Endorsements and Testimonials

BECKETT

Remembering

Remembering

BECKETT

​

A CENTENARY CELEBRATION

Reprinted with the permission of editors James and Elizabeth Knowlson

Bud Thorpe (1951-) acted with the San Quentin Drama Workshop and was directed several times by Samuel Beckett, twice in Endgame, then in Waiting for Godot. He was also lighting designer for the San Quentin productions of Krapp’s Last Tape and Waiting for Godot, and stage and lighting designer for Endgame. Interview with JK.

The first time I ever met Sam Beckett was with Rick [Cluchey] and Rick’s boy,  Louis, who was, what, two or three: still in his arms.  We were going to meet Sam after a show at the Schiller-Theater. I don’t know what was playing, I couldn’t tell you, but Sam was working at the Werkstatt.  Off we went, and as we walked down one of the side streets near the back entrance, all of a sudden we saw this figure come out of the stage door.  Sam was always at places at specific moments; I was aghast that he would walk in as the bells were chiming six, and he was supposed to be there at six.  He goes under a pool of light and lights up a cheroot.  All you can see is the shadow of a man with his hands as he lights up a cheroot, and, as we walk up, Rick goes, ‘Sam’, and all of a sudden Sam says to Rick, ‘Louis’.  Sam picks up Louis, and Louis starts to comb Sam’s hair. I was introduced to Sam: it was very short. He did not know who I was.

         [Because of his growing friendship with Cluchey, Beckett then agreed to help the San Quentin group with the production of Endgame in the St Matthaus Kirche in Berlin.  Thorpe recounts first his experiences playing the part of Clov and then the advice that Beckett gave him at rehearsals.]

         In the beginning, it took a little bit of time to realize that he was not going to be Elia Kazan!  He was not going to be one of those directors who would give you a lot.  But I was very surprised at how much he wanted to participate as an actor in the production.  So he would go up there and say, ‘Bud, now, it’s the attitude, it’s the attitude’.  He’d sort of take his hand, and, say, ‘move aside’.  We got that quickly enough.  And he would do it.  He would sit there and go: ‘Is it not time for my painkiller?’, doing it in an Irish accent.   ‘That’s not enough for ya?’, never ‘you’, never ‘not enough for you’  but ‘that’s not enough for ya’.  You saw, even before he really directed it in 1980 that the cadences were Irish, and they connected better with Irishness to them. So, he would go up there and say, ‘Bud, Bud, don’t lose the attitude.  He [Clov] is a dog; he is a beaten dog.  He has his place: the wall, the kitchen, his light.  That’s his haven.’  Mainly he was going for attitude, and he said, ‘You are subservient to Hamm, but you can retaliate.’

         [When he was directing in a regular theatre,] Beckett loved to go on little adventures in the theatre, especially up in the catwalks and in the basement and things: he was fascinated I think because he was an author, ot a craftsman and a theatre person.  But he was absolutely enamoured over the technical things.

         [Thorpe then speaks of his experiences with Beckett directing the San Quentin Group in Endgame at the Riverside Studios in London in May 1980.]  He was actually moving his hand up and down to the beat of the poetry.  It was a symphony he was conducting. It was all rhythm and music and he said to us that because we had done Godot: ‘Now I am going to fill my silences with sounds’ and ‘For every silence there will be sounds, be they the shuffling of feet, steps, the dropping of things,” Beckett would walk the steps for you, and then check, just because he was a bit shorter, no more than an inch shorter, but his steps were shorter than mine, and then we would measure steps. Incredibly mathematical: now he’s hitting things that I never thought of as a young craft actor before. He was making a ballet out of it, and he said, ‘If you follow the mathematics, if you follow the sounds, if you follow the repetition of sounds, if you then put the repetition of sounds with your feet to the repetition of sounds that you make, then put them all together, you are then going to have’ – and he didn’t use the term ‘building blocks’ but I do – ‘you will have building blocks of sounds that surround the words.’

         At an early rehearsal, Alan [Mandell, playing the part of Nagg] comes in; Teri [who was to play Nell] is late. So Beckett said ‘I’ll play Nell.’ So, there he sat next to Alan and, again, it was almost the Clov character. He put his head to the left shoulder, and sat there, and put his hands up, as though they were on the edge of the bin, and he said: ‘Nell is a whisper of life. Just a whisper of life.’  And so he sat there, and both he and Alan mimed that they had their hands on the edge of the barrel, and Sam did not move. He went through this whole thing. *I was standing there, with my hands on the top of my head, watching Alan and Sam, because Sam was Nell. Put a wig on him, and he would have driven. . . The two of them combined were the best, the best. Oh boy, it was just . . . it was frighteningly beautiful, and both of them without a script. Extraordinary, Sam lisped a little bit, so he had the little ‘yeth’ [Nell’s repeated ‘yes’], and it sounded like ‘y-e-t-h’. And he had this lilting whisper about him, just being on the brink of life and death.

         I caught on very easily and very quickly over the fact that there are musical tones and canters to what we’re doing in this. You don’t have to play act, but you do have to find it from the inside. And he kept on saying, ‘Tone, tone, tone, we have to hit the right tone’. And we also learnt about mirroring, fore-shadowing, re-shadowing, and doing mirror-images of what we had done earlier. He just said, ‘we want a mirror-image of wat you had done earlier. We want you in the same place, the exact same position, the exact same amount of time.’ I use the term ‘ghosting’, that is if something happens and Clov has to take five steps, and Hamm is sitting there, then we try to do the exact same thing, not once, but two and three times during the course of the play.

         There were all of these people who did it before us. We did it, when, quote, ‘Sam was an old man’, and things had changed, and his philosophy towards the theatre, his way of looking at the productions had changed, etc., etc. And to this day, too, recognition will never be there because of the stigma of the San Quentin Drama Workshop. We had done it after the initial performances had been done years ago, in the ‘fifties and the ‘sixties, and we will – and I will take this to my grave – we will always be considered third-class citizens because it was . . . Sam in his ageing years had decided to help this group, because of love . . . And because of love, we were hated.