Beckett Embraced By Native Land

Centenary Of The Irish-Born Playwright's Birth Celebrated In Dublin

(AP)  Samuel Beckett is everywhere in Dublin, glowering down on the home town he deserted as a young man.

A hundred years after the playwright's birth on April 13, 1906, the Irish capital has decided to embrace its difficult native son.

Beckett's lean, craggy face and coxcomb of gray hair flutter from banners along O'Connell Street, Dublin's main shopping thoroughfare. Posters bearing his words greet arrivals at the city's airport.

The man whose spare, nihilistic plays ; "Waiting for Godot," "Endgame," "Happy Days"; divided audiences during his lifetime is being wholeheartedly celebrated in death. The Irish government has backed a major centenary festival, complete with play stagings, film screenings, readings, debates and art exhibitions. A festival of his plays featuring such actors as Michael Gambon and John Hurt is running at Dublin's Gate Theatre and the Barbican in London

Beckett has even been lauded by the Irish republic's answer to royalty — U2 lead singer Bono.

"I'm a fan," Bono said at the festival's Dublin Castle launch, revealing that he'd once given Beckett a copy of U2's 1985 album, "The Unforgettable Fire." Bono said he often did not understand Beckett's work, "but I have enjoyed not knowing. He blew my mind, that is all I can say."

It is a sentiment shared by many people meeting Beckett's work for the first time; often through "Waiting for Godot," his most famous play, with its central image of two vagrants waiting by a bleak roadside for someone who never arrives.

Many early critics were inclined to agree with the play's own words: "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful." Its first Broadway production, which starred Bert Lahr and E.G. Marshall, closed after 59 performances in 1956.

But since then, the play's stark minimalism and existential despair have come to be regarded as revolutionary.

"He changed what was conceived as possible on stage," said Ronan McDonald, director of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading, near London. "It's not possible to get back to what a scandal it was, how new it was. People were suspicious whether the whole thing wasn't a big wind-up."

Ireland loves to celebrate its writers; at least the dead ones, but in many ways, Beckett is an unlikely Irish literary hero. He's a contrast to another Dublin literary star, the loquacious James Joyce, for whom the young Beckett worked in Paris.

In overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Ireland, Beckett was Protestant, raised in the affluent Dublin suburb of Foxrock and educated at the Northern Ireland boarding school that had taught Oscar Wilde. Beckett left gray 1930s Dublin for Paris and lived in France for the rest of his long life. After his death in 1989, he was buried in Paris' Montparnasse Cemetery.

Some Dubliners doubt his relevance in modern Ireland.

"We call ourselves the land of saints and scholars," said Tony MacCarthy, a retired English teacher. But young people "are only interested in English footballers. They know Beckham, but they don't know Beckett."