Samuel Beckett, an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, draws attention to the ways in which the Irish playwright has served as an inspiration to generations of writers worldwide, not least in Egypt, writes David Tresilian Samuel Beckett , 14 March - 25 June 2007, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Featuring manuscript and audiovisual materials that have seldom, if ever, been seen together either in France or elsewhere, the Centre Pompidou's current Beckett exhibition, which opened in Paris to much fanfare on 14 March, is part of what has become a Europe-wide celebration of the life of this reclusive writer, "damned to fame" as the title of his biography has it, in what would have been his centenary year. Beckett, who died in 1989 two decades after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, was commemorated last year in France, England and his native Ireland (he was born in 1906), and the Centre Pompidou's new exhibition continues the trend. Beckett threw in his lot with France after uncertain beginnings in his native Ireland and, for a time, in London, moving to Paris in 1929 where he swiftly made contact with James Joyce, at the time another Irish expatriate living in the city. His contribution to a joint commentary on material that Joyce later published as Finnegan's Wake is an early manifesto piece both for Joyce's writing and for his own, as well as a representative production of the avant-gardes of the time. France owes a debt to Beckett, who, through his longevity and his worldwide fame, perhaps became the French capital's best-known literary exile. His choice of French as a language in which to write certainly helped in the post-war renovation of French literature. (Beckett said he chose French since it was possible to write "without style" in that language.) The Pompidou's new presentation, focusing on Beckett's work in the theatre, has done him proud, and it is hard to imagine anyone visiting this exhibition and not coming out full of renewed curiosity for his work. Perhaps it is even an advantage of the present exhibition, mounted with all the Pompidou's usual intellectual hauteur, that it does so little to instruct the uninitiated visitor. Rather like being in the audience of one of Beckett's plays, visitors are confronted with the work itself and left to themselves to make the best of it. There is a presumably deliberately odd accompanying book, entitled Objet Beckett, a kind of "Beckett object", which serves some of the functions of a catalogue. By placing the emphasis firmly on Beckett's theatre work, and on the ways in which his writings have inspired others, including various contemporary artists, the exhibition suggests the role Beckett's work has played in the work of many others worldwide, including, of course, in the work of various Egyptian and Arab playwrights. Beckett's best-known plays, En attendant Godot, Fin de partie, Oh les beaux jours, and so on, all "anglicised" by the author himself (as Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days ), are foundational works of the "theatre of the absurd", a much-abused label but one that gives these plays a particular intellectual provenance and sets them firmly in the Paris of the 1950s. Camus, another characteristic voice from the time, had suggested that while "a world that can be explained by reason is a familiar world,... man feels a stranger in a world suddenly deprived of illusions and of light". The divorce, he went on, "between man and his life, and between the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of the absurd". And the playwrights of the time, notably Beckett, but also Ionesco, Genet, Arrabal, Frisch and the many others gathered together in critical works such as Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd set about exploring the nature of that "feeling". In Beckett's case, this meant staging figures that have since become emblematic of the movement as a whole, such as the tramps Vladimir and Estragon, jointly "waiting for Godot" in the play of the same name. Drawing on the kind of "music-hall" patter specialised in by earlier comics, among them Laurel and Hardy, Vladimir and Estragon are the first of many odd couples in Beckett's works, apparently held together by an inability to function without each other. Then there is Winnie, buried up to her neck in sand in Happy Days, but strangely chirpy with it, and the various "characters", if that is not too strong a word, who inhabit the dustbins of Endgame, bleakly arguing with each other or gnawing on the scraps of food that are thrown to them downstage. In the case of Ionesco, a Romanian exile and perhaps, after Beckett, the best-known playwright of the absurd, it meant attention to the "tragedy of language" and to the crushing weight of social conformity that language mediated. In his first and best- known play, La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Prima Donna), Ionesco was inspired by the conversations in an English textbook he had got hold of to teach himself the language. Lifted out of their pedagogical context, sentences such as "there are seven days in the week", and "the floor is down, the ceiling up", became marvellous material for a play, particularly for the kind of play that Ionesco had in mind. Copying such verbal items in his notebook in order to memorise them, Ionesco found that he had learned "some astonishing truths...from the entirely Cartesian manner of the [textbook's] author". Having been shunted up the familiar plastic tubes that snake their way up the front elevation of the Centre Pompidou, the visitor enters the present exhibition to be confronted by the magnified speaking mouth of Beckett's play Not I. This piece, dating from 1972, consists of the ramblings of an elderly woman who seems to have suffered from a series of traumatic experiences, all of which are told by a disembodied mouth about eight feet above the stage. In its stream of language, delivered with a strange urgency by the speaking mouth, the play suggests the ways in which story-telling pushes on even in the absence of sense, the speaker being apparently condemned to speak her thoughts in a relentless stream of words. Elsewhere in the exhibition's first room, entitled "Voices", there are manuscript materials, fascinating to look at because of Beckett's tiny, old-fashioned handwriting, and these are later joined by photographs of rehearsals of the plays in various European countries. These materials are joined, in following rooms, by recordings of productions of Beckett's plays, interspersed with works by contemporary artists broadly "inspired" by them. The itinerary is not chronological, and neither is it obviously thematic: perhaps this is deliberate teasing, or perhaps it is designed to mimic the sense of disorientation that comes from viewing Beckett's plays. The publicity material for the exhibition explains that the exhibition seeks to emphasise rarely seen audiovisual materials, such as Film, Beckett's only film work, produced in 1964 with an elderly Buster Keaton, a "major reference in avant-garde cinema", and Quad, one of the "works for television" that Beckett made in the 1980s for West German television. This is complemented by projections of other television commissions, including Nacht und traème, ...but the clouds, ghost trio, and what were. These items are one of the pleasures of the exhibition, and they can be viewed on small screens, visitors plugging themselves in through associated headphones. The exhibition provides, inter alia, a barebones sense of Beckett's biography, from childhood in Ireland (born in Dublin, he was from that country's Protestant minority), through to his fateful and definitive move to France and engagement in the resistance during the German occupation in the Second World War. The biographical materials are on show in a room called truc (thing), and they include some interesting photographs. At the end of the itinerary through the material on show there is a display of Beckett's work in the slim éditions de Minuit editions, reminding the visitor of the role this still-independent small publisher has played in the dissemination of works by writers from the francophone avant- garde, from Beckett and the writers associated with the nouveau roman to Derrida. All of this is a rich feast for Beckett lovers, and it is a welcome opportunity to renew acquaintance with a form of theatre, or anti-theatre, that must have seemed in the 1950s and 60s to have provided the shape for almost all "serious" drama. Indeed, visiting Paris in the late 1950s, having accepted a job at a UN organisation, the Egyptian playwright and man of letters Tawfiq El-Hakim was certainly taken with the theatre of the absurd, as can be seen from the plays he wrote when back in Egypt, among them The Tree Climber and Fate of a Cockroach. These plays, still enjoyable to read in Denys Johnson-Davies's English translations, bear many of the marks of the absurd, from the emphasis on situation rather than action, the elision of anything resembling human character as this might ordinarily be encountered ( Fate of a Cockroach is about cockroaches), and the deliberate mockery of tired conventions, re-functioning them in surrealist fashion presumably in order to expose the "absurdity of the human condition". In his survey volume Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt, the critic M M Badawi also suggests another intention. In the "cynicism and disenchantment" of these plays, El-Hakim meant to write "indirect, bitter satire" against the ills of the Nasser regime, Badawi says, including "the dominance of hypocrisy, paying lip-service to socialist slogans, of opportunism and pursuit of self- interest, of the dictatorship; the oppressive atmosphere, stifling all opposition and criticism of the government". While it is not clear how committed al-Hakim felt to this new form of drama, it is interesting to note that a form of theatre sometimes criticised as being "apolitical", particularly where the work of someone like Ionesco is concerned, took on a sharp political meaning when transplanted into Egypt. Perhaps for El-Hakim, writing plays since the 1930s, the absurd was a new style to be tried on for size in some kind of on-going theatrical odyssey. For Beckett, that odyssey took him towards ever-more stripped back forms of theatre, "new levels of austerity" according to Esslin. These are nicely captured in pieces such as Breath, a 25-second anti-play consisting of human breathing heard above a stage scattered with rubbish, or Rockaby, a devastating piece in which a woman of uncertain age sits motionless, listening to a taped voice reading out events from her life.
