How's everyone doing?
Turning on BBC2 one midnight in the early nineties I came across Norman Beaton, who I only knew from the sitcom Desmond's, monologuing in shades and a fez and a beaten-up set like something out of The Young Ones. I'd never heard a voice do what Beaton's was doing here, and was transfixed. The fact I had no idea what this show was helped the spell. When Stephen Rea lurched in I was suddenly reminded of an illustration of Patrick Magee and Jack MacGowran that we had hanging up in the toilet, and realised this must be Samuel Beckett's Endgame, and then Charlie Drake popped out of a dustbin, and that settled matters. But I'd been enjoying the hang of unsettled matter. To this day I've never seen the play onstage, but then... I... don't... really... enjoy going to see Samuel Beckett there I said it. I've never been asked to act in anything by him either, although I've acted in a lot that he must have inspired, which I think I prefer. Because God bless him, he couldn't have made restaging his work more off-putting if he'd tried, but now he's part of The Canon and so actors still have to climb into bins or pots or stand stock still for half an hour with only their mouths illuminated, or get pulled along with ropes round their neck burdened with suitcases having memorised three pages of intense abstraction, long after the astonishing originality of any of this blipped its last blip. In Conor McPherson's 2000 film of Endame, the dustbins aren't even in shot until they're unveiled, making a nonsense of their intial veiling. It's just an action performed because it's in the script. In that same film Michael Gambon plays "Hamm", the monster I first saw Norman Beaton play, and he plays him monstrously, which I don't think is as good. But I don't know how you could be as good as Norman Beaton is in this. I wanted to see everything he was in after that night, and when he was cast as King Lear I blutacked the flyer of him in star-rimmed spectacles onto my bunk bed and couldn't wait to watch him live. But then he fell ill, and it never happened, which you can read about here. He died that year, and I've been wanting to see this particular Endgame again ever since, literally for decades. Last month someone finally put it upon youtube. So that's the build-up. Here's a taste:
Charlie Drake's great too. And here's the whole thing if you're as smitten as me. Happy Saint Patrick's Day, gang. Stay wonderful.
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