This inertia of things is enough to drive one literally insane.
Molloy, Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett is famously one of the most recondite of writers, especially in speaking about his own work. Yet, in the one of paradoxes of modern literature, his work has spawned millions of words of scholarly exegesis. I’d swap much of this commentary for this performance by Conor Lovett: his bitterly lucid performance of extracts from Beckett’s trilogy of novels – Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable – tells you everything you need to know about Beckett, that isn’t said by Beckett himself.


Lovett’s performance reveals Beckett’s humility, that ironic compassion and obdurate, sly humour. There isn’t a trace of vanity in these cruelly comic narratives, built precariously before our eyes “to pass the time”. Lovett and his director, Judy Hegarty Lovett, wisely don’t attempt to summarise all the novels into what is already a marathon (three and a half hour) performance. Instead, they select a few passages from each work and structure the evening as a fragmentary progression. For those unfamiliar with the trilogy, it's an excellent introduction; for those who have already read them, it's a joyous exploration of a work that remains as freshly challenging as when it was written.

Beckett's characters enact powerlessness. Most obviously, it's at the hands of mysteriously intentioned others: the bafflingly charitable, who insist their charity on the benighted whether they desire it or not; or those who insist some kind of claim of obligation, perhaps the accidental death of a dog; or the policeman who embodies an irrational social order. Just as often, they are at the mercy of things: bicycles, trousers, trees, their own bodies. Yet, with a very human irrationality, if Beckett's characters have power of their own, they will exert it on others, and their actions are as cruel and absurd as those they suffer (less evident perhaps in this performance, than in the novels).

For Molloy and Malone, these encounters are merely symptoms of a brutal interior impotence, in which the self is in an unavailing struggle with itself. They are fictions who know they are fictions: and the hand that structures the writing, the author himself, despairingly sees himself in their inadequate mirrors, a thing of language at the mercy of the imperative of living, a drive for survival that is no more than a primitive instinct for continuation. It's in the clarity of this vision - as disinterested as a natural historian's - that Beckett's compassion is most evident.

Most of all, these characters are alone, in a wasteland bounded by the limits of their skulls. Through the three books the fictions narrow and focus, until the nameless protagonist of The Unnameable begins to grapple with the act of speech itself, tormentedly unsure whether he is saying the words or whether the language is saying him, his consciousness nothing but a series of predestined patterns in which individual choice is nothing but a fragile illusion. "Hearing nothing, I am nonetheless a prey to communication. And I speak of voices! After all, why not, as long as one knows it's untrue..."

The chief virtue of Lovett’s performance is how he embodies the struggles of Beckett’s absurd and tragic characters, in their struggle to exist and to remember; most of all, in their struggle out of silence, towards speaking. Dressed in dark clothes that change subtly for each recitation, he emerges from the audience for both Molloy and Malone Dies, as if to emphasise that these stories do not concern themselves with those who live in the limelight, but with more ordinary, anonymous lives. Speaking in a soft Cork accent, Lovett’s white face and fluttering hands articulate the cruel intelligence and surprisingly gentle ironies that animate the writing. Perhaps the performance is most powerful in its silences, which are impeccably timed, permitting the implications of what has been heard to flower vividly in the mind.

The staging is pleasingly bare. For the first two, a white circle of light snaps open on a huge, naked stage. We contemplate the light for some moments, until Lovett emerges from the audience and onto the stage. The Unnamable is staged in a narrowly angled blade of light that throws a monstrous shadow on the wall behind Lovett, and is more sober, more painful, than the preceding two. I find it hard to judge this last one: a migraine of titanic proportions clamped down on my skull, making being present at this performance a real struggle. Despite this, Lovett kept my attention, and somehow the physical pain seemed strangely appropriate for witnessing this anguished conflict with language and consciousness. Perhaps it was Beckett playing a final, mordant joke.

A shorter version of this review is in today's Australian.

Picture: Conor Lovett as Malone. Picture: Dylan Vaughan

The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, by Samuel Beckett, writings selected by Colin Lovett and Judy Hegarty Lovett, directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett, performed by Conor Lovett. Gare St Lazare Players Ireland. Playhouse Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre. October 15.