Directing dilemma

How can we honour Beckett's work yet still find something anew, asks Alan Gilsenan

It is the image that strikes you first. Those steely eyes behind studious eye-glasses. The weathered face. The hawkish nose and pursed lips. The gaze is both defiant yet stoic, staring out at you from the book jackets and the posters and the cheap prints. The figure seems to implore you to avert your eyes, to turn away simply for the sake of decency. Yet it is hard to look away, for there is also something unflinching in that look, something hypnotic and mesmeric that draws you slowly in.

The many photographs and sketches of him rarely reveal much else. The image is too seductive to be diluted by too much background detail. There is occasionally a hint of a doorway, a small promise of exit, but usually the surroundings are enshrouded in darkness, or sometimes whiteness. There is also, on occasion, a glimpse of a coat or pullover - in functional grey or black - and sometimes a scarf betraying a little colour which only seems to underline the monochromatic nature of it all. There is something ascetic about this man. A purity of purpose. Were you not to know, you might think he was a mystic. A man of deep faith. But no, maybe not. For he lacks the serenity of the true religious, with their hard-won sense of certainty and belief.

His name will not be far away. In starkish white or stylish silver. Beckett. An image too, as much as a word. Samuel Beckett. Flint-like, rigorous and unyielding but somehow comical as well. Sam Beckett. Something slapstick. Something - well (stupid as it may sound) - something Beckettian, of course.

But behind the face and the name is a whole inner imaginative world, that famous Beckettian landscape, which we now share with the writer. Again it is the images that linger. In the half-light, lone figures come and go. Two tramps by a sparse tree. A woman in a rocking chair. A man in a great coat and bowler. Indistinct shades in nightshirts. A black perambulator perhaps. Three figures encased in urns. The spectre of a woman endlessly pacing the floor. They wait. They look and listen. They speak.

The language comes in torrents or trickles. Poetic, spare, repetitious at times, Beckett's words are now his sole preserve. He has colonised a whole word-horde of the English language. It is close on impossible for any other writer to use certain words without descending into cliche or Beckettian parody. But, unlike other Irish writers, he is strangely unquotable. We all know that we were born astride the grave and that despite the fact that we can't go on, we'll go on, but generally his words - although deceptively simple in themselves - do not trip lightly off the tongue. They are hard won, and finely wrought, articulating our elemental despair and our childlike hope.

Beckett's world is, in many respects, the dreamscape of our time, or vice versa. His world is devoid of fuss and distraction, except for little games played to pass the time. He focuses relentlessly on what it is to be. Or not to be. Beckett's work has been subsumed into our consciousness, or perhaps Beckett, in articulating his own sense of being in our time and in the world, has simply absorbed us into his work. Yet for all this, Beckett is seen as remote, foreboding, difficult to access and his writing, like his all-pervasive image, remains largely unapproachable to most people.

BECKETT IS PART of the Holy Trinity of Irish writers, alongside James Joyce and William Butler Yeats. There are also the attendant angels of Oscar Wilde, Sean O'Casey and JM Synge. From time to time George Bernard Shaw, Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O'Brien come calling. This is, of course, an unreasonable and cursory analysis. It is based largely on brand recognition and how their image plays out on fridge magnets, tea towels and place-mats. Beckett scores highly in the recognition stakes but low on understanding and accessibility. He is the harbinger of doom, a sour depressive, an existential bore. Or so he is seen. Except, of course, among the angst-ridden students who remain, as ever, the keepers of the flame.

Indeed, I was an angst-ridden student when I first stumbled into Beckett in Trinity College, Dublin. One was aware of his ghost from time to time, glancing him maybe chatting with Con Leventhal in Front Square or perhaps guarding the wicket on a summer eve in College Park. He was a familiar figure about the place so one came to his writing with a certain nonchalance, borne mainly out of ignorance. But we responded to his poetry, to the beauty of the writing, the uniqueness of his vision which spoke with such apparent simplicity to each and everyone of us. I directed a raft of his plays, even Krapp's Last Tape with video (forgive me but it seemed like a good idea at the time). For we felt free with Beckett, and we made him our own.

Soon after I made a film of Eh Joe. Wrote a polite letter to Beckett and received a gracious go-ahead on one of his hand-written postcards. We met later in Paris when the film was shown in the Pompidou Centre. He appeared as if by magic in the cafe of a hotel across from his apartment. With Beckett there is always the danger of myth and memory fusing, but he appeared as one would imagine him, dressed in a black duffle coat and drinking seemingly endless cups of espresso. There was a real twinkle in his eye, a gentle and vibrant spark of humanity and warmth that the iconic images seldom reveal. Not, of course, that we should be surprised by this.

It was the day of an Irish-French match and we talked of rugby. But also about Trinity and the surrounding streets. He asked in detail about certain buildings and about changes in the architectural landscape. One sensed him rebuilding the Dublin of his memory, brick upon grey brick. We spoke only briefly about the film but when we did he smiled as if he was inquiring about the health of an old friend. As I left, he shook my hand warmly with his firm and bony grip and we promised to stay in touch. After his death, I visited his grave. I'm not sure why but it seemed like the thing to do. I stood (in the rain, of course) and watched the raindrops fall upon his name, carved on to a simple piece of marble.

LATER, I FELL OUT of love with Beckett. Or, at least, felt that when he died he had been stolen from me. From us all. Stolen by a vulgar Beckett industry and an academic circus that circled the corpse like birds of prey. The greasy till and the Beckett secret police.

As a playwright, Beckett was very specific about his work and about how it should be used. His stage directions are as tightly structured as his text. He abhorred the idea of his plays falling victim to some director's whimsical fancy or gimmickry. Some meaningless (or, worse still, meaningful) contrivance was always a danger.

But there is perhaps another, more insidious danger. The antiseptic reverence for the man and the fossilisation of his work. Where it is removed from the rough and tumble world of the daily and preserved in aspic in the sterile halls of academia and the high temples of the theatre. Where it cannot live and breathe and survive as Shakespeare has. Where the rarified air threatens to suffocate it. Is there any argument to say that it should be let free of its shackles of rigor and allowed to find its way in the world? Where it will no doubt be brutalised and abused but may, in the end, come back to its self again?

As I write, I am preparing to go into rehearsals for Footfalls. I am falling in love once more. With the austere beauty of the writing, with the haunting potency of its imagery, with the raw physicality of its motion. With its enigmatic truth. I am older now and so have done my reading, my research. But one is still confronted with the essential dilemma of directing Beckett. To faithfully reproduce the old productions or find it anew once more in our time? To respect the writer's clear intentions yet let the words find their unique and fresh voice again.

Allthat seems certain is that the answer lies deep within the precise and wondrous words that Samuel Beckett bequeathed unto us. So we must discover it once again. Reclaim it all once more, for ourselves and our audience. Fail again. Fail better.

Alan Gilsenan is a film-maker and theatre director. His production of Beckett's Footfalls runs at the Barbican in London and Dublin's Gate Theatre during April