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The Beckett Landscape
| Article
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15199 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1989 |
4,139 Words |
| Author
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Hugh Kenner
Hugh Kenner is professor of English at Johns Hopkins Univesity
and the author of many celebrated books, particularly on Ezra
Pound. |
That Beckett's art is quintessentially Irish is a fact that goes generally unrecognized because his dialogue shuns stage-Irish fancy dress. The Irishness we're readiest to recognize comes in talk like Sean O'Casey's in The Plough and the Stars: Here we have Fluther, exclaiming loudly, "Excited? Who's gettin' excited? There's no one gettin' excited. It would take something more than a thing like you to flutther a feature o'Fluther." It is also found in J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World when Christy, the eponymous playboy, states: "Ten thousand blessings upon all that's here, for you've turned me a likely gaffer in the end of all, the way I'II go romancing through a romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day."
Such quaintness isn't thinkable on a page of Beckett's, whose most famous play opens with a bare declaration: "Nothing to be done."
Yet what would one day be the stage conventions of Waiting for Godot young Beckett studied from the stalls of Dublin's Abbey Theater in the mid-1920s. By that time the Abbey, which had opened in 1904, was no longer the Cause it had once been for W.B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory. A scruffy-looking little hall with eccentric sight-lines and a seating capacity of about five hundred, it had dwindled into being a shrine to its own past. Putting in an evening there was just an alternative to the newfangled cinema. Bankruptcy was fended off by O'Casey revivals (which drew crowds); otherwise, the Abbey kept itself occupied with recycling its legendary repertoire (which didn't).
There, in his student days, Sam Beckett saw the O'Casey tenement plays, all the work of J.M.
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