Actor Barry McGovern explains how he has been stalked by the shadow of Samuel Beckett - 'for good or for ill' - over the past 40 years, writes Sara Keating
BARRY MCGOVERN'S relationship with the plays of Samuel Beckett has an almost mythic quality - full of strange coincidences and serendipity and a series of recurring symbolic motifs. With his lean rangy posture and his long hang-dog face, he calls to mind countless Beckettian anti-heroes - the lowly protagonist of the Murphy novels, the vagrant Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot, the shuffling servant Clov in Endgame. But McGovern is both better dressed and far more gentlemanly than any of the strange, anti-social spirits that haunt Beckett's plays and prose, and over a thoroughly un-Beckettian lunch of quartered, crust-less sandwiches in a Dublin hotel, McGovern explains how the shadow of the playwright has stalked him - "for good or for ill" - over the past 40 years.
"I first heard of Beckett when I was about 11 or 12," McGovern remembers, "when I saw a production of Waiting for Godot on the television. It would have been 1961, about six years after the Pike Theatre had produced it, and my parents had seen that production. The TV version was staged in black and white, and I had no idea what it was, or what it was about, but it bewitched me, intrigued me, and then I'm sure I forgot all about it. But a few years later when I was in my final year in boarding school in Castleknock, we were taken on a school tour to see Waiting for Godot, at the Gate ironically, where it was being performed by UCD's Dramsoc. And I loved it. I thought there was something extraordinary about the writing and something so essential, so human to it. So over the next few years I bought the odd play and started reading the novels.
"I went to UCD as an arts student," he continues, "and I got very involved in Dramsoc, and one of the first roles I played was Hamm in Endgame. And then my first professional role in a theatre production was in Waiting for Godot, directed by Chris O'Neill. It was a fringe production, but we did it all over the country and we even performed at the Gate - all these coincidences. And I suppose you could say that that is where my association with Beckett really began. Over the years, I've performed in Endgame four times, Godot perhaps more times than I can count, and I've been performing I'll Go On, the one-man show based on Beckett's Murphy trilogy that I co-wrote with Gerry Dukes, for the last 23 years. But to be honest I've done more Yeats' plays, more Shakespeare even. But it is the 'Beckett thing' that seems to have stuck."
IT IS PARTICULARLY the Godot association that has stuck with the actor; in fact it could be said that McGovern has literally been Waiting for Godot for more than 30 years. He is just about to take to the stage with the play again, as the Gate Theatre celebrates the 20th anniversary of their 1988 production of Godot - in which McGovern stars alongside Johnny Murphy, Stephen Brennan and Alan Stanford - with a national tour. However, despite jokes that the cast have requested no more than one week's rehearsal, McGovern insists that the show is "not set in aspic, like some sort of museum-piece repetition.
"For us it is a case of living [the play], rather than repeating it. I mean we - the cast - have all grown older with it. We have lived through it, and that all comes to bear upon what happens on stage. And has my understanding of the play, of the meaning of the play, changed for me over that time? I don't mean to be evasive, but I really don't know. I don't see it as my job to make the play mean something - I don't even know if its Beckett's job to do that. The play just is, it is what it is, it - the play itself - is the object."
McGovern himself has played several roles in Waiting for Godot since the 1970s, and he says that this has helped to keep the play fresh for him. In this production, for example, he originally started off in the role of Estragon, with Tom Hickey as Vladimir, swapping roles in 1991 when Johnny Murphy joined the cast. Meanwhile, his first experience in performing the play was as Lucky, "a role", he says, "that every actor should play. There is so much in it intellectually and it is physically very challenging. It is a really, really demanding role, and sometimes I can't believe that Stephen [Brennan] is still performing it in this production after all these years."
The touring, McGovern admits - the first all-Ireland tour that The Gate has undertaken - also adds an "extra edge of excitement to the revival. There will be new stages, small stages, different venues every night, and we'll be able to play it more intimately." The "Beckett thing", as McGovern calls it - his inescapable association with the writer - is something that he has gradually come to accept, despite the frustrations of being pigeon-holed. "I used to get annoyed with it," he admits, "'Oh you're the Beckett guy'. But if people want to identify you with something there's really not much you can do about it. I deal with it the same way I deal with reviews - I don't heed either the praise or the vilification, I just stick to my own way, get on with my work.
"To be honest," he says with genuine embarrassment, "I think it's because of I'll Go On, rather than Godot. I mean the other actors have been involved like me with Beckett and with this show for many years, and I feel quite sensitive about the attention I get as the 'Beckett guy'.
"It's funny," he continues, "because when Michael Colgan originally approached me in 1984 about doing a one-man Beckett show, I didn't want to. I mean Jack McGowran had died only 10 years before and he was so highly admired and associated with it, and he was such a good friend of Beckett's, that I thought I would never be able to get over that. I thought 'I'll always be living in that shadow.'
"But in the end there was a problem with getting rights or something, and Michael had been in touch with Beckett about this and Beckett wrote to us, saying what if we did a different one-man show, a different kind of play, with a different actor, and, well, if ever there was an invitation to something that was it.
"We first performed the show in 1985 at the Dublin Theatre Festival," he reminisces. "It was a late-night production, with an 11.15pm start, and no previews. It was the most nerve-racking experience of my life. We did our six nights and I thought that would be the end of it, but the show really took off, and I really can't complain, despite the 'Beckett thing', because it has brought me to places I never thought I would be.
"But I remember the first time the whole 'Beckett thing' dawned on me," he continues. "I was performing in Twelfth Night at the Gate in 1988. The production was set in a 1920s-1930s period and I was playing Sir Andrew Aguecheek.
I'll never forget when the reviews came out and one of them - a review by John Finnegan for the Evening Herald — talked about my "Beckettian performance" as Sir Andrew Aguecheek! I thought 'Oh Jesus, I'm never going to get away from this, am I?' I actually sent the review over to Beckett in a card: I'm sure, just like me, he had a laugh!"
The Gate Theatre's production of Waiting for Godot is on national tour throughout September and October. www. godotontour.ie
