《Three Beckett Plays at the Harold Clurman Theatre》.pdf

Review: Three Beckett Plays at the Harold Clurman Theatre, New York, 1983. John Calder Two of the three plays performed in the Summer of 1983 in New York were receiving their English language premiere, the other, written and titled for the Beckett seminar at Ohio State University in 1981, was being seen for the first time in a public theatre. Alan Schneider, was once again in charge of putting on stage the author’s special vision of the world as he wants it done. David Warrilow, who led the cast during the early weeks, sadly had to withdraw, but the force of the three plays did not diminish with a change of cast, and he eventually returned to it. Ohio Impromptu is unchanged from its Ohio premiere, but suffered a little from a smaller stage. The sculptural quality of a Beckett play always lends itself better to distance, width and surrounding blackness. It is the first Beckett play to present a Doppelganger on stage, another Beckett pair, but this time seen as mirror images; it belongs to Beckett’s ghost period, where phantoms that echo the haunting quality of memory and nostalgia in his work are seen or described on stage. Meaning is less important than atmosphere: Ohio Impromptu catches, in those tones of calm resignation that has characterised the Beckett of recent years, the sense of loss of a loved one, seen both from within and without, not only the memory of a face and a presence, but also a memory of that memory. The reader reads to his own image, is visited by that image, reads about that image that is his own memory of being visited. Some passages that have special poignancy for the listener are repeated on request. Seldom has the atmosphere of personal loss as it must be suffered by millions daily, been so perfectly captured in dramatic and literary terms. As with Company, the author again returns to a theme he has portrays many times, that loneliness and nostalgia are too personal, after a certain age, to be s