Globe and Mail, Canada
April 15 2006
Egoyan does Beckett, and sees a lot of himself
At a Dublin festival marking the 100th birthday of the Irish
playwright, the director marvels at their many affinities
HADANI DITMARS
Special to The Globe and Mail
DUBLIN — At Dublin’s famous Gate Theatre, Atom Egoyan is pacing
nervously in the lobby, waiting for the curtain to rise on his new
production of Samuel Beckett’s Eh Joe.
“This place,” he says, in mild awe of the 78-year-old theatre whose
artistic director, Michael Colgan, staged all 19 of Beckett’s plays
in the early nineties, “is a shrine.”
The lobby is full of photos of Beckett himself, as well as
productions of Waiting for Godot and Endgame. It is also packed with
serious theatre-going Dubliners, here for the Beckett Centenary
Festival (on until May 6) which has turned the entire city into a
living memorial to the celebrated, Nobel Prize-winning Irish writer.
Given the show’s glowing reviews in The Guardian and the Irish
Independent, Egoyan’s anxiety, however modest, is a little
unexpected. But tonight is the first time Beckett’s nephew Edward,
executor of his estate, will see the show, and Egoyan has flown in
especially from an Italian press trip promoting his latest film,
Where the Truth Lies.
The Beckett estate keeps a close watch on what is produced in the
playwright’s name. It had already given a nod to Egoyan’s film
version of Krapp’s Last Tape — produced with RTE (Irish television)
in 2000 — and it had approved his ingenious new version of Eh Joe,
adapted for the stage from the original 1966 television production,
about a middle-aged man haunted by regret and pursued by a camera.
Still, it’s easy to see that Edward Beckett’s opinion of the actual
production means the world to Egoyan.
After Beckett approaches the director in the lobby to say hello,
Egoyan practically winces. “Wow,” he says, “this is so intimidating.”
Egoyan has won the Order of Canada and been knighted by the French
government with the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. So why is this
one-act play so important to him?
“I’m very excited about it because it is the most succinct expression
of ideas I’ve been working on for a long time, presented with the
finest actors available,” says Beckett, referring to Penelope Wilton
and Michael Gambon. Adds the director, who says he has idolized the
playwright since his teenage years, “To be doing a Beckett play here
at the Gate, it’s a really privileged opportunity.”
Those ideas, says Egoyan, involve the pondering of a number of
questions. Among them: “How do we construct personality? What is the
nature of a dramatic presentation? How do we know when something is
real? How do we access our own experience of what it means to be
ourselves?
“Ultimately,” he says, “all my work is about the inherent mystery of
any meeting between two people.”
In the case of Eh Joe, those two people are a solitary man onstage,
and the haunting voice of a woman. But for Egoyan — who, like
Beckett, celebrates the Irish philosopher George Berkeley’s concept
of esse is percipi, that “to be is to be perceived” — the perception
of the audience is almost a third entity that makes for a “a rich
alchemy.”
Adding to this richness in Egoyan’s current production is the
delicate textural quality created by a scrim between the audience and
the actor. An offstage projector projects Gambon’s image onto the
scrim, so that every movement in the actor’s face, every subtle
nuance, is writ large. But rather than distancing the audience from
the actor, the effect is one of profound intimacy. The experience is
gripping.
Beckett’s poetic language is delivered in the form of a long, lilting
monologue by the prerecorded voice of Wilton, who may or may not be a
former love of Joe. Or is she an inner demon he is exorcising? As the
voice describes the lyrical suicide of a young woman Joe once loved,
the camera inches closer to Gambon’s face in nine tightly
choreographed, almost imperceptibly subtle movements.
Intriguingly, while Gambon’s face is remarkably expressive, it’s his
hands that one notices the most. At the beginning of the play, they
tenderly caress windows and doors, searching for some kind of escape
from Joe’s inner solitude, in an almost filmic gesture. At the very
end, they rise dramatically to touch the actor’s face, in a final act
of self-recognition.
As the curtain rises, the packed house applauds its approval. The
no-nonsense Dubliners — wearing jeans and lacking pretense, and
evidently feeling as great a sense of ownership of Beckett as does
his estate — appear to have embraced Egoyan’s take on their bard.
Later, over drinks, as actors like Charles Dance discuss the previous
evening’s performance of Endgame, and artistic director Colgan holds
a rather jovial court, Egoyan delightedly receives a thumbs-up from
Edward Beckett. (The next night Bono, who has lately taken to writing
editorials on Beckett in the Irish press, will make a surprise
appearance and tell Egoyan that his production “really got me inside
Joe’s head.”)
With all that Egoyan has on at the moment — including an upcoming
production of part of the Ring cycle for the Canadian Opera Company,
a book on actress Claudia Cardinale with an Italian publisher, the
debut of a camcorder documentary, Citadel (which he made with wife,
Arsinée Khanjian, about her return to Lebanon), as well as his
ongoing visual-installation projects, the latest with Turkish artist
Kutlug Ataman — his seeming obsession with an old Beckett TV play
may seem incongruous.
But in some ways, he says, the play is a “pure distillation” of all
his work to date. Indeed, his background in theatre (he was at
Toronto’s Tarragon in the eighties), his film projects and his
installation pieces all come together in Eh Joe. According to Egoyan,
Beckett’s explicit stage directions and visual sensibility were
decidedly “filmic.” He even recounts that Beckett once wrote to famed
Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, asking to apprentice with him.
In terms of the difference in genres, Egoyan says he is excited by
the spontaneity of live theatre and the “magical process of
incarnation — what an actor does when they allow another character
to enter their soul.”
For Colgan, Egoyan, whom he sees as a fellow “Beckett devotee,” was a
natural choice for Eh Joe. “Like Beckett, he has so much integrity
and so much dedication,” says Colgan. “His ego doesn’t get in the way
of the work.”
The two men first met at a theatre festival in Toronto in 1998, when
Colgan was on tour with Waiting for Godot and Egoyan was directing
his opera Elsewhereless. While the opera was not a huge critical
success in Canada, Colgan was impressed enough by it to ask Egoyan to
direct the RTE production of Krapp’s Last Tape, one of a series of
plays he was filming.
With the experience of filming 1999’s Felicia’s Journey still fresh,
Egoyan was soon bitten by the Dublin bug. “There’s something about
this city,” he muses, “so many of the writers I adore are from here:
Swift, Beckett, Joyce. It’s inspirational.”
He also sees some parallels between the Armenian and Irish experience
(even noting an uncanny resemblance between the Armenian and Celtic
crosses). In fact, it was during the filming of Felicia’s Journey
that Egoyan had an epiphany of sorts that inspired his film Ararat.
“It was the scene when Felicia’s father is taking her through the
ruined castle in County Cork, and he says, ‘You must never forget
1916 [the Irish uprising against British rule].’ I thought
immediately of 1915 [the year of the Armenian genocide] and wondered
why I could be so involved in one history and not with my own.”
Coincidentally, the day after Egoyan’s Eh Joe wins the approval of
Beckett’s nephew, three days before the 90th anniversary of the 1916
uprising, and on Beckett’s 100th birthday, Egoyan learns that Turkish
television will finally be showing Ararat on the same day.
Still reeling from the excitement of the Gate’s birthday tribute to
Beckett, Egoyan says, “I can’t quite believe that I’m here. I just
keep thinking about being a teenager in Victoria, devouring Beckett
at the library.
“But Beckett is still so important, so relevant today,” he continues.
“He took postwar French existentialism and married it to Irish
tradition in a wonderful way. His work is austere and rigorous but
it’s full of affection for the human condition. Beckett is about
despair, but also about transcending despair — not through anything
esoteric or spiritual, but through pure humanity.”