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Samuel Beckett
Saturday, December 30, 1989; Page A20The death of Samuel Beckett last Saturday at age 83 marks an epoch that made "theater of the absurd" a hallmark of the contemporary stage. But however significant the event, death cannot seem like much of a departure for the reclusive creator of "Waiting for Godot," "Endgame," "Malone Dies" and "Krapp's Last Tape" -- works so steeped in themes of death and annihilation that one would think the man had been living over his own death for years. One of Janet Flanner's "Letters From Paris" in The New Yorker from 1970 tells of a one-actor show of Beckett excerpts, "Beginning to End," that started with the actor declaring "almost with satisfaction" that "I shall soon be quite dead, at last," and ended two hours later with an abrupt "That's enough."
Mr. Beckett's nonconclusive nonplots and intensely weird images -- freaks and shut-ins, tramps in limbo, terminally ill patients in trash cans -- infuriated and perplexed early audiences and sometimes drove them from the theater. But they and others soon came to hear in the laconic Irishman, with his special stamp of morbid humor and bitter nihilism, a peculiarly apt voice for a century stunned and sickened by oft-renewed brutality. "Waiting for Godot," first performed in 1953, is one of the most frequently revived of serious plays, and its latest major reincarnation in 1988 sold out before it opened. The other major plays can likewise be found in revival in city after city and at festival after festival.
What do audiences flock to find in "Godot," whose two comic tramps wait in boredom and impatience for a man who never shows up, and in the even darker and sparser spectacles such as "Endgame" and "Happy Days," in which characters die in garbage cans or are buried in sand, or in "Krapp's Last Tape," the monologue of a decrepit old man as he replays taped scenes of his youth? The citation for Mr. Beckett's 1969 Nobel Prize said his work "rises like a Miserere from all mankind" -- a cry for mercy, maybe deliverance, whether from the terrors of death and pain or merely those of pointlessness.
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