Amid the rich and diverse theatre and discussion offered at the seven day symposium and fortnight-long theater festival dubbed "Beckett in Berlin 2000" in September of 2000, a pair of productions of what may be Samuel Beckett's most technically demanding theater work, Play, stole the show. The first was Xerxes Mehta's staging at the Akademie der Künste on 18 September, with Wendy Salkind, Peggy Yates, and Bill Largess. [...]
Mehta's production of Play made no concession on the speed of delivery, no concession on the da capo, and so may be thye first English language production to get the details rightand thus to allow the full dramatic impact of this play to come through. It is testimony, yet again, that staging Beckett Beckett's way, and getting it right, down to the finest details, produces an extraordinary evening of theatre. This should no longer surprise since Walter Asmus has been demonstrating this point with each of his stagings of Godot since Beckett's own 1978 Schiller productionj, and his staging of Kommen und Gehen (Come and Go) in German with Polish actresses, at the Berlin festival also made the point yet again.
On the other hand, as much discussion at the accompanying symposium emphasized, Beckett's way may not or should not be the only way that his plays can be performed successfully (or even legally). The festival offered a second production of Play almost by way of illustrating that point, this a Polish production (but with disctracting German Übertitelung), Komedia, directed by Marek Kedzierski as part of Theatr Atelier of Cracow's Teatr wewnetrzny (that is, internal or inner theater) that included Nie ja (Not I), an adaptation of Watt, both also in Polish and directed by Kedzierski, and Asmus's Kommen und Gehen. The Teatr wewnetrzny, also at the Akademie der Künste (on 22 :September), was something like Beckett on the cheap. Komedia, with Ewa Kalita, Malgorzata Galkowska, and Marek Kalita, had nothing of the technical sophistication of Mehta's Play. The light was slow, less than accurate, clumsy mostly, missing the mark more often than not. The urns seemed to be expandable tubes of burlap some eight or nine feet above stage level. Set and costumes for the whole Teatr wewnetrzny could fit into the trunk of Fiat cinquecento.
And yet the performance was nearly as compelling, even in, or especially in Polish, which imparted a more ominous texture to Beckett's text. The intensity of such productions rests almost wholly with the presentation of the actors, and they were as superb as Mehta's group, Marek Kalita (who also was the sole figure in the Kafkaesque Watt monologue) in particular. This unusual pairing of Plays suggests how powerful Beckett's late theater can be when done if not technically perfectly then in the right spirit. Perhaps much of the power of Kedzierski's Komedia depended on its following Mehta's, but I think it could stand on its own very well indeed, the production carried by the actors' rendering of the incomprehension and futility of the characters. As Beckett wrote to Alan Schneider on 26 November 1963, as Schneider's own production of Play was collapsing, "What matters is that you feel the spirit of the thing and the intention as you do. Give them that as best you can, even if it involves certain deviations from what I have written and said". That last may sound like heresy to the parishioners, but it is the future as well if Beckett is to be part of the living theater of the twenty-first century.Stanley Gontarski
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