Hell Without End

By T.E.K.

Life on earth is every man's hell some of the time. From man to man, the span of suffering and the sense of damnation varies. For some, the searing pain, the numbing descent into nothingness lasts minutes or hours or days; for others, weeks, months and years. It is Samuel Beckett's special vision to see man's entire life as a torment, a flaying of the heart, a hell without end.

His entire work--plays, novels, poems --is a lamentation for the living. It is astonishing, at times, that Beckett can bring himself to write at all. Silence, like the peace of death that he constantly invokes, might seem like surcease from such unremitting sorrow. Perhaps not writing was the circle of earthly hell that he could not bear to enter.

All of this is admirably conveyed by Jack MacGowran in the Works of Samuel Beckett. A fellow Irishman, MacGowran can claim a friendship and affinity with Beckett attested to by a BBC play, Eh, Joe, specifically written for him by the Nobel-prizewinning playwright. With a seamless unity MacGowran has assembled a one-man reading session, principally from Beckett's novels (Malone Dies, Molloy, The Vnnameable) and plays (Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, Endgame). Cloaked in a black-spattered coffin of a coat, head and body shaken with keening tremors, and eyes stony with grief, MacGowran is the symbol of a man exiled from his own planet but imprisoned in his being.

"Words have been my only love," says Beckett. This show is abundant proof of that. The word as dance, as flame, as dirge, as echo, as whip, as caress, as cosmic howl--they are all here, and MacGowran catches every cadence perfectly.

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