Rock star Bono made a surprise appearance at the launch of the Beckett Centenary Festival at Dublin Castle last night to read with gusto his long and topical poem Un Homage a Maestro Samuel Beckett.
I've been waiting
Waiting a long time
One hundred years
It gets tiring all this velvety blackness
That's what Le Brocquy calls it . . .
Velvety blackness but there's no nothingness
Oh no, just everythingness and judgement
The judgement of your peers . . .
Where's Gaybo? Where's Ryanair? Where's the trolley dollies?
It's not dollies on trollies now
It's the living and the dead clogging up the arteries of the health service
Oh yes, late to the late, late to the Late Late Show
Isn't Brendan Gleeson the business
The pricks
The Celts
Waiting, waiting for the tiger to catch its tail.
Bono read with speed and vigour, managing to encompass references to Beckett's texts, Ireland's recent victory with the Triple Crown, Ryanair, George Bush, the state of the health system and the academic industry around Beckett's work.
Judging by the enthusiastic response and laughter from the audience, Bono swiped the evening's thunder from Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue, who had just officially launched the festival by saying: "Brevity is the soul of wit. Beckett, by his own admission, was a master in the economy of language. At the same time, he remains a true genius in the exactitude with which he deployed language to de-layer a complexity of thought. He once differentiated himself with Joyce thus: 'James Joyce was a synthesiser, trying to bring in all he could. I am an analyser, trying to leave out as much as possible.' Well, if I may misquote Samuel Beckett, he certainly had a capacity to 'state silences more competently than ever a man spangled the butterflies of vertigo'."
The actor Barry McGovern gave the festival's first public performance by reading a short extract from Watt, a novel by Beckett first published in Paris in 1953.
Dozens of festival events are scheduled to take place in Dublin over the next month. Among them is Beckett on Stage, a selection of his plays at the Gate Theatre; a number of light-projections of Beckett's text on buildings around the city by American artist Jenny Holzer; films at the Irish Film Institute; and a symposium at Trinity College.
