Dance First, the samuel beckett biopic that made me want to write first instead
If we accept that life is absurd, and there is to be no reward for our industriousness, then it makes as much sense to do anything as nothing. In absurdist plays, like Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot‘ “however frantically the characters perform, their busyness serves only to underscore the fact that nothing happens to change their existence”.
When I studied the play, I read it straight and bleak. It was a toe in the water of the inertia depression would paralyse me with in later life. The wretchedness of Didi and Gogo consumed my thoughts, but in the pulsating manner of being agonisingly alive and connected to humanity at large, a bond yet unsullied by age and experience.
Art, so often benevolent or benign, is sometimes a poacher, trapping unbidden parts of you in an existential wrestle; there’s marks left from the perplexing questions posed and the agony exposed. I felt this with Godot, Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, Great Expectations and Wuthering Heights. And when faced with L. S. Lowry’s empty seascapes; it’s the vastness of the water and the unending presentation of it gobbling everything to the horizon. It gives me vertigo with the verbosity. (Coloured by the knowledge he made this series while dealing with the death of his mother.)
““I’ve always been fond of the sea. How wonderful it is, yet also how terrible. I often think… what if it suddenly changed its mind and didn’t turn the tide — and came straight on? If it didn’t stop and came on and on and on and on… That would be the end of it all.”
But when I finally saw ‘Waiting for Godot’ performed, it was as a comedy at the Library Theatre in Manchester, and while I wanted to be affronted, I was comforted. It worked as well that way, how utterly confounding that without any alternations to the text, this could be true. If I suspected it before, this confirmed the genius of Beckett.
When I read about the release of Dance First, the biopic of Beckett’s life that was released this weekend, I knew I had to see it immediately. The casting of Gabriel Byrne and Fionn O’Shea (playing him in his later and earlier days, respectively) was sound, they afforded him the necessary nuance to be perceived beyond the facsimile of writer, womaniser, depressive.
There was a tenderness in the film that doesn’t seem to underwrite Beckett’s work, and it’s all the better for it. By the end, I am not more enamoured by him, nor repelled. The complicated relationships with his mother, wife and James Joyce, are portrayed as cycles feeding into one another and dragging you inwards towards some chlaustraphbic revelation that doesn’t come. This might frustrate some viewers, but it’s a suitable reflection who wrote lines such as:
“We wait. We are bored. No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste... In an instant, all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.”
By the time I left the cinema, having deliciously converted an uninitiated friend to Beckett, it was striking to me that both him and the Theatre of the Absurd, are comfortable bedfellows in the acknowledged age of the Anthropocene. The thought drove me, as if possessed by it, to my books, and to research, and to a full day of contemplating nihilism, and finally, to writing.
Humans, so delicate and temporary in the universe, face the horror of certain oblivion in such strange ways; sometimes it drives a tyrannical intent, a heedless indulgence, or even a dull slow background ache, but does it matter? Does it matter at all?
In Waiting for Godot, Didi and Gogo wait for Godot, and Godot never arrives. But, is there significance in the fact they wait together? Or, that they actively choose to wait? Is the tedium of a play where nothing happens, exactly what makes it so dynamic? The fruitless efforts of our numbered days laid bare?
In our fellowship of waiting, we yearn for meaning.
Sometimes, we find it in the protests to free Palestine and at the ballot box; sometimes we find it tangled in our beds with another; and sometimes we find it in a theatre in a shared hush of suspended belief.
