Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett

2 In Memoriam

2 In Memoriam It may seem paradoxical to celebrate the opening of a theater named The Encore with a play named Endgame; but those who saw Waiting for Gadat might expect the despair of Samuel Beckett to be more ennobled, and salutary , than the politer optimism of lesser men. An elegy with the passion of the Old Testament prophets, the drama is almost unbearably humane. Even more than Gadat~ Endgame is a play with magnitude, achieved through the most excruciating constraint. The action haunts the limits of endurance, finding grandeur amidst the trash, trivia, and excrement of living . With an enormous sense of loss and remorseless memory, it sees through the failure of a culture back to its most splendid figures: Hamlet, Lear, Oedipus at Colonus, the enslaved Samson, eyeless at Gaza. Few characters are more savagely solitary and dreadfully engaged than those Beckett has created for this play. Old endgame, lost of old, every move a crisis-the term taken from chess, the emotions from the world of Buchenwald and Lidice and Hiroshima; extinction a datum, its possibility a commonplace, something we learn to live with. Absurd. With laughter to boot. When and where is the play set? After an atomic war? Now? Here? Beckett is a writer of whom it is impossible to say just what he means, though we know he means beyond question what he says. And what he says is all there, upon the stage, an immaculate concentration of nerve and mind. He is beyond paraphrase but not beyond sense. This is what exasperates us and forces us back again and again for meanings, for cues and hints, puns, echoes, and ambiguities. In Gadat the characters, having forgotten their history, live moment by moment improvising, as though time didn't exist, astonishingly active in a static scene. In Endgame~ time is the measure and the plague-every action seems the consequence of something prepared moment by moment In Memoriam / 25 mounting through unnumbered years. By reflex of the characters we move through an eternal patience, fevered and fierce, through stages of decantation ' down corridors of hopeless end. And always, we rage, rage against the dying of the light. (Program note, The Actor's Workshop of San Francisco, 1959) ...