Sam Beckett was asked to send a message in support of anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War. He replied, wickedly, "Up the Republic!" Too Irish a resonance, so no one got it. Nothing like Beckett.
The dead often get spoken of better than the living in Ireland, but when it comes to Beckett, the good things are true. He lived a life of substance and in the process made a body of work that changed the way the world makes theatre. The human voice, the human body. Everything starts from there.
Nothing was the same after Waiting for Godot. (He'd probably comment, nothing ever is.) Beckett plays were more music than traditional drama, each scored carefully as a chamber piece around simple, stock-in-trade devices of storytelling and memory. Breath-by-breath stage instructions meant what was on offer was a world, maybe a universe, rather than a text in need of animation. The play was the thing. Beckett was the first writer to insist on challenging the stranglehold of directors' theatre that had dominated the French, American and English stages for so long. Writer-based theatre became the most powerful form of expression for generations, from Pinter to Mamet.
The question bandied around over the last few days was whether Godot would come to the "Beckett on Film" project produced by Michael Colgan and Alan Moloney with RTE. Tonight the first three of 19 new films based on his stage plays opens at the Irish Film Centre, before their television premiere. This time round, directors are the auteurs.
Godot was one of the last films shot - wonderfully, in a turkey warehouse near Castleblayney against the imminent deadline of dead birds coming for Christmas. The play had brought Beckett fame and critical attention, but wasn't his favourite piece. It wasn't that he didn't like it, rather that he felt he could do better if he tried again.
Endgame dissatisfied him least. He told us that in 1989, three weeks before he died. My boyfriend, later husband, had been working on various Beckett projects since 1985, and we'd met him now and again, usually at the PLM hotel near his apartment.
He never arrived without the brown duffle coat immortalised in John Minihan's photographs, startling you with his good looks and pale blue eyes. Then he'd put you at your ease, speaking in an accent that was old Dublin and not at all posh.
Now, he was in an unremarkable nursing home, looking frail and a bit unsteady on the pins, but sharp as ever and in very good form. The nursing home was built near old catacombs where generations of Parisians lay crumbling. The coincidence amused him. It was bitterly cold that November and we'd entered shivering through the residents' lounge where a group of elderly people were arguing about a TV game show.
"I can't go on like this," Gogo tells Didi.
"That's what you think," Didi replies.
Beckett was fascinated by beginnings and endings, last words, last gasps. We'd been moved when we left him five months earlier. He'd read our minds and knew we thought we'd never see him again. He'd embraced Barry in a bear hug. Then, to my surprise, he hugged me, too. Nothing had changed since then, except that his Boswell's Life of Johnson had moved from near Dante's Divine Comedy (in Italian) on the bookshelves to the small locker beside his bed.
He asked us about the Irish writers' tour running in Paris. He didn't want any of them to know where or how he was. Except Francis Stuart. We were not to tell Stuart that Beckett would see him, but if Stuart inquired we should not discourage him from visiting.
Talking with Beckett didn't involve endless discussions about the meaningfulness or otherwise of life. He wanted everyday news about Dublin, and people he'd known, mostly friends and relatives, or how the traffic was being redirected on Nassau Street.
He loved visual art and would talk sport for hours, especially rugby, but increasingly in those years the doings of Jack and the lads. My then six-year-old son, Barra, met him once and wore official Irish gear for the occasion. Beckett admired it, talked soccer and fixed a meemaw toy car for him.
Other times, he'd inquire with a slight exhalation of breath, "How's himself? Will he get back?" and we'd recount the latest doings of Charles J. Haughey. The sighs became deeper. November's extra "last time" was a bonus. Beckett stood to his full height on spindly legs and started to declaim one of the Endgame speeches, an old story about a man who commissions a tailor to make bespoke trousers and becomes infuriated when the tailor never has them ready on the appointed date. Eventually the man reminds him that God made the world in seven days, while he is still waiting for a pair of trousers. "But look at the world," says the tailor as Beckett holds his arms out helplessly. "And" (extravagant gesture downwards) "look at my trousers."
Impertinence in face of the inexpressible; human empathy in face of everything else. Beckett took his last breath in Hopital SaintAnne, Paris, on December 22nd, as the Berlin Wall he so despised got set to come tumbling down. I can still see those trousers.
mruane@irish-times.ie