ENDGAME
by
Samuel Beckett
UC Irvine
Fall 2008
This production included twenty lines from Beckett’s original
French edition that the author had dropped from his own translation,
but, fifty years ago, had written to Cohen that “you are
free to put them back if you wish” (see below program
note). The designs were by Darcy Prevost (scenery), Lonnie Alcaraz
(lighting), Christa Mathis (costumes) and Vinnie Olivieri (sound);
the actors are identified in the photos. The play included a
brief “pregame” (preshow) and ran for five sold-out
performances. As a one-weekend Faculty Workshop, the production
was not reviewed by outside press, but the UCI student newspaper,
under the headline “Precision, Perfection in Endgame”
declared it “a dazzling performance."
DIRECTOR’S
PROGRAM NOTE
Forty-eight
years ago next month, I received a letter from Samuel Beckett
authorizing me to “put back in” certain lines he had
dropped from his texts when translating Waiting for Godot
and Endgame from French into English. “I leave
the translation to you,” he added.
You
will thus hear twenty short speeches in tonight’s performance
that have never before been performed – legally at least
- in English versions of this play, which is widely considered
to be one of the two or three great masterpieces of twentieth
century drama.
I
was introduced to Beckett’s work (and indeed, his name)
by my high school English teacher, Margaret Casey, in 1956 when,
in the middle of a senior class on Shakespeare, she decided to
talk about contemporary writers – and mentioned the emergence
of beatnik poets in San Francisco and a French playwright named
Samuel Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot had just failed dismally
in Miami but was nonetheless headed to New York. So I scurried
down to my favorite bookstore – a quaint establishment in
Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown – and picked the single
Grove Press copy off the shelf, devouring it on the bus as I headed
home. At Dartmouth College the following year, I loaned the book
to Henry Williams, a professor of drama on our campus (which had
no drama department but still produced four faculty-directed plays
a year), with the suggestion that he direct it; Henry fell in
love with the play as I had, and staged the first-ever college
production of it the following year; I was his stage manager.
We were a great success, and brought the first act to the first-ever
college theatre festival in the U.S., held at Yale, where it simply
brought down the house.
Later that year, an English literature Professor told all of us
in his sophomore class that we should forgo spending spring break
with our families and instead should head to New York and see
some plays. So I took his advice, spending a weekend in Manhattan
where I saw the Broadway premiere of Blue Denim, a sturdy
realistic play about teenage pregnancy, and Beckett’s Endgame,
which was having its American debut at the off-Broadway Cherry
Lane Theatre - with Lester Rawlins as Hamm and Alvin Epstein as
Clov, both unforgettable. Returning to Dartmouth, I wrote a review
of the two plays, announcing that Blue Denim was a work
of the past and that Beckett was the writer for the future.
That was to be my last full year at Dartmouth. In the middle of
my junior year I transferred to UC Berkeley, where there was a
Drama Department and by the following summer I had added Drama
as a second major (to my existing Political Science degree program).
My senior drama projects turned out to be directing an undergraduate
production of Waiting for Godot and writing a paper on
the parallels between the works of author/dramatist Beckett and
essayist/theologian Simone Weil. Both happily proved successful:
the Godot production was picked up by a professional producer
for a month-long run in San Francisco (where I took over the role
of Pozzo), and my paper was published in Modern Drama. My professional
career, therefore, as both director and scholar, began with the
work of the remarkable Mr. Beckett.
During
the Godot rehearsals (this was the Fall of 1960), I had
the temerity to write Beckett a question about his text. To my
astonishment, he replied. I had asked him (after an introductory
paragraph in which I shamelessly cited fifteen of his earlier
poems and essays) why he had cut two lines out of his English
translation of En Attendant Godot. The lines translated
as “ESTRAGON: Let’s go. VLADIMIR: Where? This evening,
maybe we’ll sleep at his [i.e. Godot’s] house, where
it’s warm, it’s dry.” This line seemed to me
extremely important, because elsewhere Vladimir chides Estragon
with, “You’re not going to compare yourself with Christ…
where he lived it was warm, it was dry,” thus these two
lines confirm what almost everyone now understands: the non-present
character of “Godot” is clearly linked – in
these characters’ minds at least – with the non-present
Christian godhead. To my delight, Beckett’s reply acknowledged
that the omission of the line “is a mistake and the line
should be restored.” He then continued, “I leave the
translation to you.”
So
I translated and replaced the omitted Godot dialogue
for my 1960 production, and the reasoning was detailed in my paper
in Modern Drama.
But
that was only part of the letter. In a second paragraph Mr. Beckett
also acknowledged another omission in Godot, revealing it had
been “cut during Paris rehearsals because the scene dragged.”
And that an entire scene – “of the boy seen from [the]
window toward [the] end of Endgame was similarly reduced in the
English translation,” concluding, “I think these lines
merely labour the point. But you are free to put them back if
you wish.”
Well,
I am now taking him up and reinserting these equally significant
speeches toward the end of the Endgame. These lines also
serve to confirm a godhead – one more universal than before,
as it includes Christian, Jewish and Buddhist referents –
latent in the vision of, if not Beckett himself, Beckett’s
characters.
And
I’d also like to draw attention to the auxiliary phrases
already cited. That Beckett would cut language “because
the scene dragged” removes him from the category of sainted
literary purist and places him squarely in the practical world
of the dramatist in the rehearsal hall. Despite his canonical
statements to the contrary (“Success and failure on the
public level never mattered much to me”), Beckett seems
to have had no qualms in cutting material he thought would bore
the audience. And the second line, that the cut lines would “labour
the point,” makes it clear that Beckett was seeking to make
points – again despite his avowals to the contrary, including
the canonical “My work is a matter of fundamental sounds
[no joke intended] made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility
for nothing else…,” and “I… refuse to
be involved in exegesis of any kind…”, for example.
But
whatever points are to be labored will not be done so by any “director’s
exegesis” of Mr. Beckett’s work. In our staging, we
have tried to concentrate on the human values of the play rather
than seeking to directly present its (plentiful) philosophic,
allegoric, religious, socio-political or metatheatrical themes.
It is a the fin de partie we must all experience: the
end of the game, the end of the party, the end of departing.
Robert
Cohen, director.
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