Beckett Embraced By Native Land

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

(AP) 

Rather than drawing on the garrulousness of Irish English, Beckett often wrote in French — Godot was originally "En Attendant Godot" — and translated his own work. His language and imagery began lean and grew even more minimalist as he aged. By the time he wrote the 1972 play, "Not I," the sole character had been reduced to a mouth onstage, surrounded by darkness.

It is only one of a series of startling and unnerving images. In "Happy Days," the central character is buried up to her waist, and then her neck, in sand. In "Play," the three characters are trapped in urns.

"I didn't invent this buzzing confusion. It's all around us," Beckett once said.

Mary Bryden, a Cardiff University academic and president of the Samuel Beckett Society, said Beckett's motto was "pare it down, pare it down."

"He used to say that to people who sent him their work. It's only when you've faced your own nothingness that you've got something valid to say," she recalled.

The world may have caught up with Beckett. A writer whose work shocked viewers with its bleakness now seems to capture the violence and chaos of the 20th century; and the 21st.

Beckett witnessed its worst firsthand, fighting with the French resistance against the Nazis in World War II — he was later decorated by the French government — and working at a Red Cross hospital in a bombed-out Normandy town.

By the end of his life, Beckett had become an elder statesman of existential anguish. In 1969, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. His influence can be heard in the work of minimalist composers such as John Cage and Philip Glass, and every pared-down playwright from Edward Albee to Harold Pinter.

Beckett's work is still performed frequently around the world, under the intensely — some say overly — protective gaze of the estate managed by his nephew, Edward Beckett.

Several directors' plans have been overturned by the family's desire to be loyal to Beckett's vision. Earlier this year, the estate objected to an all-female "Godot" in Italy. It went ahead, and an Italian court agreed with the show's producers.

Despite Beckett's pessimism, his works are frequently very funny: The two hobos in "Waiting for Godot" swap patter like an old vaudeville act.

His poems, plays, novels and essays also exude humanity and a dogged determination to carry on against the odds. "No matter," he wrote in a late novel, "Worstward Ho." "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

An international Beckett symposium this month at Trinity College Dublin, Beckett's alma mater, drew not only academics and playwrights but ordinary people influenced by his work.

Retired civil engineer Brendan Foley, 73, said he had first encountered Beckett during a period of illness and severe depression.

"I saw 'Waiting for Godot' and I could identify with it," he said. "Without over-intellectualizing it, he cut to the heart of what it means to be human. He taught me to be awake in the moment, to go with the flow. I found that very therapeutic."