Playwright Sam Shepard is creating a theatre more distinctive and complete than anyone since the other Sam, writes actor Stephen Rea, as the play Shepard wrote with Rea and Sean McGinley opens
JEAN MARTIN, the great French actor, who created the role of Lucky in the first production of Waiting for Godot(1953), died this year on February 2nd.
I was fortunate enough to have been on stage with him (and a group of French, English and Irish actors including Delphine Seyrig, Harold Pinter, Peggy Ashcroft, Billie Whitelaw and Barry McGovern) in the Olivier Theatre in April, 1990, to take part in a memorial tribute to Samuel Beckett when Jean reprised his signature role.
It was extraordinary to behold this history-shifting moment. If Godotwas the turning point in 20th-century drama, redefining what was possible in theatre,
then Lucky’s one-line speech – 700 words long – was what focused the rage of the traditionalists. Scenes comparable to Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival occurred in Paris and London. The curtain at the Théâtre de Babylone had to be lowered amid howls of derision. In the Arts Theatre in London, audience members stormed out.
But if the impact of Godot(and the entire canon of Beckett's work) was undeniable, it is more difficult to determine the extent of his influence on subsequent writing. Certainly in Ireland, while we obviously respect him as a great writer and perform his plays often (we've named a theatre after him, and there's soon to be a Samuel Beckett Bridge), his work seems to have had little effect on how we approach theatre either as writers or performers.
A decade after first opened in Paris, the 20-year-old Sam Shepard arrived in New York. He was immediately drawn to the Open Theatre and the work of actor and theatre visionary Joseph Chaikin whose main influences were Brecht and Beckett. Chaikin noted that “the theatre, insofar as people are serious in it, seems to be looking for a place where it is not a duplication of life. It exists to represent a kind of realm just as certainly as music is a realm”.
This in itself could be a definition of the theatre of Beckett and, equally, the attempt to occupy this realm is immediately apparent in the writing of Sam Shepard. Shepard’s plays, more than any since Beckett’s, feel like musical experiences. They transcend meaning, avoid the literary and conceptual and search for a concrete immediate reality, beyond the idea, which the actor and audience are forced to experience directly.
Sam Shepard felt that in the 1960s Beckett made American theatre "look like it was on crutches" and that "he had revolutionised theatre, turning it upside down and making it possible to write about anything". It is a wholly non-theoretical theatre. Beckett said "my work is a matter of fundamental sounds – Hamm as stated, Clov as stated – that's all I can manage" and " Godotbegan with an image of a tree and an empty stage and proceeded from there. I only know what's on the page".
Shepard's Kicking a Dead Horse, which premiered at the Abbey Theatre in 2007, begins with a description of – yes – a dead horse, and an insistence that there should be no attempt to stylise or cartoon it in any way. The play begins with a concrete dramatic image and proceeds from there.
In fact, what Shepard has done is to claim the Beckettian existential space and recreate it in rooms, ranches, prairies and, in the case of his most recent work, Ages of the Moon, on the porch of a (Kentucky-style) whitewashed brick country house.
To ask why the Irish theatre should concern itself with the work of an American is to miss the point. Sam Shepard is creating a theatre more distinctive and complete than anyone since the other Sam. That is why he demands our attention.
Beckett, the writer, never crossed the door of the Abbey with a new play: even his hero, Murphy, failed to have his ashes flushed down the Abbey toilet, as requested in his will. But now 55 years after Jean Martin first uttered as Lucky, perhaps we have Beckett’s genuine heir having a second world premiere in the Abbey Theatre.
Stephen Rea appears with Seán McGinley in Ages of the Moonat the Abbey Theatre from Mar 3 until Apr 4. Tel: 01-8787222, abbeytheatre.ie