Word: macgowran
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...this is admirably conveyed by Jack MacGowran in the Works of Samuel Beckett. A fellow Irishman, MacGowran can claim a friendship and affinity with Beckett attested to by a BBC play, Eh, Joe, specifically written for him by the Nobel-prizewinning playwright. With a seamless unity MacGowran has assembled a one-man reading session, principally from Beckett's novels (Malone Dies, Molloy, The Vnnameable) and plays (Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, Endgame). Cloaked in a black-spattered coffin of a coat, head and body shaken with keening tremors, and eyes stony with grief, MacGowran...
...Words have been my only love," says Beckett. This show is abundant proof of that. The word as dance, as flame, as dirge, as echo, as whip, as caress, as cosmic howl-they are all here, and MacGowran catches every cadence perfectly...
...long ago. The present, for Beckett's tramp, seems a stretch of shingle beach, or a corner in Caliban's cell. There is an outrageously shaggy story about the arrangement of 16 pebbles in four pockets, which grows with mad logic from the very gleam with which MacGowran first so casually confides the notion of his "sucking stones." MacGowran has found, too, Beckett's lilting Celtic love of the earth that resonates unexpectedly with Dylan Thomas-except that where Thomas pounded and battered his great brass bell, Beckett touches his once and lets the sound...
...MacGowran's cunning anthology of Beckett is at root the celebration of man's fear and lust for death. "Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringlv. The gravedigger puts on the forceps," or, "Oh I know I too shall cease and be as when I was not yet . . . Often now my murmur falters and dies and I weep for happiness as I go along and for love of this old earth that has carried me so long and whose uncomplainingness will soon be mine...
...Beckett, a Stoic in a post-Romantic age, strives to find the words to face death with. The words are essential, yet they are impossible; perhaps even silence is impossible. With wrenching beauty at its climax and end, MacGowran's performance makes that terrible paradox its own only consolation. "You must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me. until they say me, strange pain, strange sin ... Perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story . . . Where I am, I don't know...