Rambles and Deep Thoughts

On Saturday blushingflower and I went to see On Beckett at what used to be the Lansburg in DC. It was a matinee, and she'd been out late the night before so we got up, got food and then headed to the theater. At one point she used to work for STC box office, and we saw a lot of shows together, partly because they wanted their box office staff to be familiar with the shows (official reason) and partly as an unofficial part of her compensation. 

So the neighborhood is familiar, but also has changed quite a bit since we were down there regularly. I've been back in the intervening time, but it's always interesting to see what businesses have closed and what they've been replaced with.

We got there a little early, and went to our fancy box seats (these tickets had originally been for her and Kay, RIP).

Going into this I had basically zero knowledge of Beckett, so it was all new territory for me and I wasn't sure how much I was going to enjoy it, but was willing to give it a try.

This was a one-man show, and when Tony Irwin stepped up to the podium and announced that what he was going to do was recite some passages from Beckett and in between talk about his relationship with the works, which I have to say wasn't very encouraging, though I was relieved to find out the show was only 90 minutes. 

And in fact after the first 15 minutes I was struggling. I was tired and while the language was interesting my lack of prior knowledge meant that the fragments didn't have a through-line, there was no story to pull me into the experience. I was in fact, on the brink of falling asleep and trying very hard not to.

And then Irwin put on a pair of baggy pants. 

The STC's page for the show styles Irwin as "a master clown" and while I certainly wouldn't disagree, he talked a lot about the tradition of vaudeville (and Beckett's family connection with it) and how Beckett's work and language was sometimes vaudevillian (or at least he liked to think so). 

Suddenly there was something visually interesting on stage, and his clear love for his craft in combination with the physical comedy finally gave me something to focus on. I frequently enjoy actors talking about their craft, about the process of acting, the travails, etc. and this was no exception. From that point on, I was much more engaged. 

And if you asked me going into the show, I wouldn't even really say that I liked clowns or clowning, but Irwin's performance was as much lecture as comedy. Putting on his clowning outfit on stage, explaining the usefulness of the baggy pants and oversize jacket and so on. At one point he stepped up to the podium and started fumbling with an entirely unnecessary microphone (since he had been miked from the outside) which culminated in him declaring that STC had all the modern conveniences in their podiums and you didn't need to adjust the height  of the microphone, it would just raise and lower you behind the podium.  He then proceeded to do a bit about being too tall, and then being too low, all with his hand on the podium operating an imaginary switch. 

All this is well and good, you may say, but where did Beckett come in? 

It was interspersed throughout this, but a lot of the back half of the show was focused on the play Waiting for Godot, which I had read about but never read and never seen performed. It had always sounded somewhere between dull and navel-gazing. 

Irwin started off talking about the pronunciation differences, "GoDOH" vs. "GODot", and the philosophies around them, his experiences in acting in the play, performers he had seen acting in it, and then said that once someone had said that it wasn't "political". He paused for a moment and said that he couldn't disagree more.

All the while, this was interspersed with bits of physical comedy, vaudeville, clowning, whatever you want to call it. There was a whole bit about Beckett's explicit stage instructions ("very clear!") that Vladimir and Estragon are to be wearing bowler hats, and then a quick succession of a vast array of different hats conjured almost out of nowhere as an illustration of the importance of the bowler hat to the play.

But I digress, back to the political. At one point he was describing the second half of the play, and he recited Vladimir's line "Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?"

And especially after hearing about Pazzo and his carrier, I couldn't help but draw the immediate line to the current political moment and the question of whether we are sleeping while other's suffer, whether habit is our "great deadener" too.

I was still thinking about that when the show wrapped up, and we exited back into the glorious spring afternoon, and really what more can you ask of a performance than that it wake you up a bit and make you think?