Samuel Beckett is dead. This is a simple statement of fact. But it is also a statement about the nature of his plays. Something happens to dramatic texts when their author is no longer alive. The ultimate source of authority is gone. The circumstances of each production continue to change, but there is no longer anyone to say where the limits of acceptable change now lie. Before December, 1989, the answer to the question: "What would Beckett think if we did it like this?" was obvious; "Ask Beckett." Now, people approaching his extraordinary body of work find themselves like characters in his plays - alone in a world that has been abandoned by God. The only man who could possibly tell us what Beckett would have thought of Michael Colgan's epic project to put all of his plays on film is lying quietly in the Cimetiere de Montparnasse and saying nothing. All we can do is guess.
For Beckett purists, the best guess would be that he would have hated the very notion. They would have a great deal of evidence on their side. In his autobiography, the American director, Alan Schneider, recalled his attendance with Samuel Beckett at the first run of Waiting for Godot in London in 1955. Whenever a line was misinterpreted or a superfluous piece of stage business was added, Beckett would clutch Schneider's arm and exclaim, in a clearly audible stage whisper: "It's ahl wrahng! He's doing it ahl wrahng!" Where most great playwrights were content to write the text of a play, Beckett wrote the entire theatrical event. He specified, not just the words, but the rhythms and tones, the sets and the lighting plots.
Where most plays invite the active participation of actors, directors and designers in determining the meaning of the work, Beckett demanded that the meaning must remain indeterminate, especially in the face of journalistic demands for elucidation. Writing to Schneider in 1957, he warned that "when it comes to those bastards of journalists, I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind. That's for those bastards of critics".
In the last years of his life, Beckett became involved in some fierce altercations with directors who strayed too far from his own vision of his plays. In 1984, he strongly objected to an American Repertory Theatre production of Endgame directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, explicitly set in a New York subway tunnel after a nuclear war. He tried to have production stopped and eventually allowed it to proceed only with a programme note in which he disavowed it in the strongest terms and said that "anybody who cares for the work couldn't fail to be disgusted by this".
In 1988, he and his publisher, Jerome Lindon, forced the Comedie Francaise in Paris to withdraw certain alterations of and additions to the prescribed setting and costumes from another production of Endgame by Gildas Bourdet, leading to Bourdet's own decision to take his name off the credits. In the same year, Beckett took legal action to prevent a Dutch company, De Haarlemse Toneelschuur, from staging an all-woman Waiting for Godot. When he lost the case, he banned all productions of his plays in the Netherlands.
Others to feel his wrath for proposed deviations from his intentions were the Irish actress, Fiona Shaw, and her director, Deborah Warner. If he took such a hard line against anyone taking liberties with the plays, it seems obvious that he would have been utterly outraged by the far more violent act of changing the entire form of the work from live theatre to film. But then, nobody abhorred the obvious quite as much as Beckett did. The evidence for a much more open-minded, flexible approach on Beckett's part is just as strong.
This flexibility included a willingness to allow his work to be translated from one form to another. Beckett gave his blessing to one-man shows by Jack MacGowran and by Barry McGovern based on the Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable prose trilogy, and allowed David Warrilow to present a public reading of his late prose piece, Stirrings Still, which was, in all but name, a theatrical performance. Likewise, the novels, Company, Mercier and Camier and Worstward Ho, were staged, without objection, by directors whom he respected. Nor did he object in principle to the filming of his plays. He involved himself in quite a detailed way with, for example, Schneider's 1971 film of Krapp's Last Tape for public television in the US and with a version for the BBC the following year. In general, his main concern with TV versions was that they were directed by someone he trusted. And, of course, Beckett himself wrote directly for both cinema (Film in 1964) and television (Eh Joe in 1965, Quad in 1981).
One of the many important things about him was that he was the first great literary figure to embrace the new technologies of the 20th century. Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot are direct descendants of Laurel and Hardy. Beckett's Film stars Buster Keaton. The tape machine is central to Krapp's Last Tape. The disembodied voices that are so crucial to his whole aesthetic are a direct response to the effects of radio and recorded sound. His attitude to the realisation of his intentions on screen was not, moreover, nearly as puritanical as might be imagined. In 1964, when Beckett had just seen Film, he wrote to its director, Alan Schneider: "Generally speaking, from having been troubled by a certain failure to communicate fully by purely visual means the basic intention, I now begin to feel that this is unimportant . . . It does I suppose in a sense fail with reference to a purely intellectual schema . . . but in doing so has acquired a dimension and a validity of its own that are worth far more than any merely efficient translation of intention." He was quite happy to sacrifice a faithful reproduction of his intentions for "sheer beauty, power and strangeness of image".
The real question that needs to be asked about the new Beckett films, therefore, is not whether they follow the author's instructions in every detail but whether the deviations are justified by the beauty, power and strangeness of the images. On the basis of the films which were available for viewing this week (some are still in postproduction), the answer is "yes and no". In some cases, the translation from stage to screen has resulted in haunting, moving films. In others, it has created works that remain stuck in an artistic no-man's-land, neither faithful renderings of the originals nor successful new creations for a different medium. Sometimes this is because the adaptations are not very good. Other times it is because the works simply don't lend themselves to adaptation.
Inevitably, even in the successful films, there are losses. One of the best of them, Conor McPherson's Endgame, has an immense performance from Michael Gambon as Hamm and a fine one from David Thewlis as Clov. With its simple interior set and the relative realism of the action, the play demands no big leaps of style or content in order to become an intense, gripping screen drama. What is gained is simply what cinema itself makes possible - the precision of the close-up, the ability to change the perspective of the viewer so that it seems at times to be that of one of the actors. McPherson's good taste and talent for understatement makes a great deal of these extra dimensions, while sticking very closely to Beckett's original. Yet even here, something is lost. This cinematic Endgame is much less funny than any stage production I've seen. The problem lies not with the director or the actors but with the nature of Beckett's humour. One of the things that gives his early plays their grim hilarity is a constant teasing of the audience, which is asked from time to time why it is sitting through this grim stuff in which nothing happens. The funniest moment in Endgame is when Clov takes his telescope and instead of looking out the windows as he does at intervals throughout the play, points it directly out into the auditorium.
Asked what he sees, he replies: "A multitude in transports of delight." But on screen, an actor can't look at the audience. Instead, Clov looks through the telescope at Hamm. The line ceases to make sense and the joke is lost. Something similar happens with Patricia Rozema's film of Happy Days. She sticks very closely to Beckett's lines and movements and Rosaleen Linehan essentially recreates on screen her marvellous stage performance of the role of Winnie at the Gate. But Rozema makes one huge change, placing the action in a real and beautifully filmed landscape of sky, mountain and stone. This may seem like a rather obvious thing to do when turning a play into a film, but it interferes quite radically with the nature of the piece. For one thing, what Beckett wanted was a visual monotony which makes Winnie's determined cheerfulness all the more poignant. For another, he was also making a deliberate joke of the audience's utter incredulity at a set that features a woman stuck in a hole in the ground. As he wrote to Schneider, "what should characterise (the) whole scene, sky and earth, is a pathetic unsuccessful realism, that kind of tawdriness you get in third-rate musical or pantomime . . . laughably earnest bad imitation". When you get, not a laughably bad imitation, but a real and lovingly shot landscape, the tone of the play changes and the joke is lost.
Such problems tend not to occur with the shorter pieces, largely because they don't engage the audience in this way. This is why some of the most completely successful films are of the short plays. David Mamet's film of the late 16minute piece Catastrophe, with Harold Pinter as the dictator/director, Rebecca Pidgeon as his assistant and John Gielgud as the Protagonist/victim works superbly. Kieron Walsh's Rough for Theatre 1 gains enormously from being shot on location and in monochrome in a style that makes it a kind of bleak negative image of a Laurel and Hardy comedy. Anthony Minghella's version of Play with Alan Rickman, Juliet Stevenson and Kristin Scott Thomas seems even better than the stage original, since the fast intercutting of shots achieves more powerfully what Beckett tries to do by shifting a spotlight from one character to the next. On the other hand, though, Neil Jordan's technically brilliant film of Not I still seems like an impossible task undertaken with unavailing brilliance. The protagonist is a pair of lips that floats above a dark stage, speaking a fragmented monologue into the void. Jordan translates this into an extreme close-up of Julianne Moore's lips as she utters the same lines, editing differently angled shots into what seems like a single, seamless take. This is, in itself, superbly accomplished. But it is also falls far short of the chilling, deeply disturbing effect of the piece in the theatre. The sheer strangeness of the play cannot be recreated on screen. In the theatre, the small, distant lips in the darkness have a grotesque and terrifying quality that is, as Beckett knew, profoundly unsettling. In the cinema, even an extreme close-up is just a somewhat exaggerated use of a familiar device.
While Jordan's film can thus be called an impressive but inevitable failure, though, Damien O'Donnell's version of What Where is just disastrously misconceived. For the most part, the directors seem to have understood that they had to work within quite strict limits in order to preserve the integrity and mystery of the plays. Those limits include the visual details that are, especially in the late short pieces, inextricable from the texts. What Where, a highly political play about torture, depends for its effect on a kind of extreme understatement where almost nothing is said so that almost everything can be imagined. Part of that understatement is visual.
The characters look alike with the "same long grey gown" and "same long grey hair". O'Donnell, however, has chosen to trick it out as a lost episode from Star Trek. The characters are dressed in 1960s visions of futuristic clothes. The setting is some kind of library. The entrances and exits are accompanied by the swishing sound of automatic doors. What should be terrifying is merely silly. The only good thing to be said about the film is that it underlines by way of contrast the thoughtful restraint of most of the others. It also shows that Samuel Beckett was, after all, a wise man. The apparent contradictions in his attitude to adaptations of his work can be reconciled by remembering that the question he asked was not what is being done but who is doing it. To those he trusted to stick to the spirit of what he had written, he gave a remarkable freedom. To those he didn't trust or didn't know, he showed his stern, disapproving side.
The best guess is that, watching these films, he would temper words of generous appreciation with the odd stage whisper of "It's ahl wrahng!"
Beckett on Film begins at the IFC, Dublin, on Friday, with the 19 films showing in repertory for a week. All of the directors, except David Mamet, will be at the IFC over next weekend. The Beckett on Film project was produced by Blue Angel Films for RTE in association with Channel 4 and the Irish Film Board. Michael Dwyer reviews the Beckett films in Wednesday's edition of The Ticket, with The Irish Times. How Beckett's love of film influenced the way he wrote his plays: in Friday's Arts page.