In some ways, the plays of Samuel Beckett are as much an artistic tuning fork of one’s existence as, say, the late quartets of Beethoven which are also, at once, profoundly spiritual, playful, poetic, and uncompromising expressions of resolution to life in this world. In fact, I find that being present at a production of a Beckett play can be much like a musical experience with poetry distilled into pure and essential sounds that resonate with one another without any redundancy. No wonder, then, that a friend and I sometimes burst spontaneously into quotation from Beckett or Harold Pinter too, a playwright influenced by Becket, as if we are singing a duet. More to the point of this review, I was glad to recently experience a number of revelations in Beckett: Feck it!, a current production of the Queen of Puddings Music Theatre Company that I urge you to see.
I once walked out of a production of Waiting for Godot on which the director had imposed all manner of vaudevillian side effects and other stage business, because such intrusive elements violated both the inherent theatrical magic and meticulously realized poetry of this unique masterpiece. Around the same time, give or take a decade, I discovered the Irishness of Beckett and his Godot at the Old Vic. This production was attuned to both the underpinning of humanity in the play and the musicality of Beckett’s distinct voice. It was entertaining and moving, a spiritual eye-opener in some ways, and a beautifully rendered reminder of, as we struggle to be in this world, just how putrid we are. But as we breathe and decay, we are still human and food for music and poetry.
Beckett: Feck It! is another challenging evening of theatre from Queen of Puddings, one that offers four of the playwright’s short plays alternating with composer Andrew Hamilton’s specially commissioned take on the lieder of Schubert, Beckett’s favourite composer, and two trumpet solos from composer Gerald Barry. One might instinctively question the juxtaposition of any music or any additional elements of sound at all with Beckett, a writer who once declared that “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness,” but such innovation is here both logical and theatrically gripping, not an intrusion but something of a a mirror in sound that seeks to reflect Beckett and say what he says another way.
Beckett is certainly existentially minimalist, a literary and literal purveyer of reductio ad absurdum, one who says more with less and eschews redundancy with incisive passion. But the musical selections here seek to serve as an echo to Beckett’s existential concerns, as a musical context for the musicality of Beckett’s words, as a supportive atmosphere for the playwright’s theatrical imagery, and as something of a co-creator’s amen to the path Beckett has chosen to follow.
Thus the Drei Gesange, performed with unsettling conviction, dazzling technical elan, and interpretive sensitivity by soprano Shannon Mercer, like the agile and assertive trumpet solos of Michael Fedyshyn, demand that we deal with silence punctuated with almost brutal declarations, repetitions, crude sounds, assaults on both romantic notions and fluidity, pinched and eerie cries, fragmented idioms, plus implied and explicitly delivered breakdown of musical form and by implication of the human psyche, all simultaneously. Mercer’s rendition of Cearbhall O Dalaigh’s 16th century Eleanor a Run, delivered a cappella with slides and fluid descents provides a lovely coda to the evening’s Irishness.
My very few concerns involve director Jennifer Tarver who might have stressed more the urgency and acidity of gossipy pettiness in Come and Go, stressed more the need for one’s words to have effect. Beckett’s texts are most poetic and effective when treated as a ritual of colloquial expression, very human but poetic through pointed and clearly pronounced delivery and unobtrusive projection, but this threesome of ladies seemed to come and go without leaving sufficient impact. In this vein, Michal Grzejszczak in Ohio Impromptu, also seems a tad too inward in delivery and thus reduces his balancing presence somewhat in a play of only two characters. Ironically, his inwardness does add a poignant touch to the atmosphere of sadness where one can offer no real solutions.
Otherwise, Tarver has shaped an evening of fluidity from one visually striking hopelessness to the next and elicited some striking moments of human character. In Act Without Words Michal Grzejszczak is a hilariously basic concoction of ass and scrotum barely held in by his underwear as he proceeds to yawns and prayers until Tom Rooney replaces him with a pathetically enthusiastic routine of smiles and vigorous exercises and brushing of teeth and eating of a carrot, all with an idiotic smile. Come and Go is haunting in its concision and brevity of only 121 words and visually threatening with its three ladies uniformed in long brown overcoats and helmet-like hats. They are actively before us but we feel left out, and so playwright and director have established a compelling tension in us
Ohio Impromptu is striking in how Grzejszczak as the Reader seems humanly adequate and Rooney seems wounded beyond bearable grief as he punctuates the Reader’s words with a fist to the table. Play, with Rooney, Laura Condlin and Sofia Tomic buried to their necks as they embody an emotional mess involving a man, wife and mistress, has the three deliver their words and burps in rapid shots that almost defy one’s ability to follow what they say, and it is a stroke of genius in conception and here both frantic in performance and strangely hypnotic in effect. The spotlight switches from speaker to speaker and the lighting cues are therefore grueling in their demands, and the speed of articulate delivery required here always amazes me.
One aspect of Beckett’s genius is how he can say more of the same so uniquely so many times and this production is, in total, a rare opportunity to explore Beckett’s theatrical and philosophical mind and also the creative minds of those who dare to so ably interpret him. If you love Beckett, Beckett: Feck It! also offers a challenging and creatively fresh opportunity to see the lesser known works in his canon and to re-assess where Beckett stands in your life and in the lives of others who also find him essential. As with every substantial evening of Beckett, one doesn’t simply ask questions afterwards; one asks why one asks questions in the first place.
February 17 – 25, 2012
Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs
26 Berkeley Street, Toronto
www.canadianstage.com
416.368.3110
