk. Instead he finds himself carving the letters of her name into a patty of dried cow dung. Ah, romance!
That love is pain is a truth often told. But this bit of accepted wisdom is illuminated with a uniquely eerie glow in the stage adaptation of this Beckett story being captivatingly performed by Ralph Fiennes at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater through the weekend.
Originally written in French in 1946 and translated into English by Beckett, “First Love” has been staged by Michael Colgan, the artistic director of the Gate Theater of Dublin, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival’s program of Beckett works not written for the theater. (All were originally seen at the Gate.) This weekend Mr. Fiennes joins Liam Neeson and Barry McGovern in two marathon performances of all three of the offerings, an indispensable ticket for admirers of Beckett’s writing — and, for that matter, of first-rate stage acting.
A ghostly snatch of song can just be discerned as the lights rise on Mr. Fiennes, facing upstage. As he slowly turns toward us, the nearly shaved head, clammy pallor and weird glow in the eyes suggest the emergence of some molelike creature from his lair. The clothes — suit, tie, overcoat and hat — come in several shades of dried mud.
This unnamed fellow has, in fact, been rudely forced from the comfort of solitude. In a gentle brogue flecked with vinegary bursts of bitterness, he relates how his father’s death led to his unwilling entry into the world, where he shuffles morosely along like an unhappy refugee from beyond the grave — a place he’d much rather be, actually.
“Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards,” he confesses happily. “The smell of corpses, distinctly perceptible under those of grass and humus mingled, I do not find unpleasant, a trifle on the sweet side perhaps, a trifle heady, but how infinitely preferable to what the living emit.”
As he continues in this macabre vein, the pleasant lilt in his voice suddenly turns sharp. “The living wash in vain, in vain perfume themselves,” he says, concluding with a fierce baring of fangs, and two words that Mr. Fiennes spits out almost violently. “They stink.”
Perhaps not surprisingly for one so ill-disposed to its inhabitants, the world proves to be a dangerous place for this misanthropic fellow. All too soon he finds himself in the company of a woman, irrationally and inexplicably bound up in the kind of attachment that repels him most. As he inimitably puts it, “I had to contend with a feeling which gradually assumed, to my dismay, the dread name of love.”
Beckett’s story is a grimly comic parody of youthful romance, in which the hero recalls his initiation into human attachment as if it were an embarrassing rash, something that must be endured until it can be cured.
Not a fun-loving fellow, obviously. But as embodied by Mr. Fiennes he has a gloomy, funereal kind of charm. Holding the stage alone for an hour Mr. Fiennes clearly relishes every sentence of Beckett’s beautifully cadenced, lyrical prose, with its ghastly jokes like dark, glittering jewels embedded in cool slabs of marble. “The mistake one makes is to speak to people,” our nonhero sighs, recalling with resignation the first moments of his unfortunate engagement with a woman he calls both Lulu and Anna.
Mr. Fiennes seems to have a natural affinity for portraying hollowed-out men. His performance here can be set alongside his unforgettable turn in Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer” as a sort of diptych of haunted humanity. The piercing ferocity of those blue eyes keeps us aware of the fading embers of tender feeling buried beneath sooty layers of anguish or indifference or bile, the vestiges of a soul that even Beckett’s most absurdly life-repelling characters cannot purge themselves of.
For all its grotesqueness — Beckett’s fondness for scatological references included — “First Love” ultimately affirms the intractable nature of human attachments, although you could not exactly say Beckett celebrates it. Try as he might, and mightily he does, the protagonist can’t really scour his heart free of feeling. The irritating wail of the baby he fathers drives him grimly back out into the world in the play’s climactic moments. But whenever the heavy tread of his footfalls dies out, the baby’s cries come back to haunt him, the sad song of humanity seducing even this bizarre creature.
“There it is,” he concludes. “Either you love or you don’t.” And either way, Mr. Fiennes’s mournful glower suggests, you lose.
GATE/BECKETT
First Love
By Samuel Beckett; directed by Michael Colgan; designed by Eileen Diss; lighting by James McConnell. Presented by the Gate Theater of Dublin, Mr. Colgan, artistic director; as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, Nigel Redden, director. At the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, 899 10th Avenue, at 58th Street, Clinton; (212) 721-6500. Through Sunday. Running time: 55 minutes.
WITH: Ralph Fiennes.
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