Fabulous thread, Eddie.

Beckett has never really appealed to me - I think I'm too optimistic and find his obsession with death and misery a rather limited world view. He has a wonderful way with the English language - and it was fascinating to read some of it was written in French then translated back. Often wonder if anyone would take him seriously if he didn't write such superb sentences.

My favourite Beckett quote is almost optimistic:

Always trying
Always failing
Never mind
Try again
Fail better

It never occured to me that Beckett was a pessimist...
A glass half empty or half full is still a half glass of water. I thought he was a realist, a voice of reason in a world full of people with twisted perceptions.

"I might be sprawling in the sun now, sucking my pipe, patting the bottoms of the third and forth generation, looked up to and respected, wondering what there was for dinner, instead of stravaging the same old roads in all weathers, I was never much of a one for new ground..."
(Beckett. "From an Abandoned Work")

It's not really possible to imagine SB as a happy family man, is it? He and Suzanne never had any children- it would have been contrary to his whole world view if they had.

He seems to have liked young people, though, and to have felt his family obligations deeply. Relatives in Ireland would sometimes complain, "Sam only comes over here for funerals".

Not for the weddings? Perhaps he liked the old people better, confining his visits to the funerals. Or perhaps he also came over for the child funerals. His speed.

Apropos the other thing, there was a dinner theatre "Godot" in Miami once, starring Bert Lahr and someone else,more forgettable, in clown makeup.

I like the ending of Murphy, when the ashes of the hero in a newspaper parcel are knocked to the floor in a bar, becoming a football until the package bursts and they scatter among the sawdust and split beer, to be swept out with them at the end of the night. If you don't think that's funny, Beckett might agree with you, dolefully. If you do, he might also agree with you, equally dolefully. Beckett and Buster - synchronicity, perhaps. Certainly serendipity.

The ER Rules are godawful. I think I may go back to erase my presence, if that's possible.

Eh. Forget it. Too much work. Let the half-dead bury the half-dead, if anyone cares enough.

Beckett: First read him when I was what, 23? Don't know as I agree you need a life or half-a-life of misery to get him, Eddie. Opinion, not fact - I hungered for more, after reading his first book, I think perhaps Murphy, or maybe it was Godot. You know a classic the first time you read it, nobody has to tell you, you don't have to wait a hundred years till he's safely buried. This guy was a writer, a phrase-polisher par excellence. Did I get his misery? I dunno. I grew up in Glasgow, if that's of any help. The East and South Ends, Kelvingrove being a foreign, English-inhabited upper-class den of chinless yawpers who tried to import/export tennis to Glesga Green without much success.Of course, that was Glesga sixty-plus years ago. It's changed since then, I suppose. Who knows. Or much cares.

You must be the best-read guy I've met since Paul Pines..

Now, that's an accolade.

And no, among the zillions of books I haven't read, I haven't read that biography. You excessively well-read English bastert.

Gandalf and Captain Picard (Sir Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart) are presently having a whale of a time- by all accounts- with the roles of Vladimir and Estragon in a production of "Waiting For Godot" on the London stage.

Don't think I'll be attending. Probably couldn't get hold of a ticket, anyway. Beckett goes Hollywood! Now, there's a thing.

It's interesting to reflect that Beckett had no high opinion of "Waiting For Godot" at all, regarding it as "a bad play".

The reviews of the first production on the London stage- directed by Peter Hall- were indeed terrible, and the play looked like closing after a short run until the production was saved by a glowing review in the Sunday papers by theatre critic Kenneth Tynan.

After that, it became a hot ticket, a "succes de scandale".

The London premiere of "Endgame" was equally problematic because the Lord Chamberlain's office (the official theatrical censor of the day- since abolished) objected to Hamm's line (of God):

The bastard! He doesn't exist!

Beckett dug his heels in and refused to cut the line. The production looked like closing before it had opened, but the Lord Chamberlain relented when it was pointed out that the same line had been spoken in a previous production in Paris without riots in the streets.

Actors have a hard time performing Beckett.

Many have recounted a peculiar feeling when performing "Waiting For Godot": that some nights on stage the lines seem to be about the futility of their own lives.

Billie Whitelaw, strapped immobile to a board in the darkness while performing the role of the Mouth in "Not I", used to experience a kind of sensory deprivation during which she would imagine that she was flying an airplane.

At one point she broke down in the course of rehearsals, much to Beckett's consternation: "Billie, what have I done to you!".

As observed above, Beckett's actors are frequently confined or imprisoned in some way on stage, where they are obliged to give performances of great vocal skill and complexity demanded by the text, not to speak of the sheer feat of memory involved here.

It's little wonder that Beckett's original Anglo-Irish stage interpreters (Patrick Magee and Jack McGowan) were eventually worn down by demands of performing SB's work. Both died of alcohol-related illnesses.

Of course, death from alcohol-related illnesses are not confined to people who've acted in Beckett's plays; Dylan Thomas was a poet-actor who threw himself into his roles, despite great personal shyness, and lubricated his performances with great doses of alcohol which led him to bravura performances both on and offstage afterwards. Just a thought about Magee and McGowan, who may well have suffered from "The Irish curse," in any case. Nice anecdote about Beckett's concern for Billie Whitelaw; would that more playwrights cared more about the actors!

Billie Whitelaw was an attractive woman. Maybe he fancied her? SB wasn't immune to the beauty of women. He shagged Peggy Guggenheim.

It must be said, though, that the depiction of sex in Beckett's work is often attended with a certain Swiftian physical disgust.