Chicago's Theatre Oobleck and the Neo-Futurists discover an unlikely vein of humour in playing Beckett, writes Peter Crawley.
Sometimes a play's title can say it all. Audiences for Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman must watch the performance through a screen of fatalism as the protagonist spins towards his titular destiny. The tramps in Waiting for Godot may find ways to pass the time, but in any translation of the title they are doomed to be forever attendant.
But when it comes to leaving as little to the imagination of an audience as possible, a clear contender must be The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett as Found in an Envelope (Partially Burned) in a Dustbin in Paris Labelled "Never to be Performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I'll Sue! I'LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE!!!" Critically adored at last year's Edinburgh International Fringe Festival and the New York International Fringe Festival in 1999, the comedy had a challenge living up to its title, containing, as it does, one big joke, several in-jokes and a ruse that its performers are not keen to let go.
"We recently unearthed these discomfiting scripts," announces the programme note from Theatre Oobleck and the Neo-Futurists, two of Chicago's collaborating experimental theatre companies, "and immediately (with all due deference) thought Mr Beckett (deceased) 'an idiot' for attempting to deprive the world of these works."
Through 70 minutes of liberal reference, tortuous repetition, academic reverence and tense power struggles between actor and director, the discoverers attempt to present such "new" works as Happy Happy Bunny Visits Sad Sad Owl (tracing the six-year-old author's nascent existentialism through the musings of stuffed toys), Not Me and Foot Falls Flatly (apparently written posthumously).
Proceedings are continually interrupted, however, by steadily more threatening "cease and desist" missives from the law firm, Puncher, Wattmann, Testew and Cunard, which is something of an in-joke within an in-joke.
"They hound us every time we do a show, but we have not yet been arrested," says Ben Schneider, the actor who is, to this material, what Roger Blin and Billie Whitelaw are to the known Beckett canon. It may sound like zany iconoclasm, a literate and goofy branch of university humour run amok, but for all the apparent silliness of The Complete Lost Works - and it is gloriously silly - there is an arch reverence humming below the surface.
"If I can speak out of character sincerely," says Oobleck's Danny Thompson, who has spent most of our interview in character, "we really do perform these pieces as if they are Beckett. That was our goal. Obviously it's comic, but we all love Beckett and we're trying to pretend that this is how they would be done."
Thompson, who once directed a college production of Rockaby starring a Playboy bunny ("It's not that unusual. I'm sure there have been many Shaw productions featuring Playboy bunnies. We're talking about the United States here . . .") might not seem to be an authority on how Beckett should be done. However, his fellow presenter, Bill Coelius of the Neo-Futurists, agrees. "We've always believed that it's also a nice little instruction booklet to people who have never seen Beckett before." That may sound more ridiculous than absurd, but Schneider, for whom Monty Python's The Life of Brian provided an introduction to the story of Christ, is similarly convinced. "Even though it was completely hilarious, it still, as a satire, had informative qualities with regard to that story. So these early works of Beckett can be an entry-way into his other works, as pretentious and preposterous as that may sound."
Indeed, as it recycles the same meta-theatrical devices which Beckett used to dismantle the artifice of the stage, incorporating tortuous repetition towards painfully funny ends and invariably reduces the futility of existence to the prison of a dustbin, the principle difference between this material and its source may be that, where uneasy laughs escape from Beckett's theatre of the absurd, here the same genre is simply played for laughs.
There is no small irony in the fact that the American première of Beckett's Waiting For Godot in 1953 was an unmitigated failure for setting up such comic expectations. Awkwardly advertised as "The Laugh Sensation of Two Continents" before its Miami opening, the production was pilloried by the press and deserted by audiences. Likewise, The Complete Lost Works has been no stranger to controversy.
"There's a moment or two in the play where the patience of the audience is tested," admits Thompson. "In Edinburgh, shockingly enough, we had quite a few walk-outs. About four or five every night out of 100 people - so that's 5 per cent who can't take it." In America, they've not only had walkouts, but threats. "A man ran from the audience, up to Ben onstage and just yelled at him that this was enough, and ran out of the theatre, knocking me down as I waited to come on," recalls Thompson.
It seems this is the kind of direct communication that the Chicagoans are trying to incite, however, and Schneider can happily recite a litany of such audience interaction during If, a Rockaby tribute that moved this writer to tears. "Quite often people would throw their crumpled programmes at the stage. Much hilarity can ensue. One time a guy threw a shoe. One lady threw her little tub of hand cream and it landed in my lap, so I opened it up and started to rub it on my leg. Someone threw Fig Newtons [cookies] once and I opened them up and ate them." You begin to see why Theater Oobleck's manifesto claims the influences of both Grotowski and the Mary Tyler Moore Show, or how the Neo-Futurists create theatre that is "a fusion of sport, poetry and living newspaper". Just as the plays are discovered and presented rather than performed, the distinction between Brechtian de-familiarisation and the direct address of a stand-up comedy routine is smudged, high art and trash culture are caught up in a giddy vortex.
John Clancy, the show's director (or "outside eye" as they have it) and former director of the New York International Fringe Festival thinks that such an aesthetic is becoming the prevailing trend of American fringe theatre. Equating frequent collaborations and late-night performances with the garage band movement, Clancy believes that at the core of such theatre is a political act of radical democracy. "We'll take it all," he says, "If we're more interested in getting our peers into the theatre than getting into the history books, then of course that's what we're going to use - the conventions and the structure of television, sport or stand-up."
Clancy agrees that even though this show has had to reinvent Beckett in order to challenge him, the author's influence is keenly felt on the American fringe. "Theatre of the absurd, and so many of those terms, have barnacles of critique and criticism all around them. But it's also a step away from the theatre of Western narrative and representation. It starts with the acknowledgement that there is a bunch of people in the room. It is an immediate relationship between the audience and the actor
"If you begin with that, it's like the energy of stand-up. It's automatically much funnier if a stand-up comedian is talking to the audience." It's the same situation, he says, with The Complete Lost Works.
"Here we are, presenting this to you, and over the course of the evening it begins to fall apart. It's absurdism, certainly in the sense of the anarchic comedy that absurdism allows. At the same time there's something about allowing an audience's intelligence to be challenged. In most western theatre the immediate relationship is a sentimental one. You're trying to get into an audience's emotions. For me that's a dead end. It's a quicker mainline to go to the head."
The legendarily litigious Beckett estate is no joke, zealously policing any productions that may stray from the austere and iron-cast intentions of the author. Beckett has thus rarely offered fertile ground for the reinterpretation of experimental theatre companies. Joanne Akalaitis's radical production of Endgame in Boston in the 1980s was only allowed to continue by removing the author's name from the programme.
The British director Deborah Warner was banned for life by the estate in 1994 because her Footfalls for the National Theatre did not follow the stage directions precisely. Earlier this year, Edward Beckett, the author's nephew and executor of his estate, attempted to shut down an Australian production of Waiting for Godot for its illegal use of music. In the case of The Complete Lost Works, the solution seems to be, if you can't beat 'em, purloin 'em.
But is there any danger that this production could incur the estate's wrath? "Well, there's been a risk," Clancy laughs rather sheepishly. "That's what keeps it kind of fun. And I think in good faith they could not see this and not understand it. This is almost a definition of what is a parody and what is satire. But we'll see. There's an open invitation."
The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett is at the Helix, Dublin, from tomorrow until Friday, Island Arts Centre, Belfast, on April 26th and the Cathedral Quarter Festival, Belfast, from May 3rd to 5th
