THE END: BECKETT IN PROSE

                                                Jeff Busby

It is not altogether unpredictable that a work of prose by Samuel Beckett should be performed in the Beckett theatre at the Malthouse in Melbourne. The house lights do not dim alongside actor Robert Menzies as he enters from a spartan door situated stage right. But his presence is substantial enough to subdue the anticipatory chatter of a collective of drama teachers who comprise a portion of the audience. Experiencing the antipathy of a Samuel Beckett play, even one that has been adapted from the prosaic form, is an event during which the house lighting should implicate its audience. But the question remains: how does a person confess existential angst once it is expressed for him and consequently, disassociated from the self ? Perhaps all we can hope for from The End is the transient discomfiture of knowing that there are others out there like us, and that we are not alone.

Menzies' Beckettian persona is also subdued. Dressed in crinkled shirt and stove pipe trousers he more resembles the contemporary homeless man than the theatricalised clowns who so often populate Beckett's writing. He informs us that he has been ejected from an asylum and is now struggling to find acceptable lodgings. Money is not the problem, for he has more than enough to sustain himself. What potential landlords do find reprehensible is the sullen demeanour of the man. Acerbic in thought and conversation, and ever-ready to unleash upon himself and others a sizzling tirade of paranoia, disappointment and at times hallucinatory despair, this 'everyman' is to housing applications what Ivan Milat is to backpacking. Like many of Beckett's prose characters, (Belacqua from More Pricks than Kicks, Murphy from the eponymous novel), he wanders the streets in search of salvation but only finds himself further immersed within a Dantean inferno. During one such sojourn he encounters his son. Unable to approach his offspring due to an incandescent hatred, Beckett's nameless character can only offer sardonic rumination upon his own incapacity to assimilate. He soon finds himself by the seaside where he occupies an upturned boat, sleeps for a while, then pushes the boat out to sea before committing suicide. 

Of course, all this is revealed by monologue and never enacted. Consequently, it remains safe to assume that the nameless man himself has constructed a fantasy. Purposefully standing upon an actor's mark and having never left his theatrical box,  his tale could be one that has been repeated many times, while also being a final elaboration upon the life of a condemned man. Throughout this performance the house lights oscillate between a tight spot on Menzies the performer and a general wash upon the audience. As a directorial strategy for implicating the audience in the absurd yearning of an anonymous man, it is, like the performance itself, ineffective, if not incidental. Beckett's plays are innately theatrical: a character who cannot sit and another who cannot stand in Endgame; humanity reduced to a pair of lips in Mouth, a woman incrementally buried in sand in Happy Days, and of course, two tramps crawling out of a ditch compelled to wait for a mysterious fellow who never arrives in Godot. Why directors choose to generate theatre from Beckett's prose remains a mystery... Menzies, however, gives a disciplined performance. Not only does he appear to have been sculpted from the same literary scalpel that Beckett dissected himself with, his capacity to sustain embittered humour and connect this with an audience is succinct. Overall though, reanimating Samuel Beckett's theatrical oeuvre would be a more rewarding endeavour than stultifying remarkable works of prose that were written with the intention of these remaining on the page.

The End
Writer: Samuel Beckett, Director: Eamon Flack, Performer, Robert Menzies, Lighting design: Teegan Lee, Malthouse, Feb. 17 - March 11, Melb.