Worstward Ho, Public Museum, Cork: There are some very good arguments against the staging of Samuel Beckett's prose works, especially the late, dense ones such as Worstward Ho. Beckett knew how to write plays, and his belief that certain material was better suited to the page than to the stage is the judgment of a formidable artist. When he did write plays, moreover, he imagined them in meticulous detail, writing not just a text but, as it were, a performance.
The very absence of such physical detail is itself part of what makes his novels novels. And the structure of a text such as Worstward Ho is intricately bound up with the act of reading. Its density and its lack of punctuation marks require the reader continually to circle back, figuring out which words form phrases, thus redoubling the repetitions that give it its mesmerising shape, and creating the experience of a mind painfully attempting to assemble a narrative from evanescent fragments.
It is presumably for these very reasons that the Beckett Estate does not license performances of these works. Yet it also implicitly acknowledges that there is a contrary case to be made. Beckett's late prose and late plays are in some respects all of a piece. They share the irreducible minimalism of an aged voice alone in the darkness, attempting to conjure a dimly remembered life. In a sense, the prose is just the minimalism of the plays taken a stage further: the words without the voice.
Weighing up these counterarguments, the Beckett Estate has gone for a compromise: the prose texts may not be performed, but they may be "recited". It is this compromise that Judy Hegarty Lovett, Conor Lovett and their collaborators in Gare Saint Lazare Players are inhabiting with their "Access All Beckett" project.
It continues a process which began with Conor Lovett's brilliant version of the Beckett Trilogy, advances further at the Cork 2005 festival and will culminate in next year's Beckett centenary.
As compromises go, it is an intriguing one. It might end up as a mess, neither a performance nor a reading. Or it might produce something that hovers tensely between forms, as Beckett himself did.
This second possibility is pretty much realised in the recitation of Worstward Ho by the American actor Lee Delong, under Hegarty Lovett's direction. Her recital moves in step with the text, in which a lone voice tries and fails to bring some haunting shades into vivid focus.
The failure, of course, and the human capacity to persist with it, is what interests Beckett: "try again, fail again, fail better." Delong fails beautifully.
At first her approach is so unexpected that it seems wrong. Clad in a distractingly odd ensemble that mixes traditional Japanese costume with a purple fleece, she seems too solid, too insistent a presence. Her delivery, on the other hand, goes against expectation in a different way. The obvious way to recite the complex, often coldly algebraic text of Worstward Ho is to emphasise its rhythmic repetitions, and to use them as a drum beat that keeps the words on the march.
Delong, to the contrary, goes for a warm, almost chatty tone, creating a cadence that is close to conversational. She also disrupts the minimalism of the piece. She gestures with her eyes and hands, moves about the playing area with considerable freedom, and occasionally smiles at us as if this evocation of the waning of life were actually a rather jolly game.
Yet, perhaps because it is so unexpected, Delong's recital is also enthralling. By avoiding the obvious rhythms, she discovers other metrical possibilities in the highly-wrought text. At times, she makes it sing like Shakespearean blank verse. At others, she makes it reminiscent of the convoluted wordplay of John Donne or the strange syntax of Gerard Manley Hopkins. She thus creates a rich variety from prose that seems to glory in its own constraint. She justifies her smiles, too, by revealing the sly humour in a piece whose title is, after all, a self-mocking joke.
And ultimately Delong brings this richness back to a simple and moving point. The human reality behind the aesthetic mastery of Worstward Ho is that of age and forgetfulness. It gives us a mind in which memory is gradually defeated by oblivion.
Delong's upfront recital, in which her own vividness is a counterweight to the dimly imagined figures evoked by the narrator, also makes us aware of how astonishing it is that anyone can commit to memory so difficult, dense, and strangely structured a text. Usually, the actor remembering the lines is something we take for granted. Here, that act of remembering is also a touching triumph over oblivion.
Runs until Apr 15, no performance Apr 10
