Samuel Beckett: Dead Laughing

Ralph Fiennes, head nearly shaved, thin frame draped in mud-brown haberdashery, stands in an implied graveyard and works his mouth into a sour scowl as he says he doesn't mind the smell of corpses. "A trifle on the sweet side perhaps, a trifle heady, but how infinitely preferable to what the living emit, their feet, teeth, armpits, arses, sticky foreskins and frustrated ovules." Fiennes enumerates these body parts with slow precision, and in a tone of crescendoing disgust. It might be a litany of curses, a bill of criminal charges brought against a species about to be condemned.

Liam Neeson sits on a bed on the left side of the stage; on the right side is a blank wall on which his face is projected in closeup, as a woman's voice softly, insistently works its way into his head. "Anyone living love you now, Joe? Anyone living sorry for you now? That slut that comes on Saturday, you pay her, don't you? Penny a hoist, tuppence as long as you like." Once another woman did love him, and he shrugged her off, and she tried killing herself several ways, until one worked. And Neeson stares ahead, and the dead voice drones on: "It stops in the end. You stop it in the end. Imagine if you couldn't. Ever think of that? If it went on. The whisper in your head. Me whispering at you in your head. Things you can't catch. On and off. Till you join us. Eh Joe?" And Neeson stares.

It's appropriate that the just-concluded season of Samuel Beckett plays produced by the Gate Theatre of Dublin for the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City took place not in the Center's usual theater space but at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (familiars call it the John Jay College of Criminal Knowledge). For the oeuvre of the Nobel Prize-winning Irishman contains testimony from, and about, people guilty of a long list of particulars, most particularly being born. They solemnly declare all crimes of commission and omission, which Beckett sets down in crystalline phrases that might be spoken from the witness stand, or from the hangman's platform just before execution.

"Gate Beckett," which ended a brief, triumphal run on Sunday, is a welcome addendum to the 1996 banquet of all 19 works he wrote for the stage, from the full-length Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days to the 40-second Breath. That two-week event provided New Yorkers with what may have been their greatest theatrical experience of the decade. This time the Gate's artistic director, Michael Colgan, presented three pieces from Beckett's writing for other media: TV, for Eh Joe (Neeson), the short story, for "First Love" (Fiennes) and the novel: Barry McGovern's tour-de-force I'll Go On, a distilling of the Beckett novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable.

Why do it? Why transplant the work of an author who exercised such meticulous control over his plays that he itemized the number of seconds between pauses, the precise level of gloomy light? Presumably Beckett meant "First Love" and the novel trilogy to remain in the forms in which he created them. Yet there's reason in Colgan's audacity. He wanted to prove that even Beckett's fiction has theatrical verve, that the static can be dramatic, that pieces written for the eye can entrance the ear, that, for this most "internal" author, the page was also a stage. Colgan's strongest case was the most evident: all three adaptations worked gloriously.

The story, the TV show and the novels are all monologues, thus suitable for reading. And all take place in what the woman's voice in Eh Joe describes as "that penny farthing hell you call your mind." Some of Beckett's characters may never understand the harm they've caused or allowed, until "the agenbite of inwit" — a medieval phrase, often used by Beckett's mentor, James Joyce, to refer to the remorse of conscience — forces them into self-knowledge, into an act of contrition. In Eh Joe Neeson's face hardly moves a muscle; the play's director says the performance is "the longest reaction shot in movie history." Yet by the end of the half-hour play, his face is creased into something like penance.