Two men are meeting on Zoom, as they have done twice a week for the past two years. One of them is in northern France, his cottage bathed in bright spring sunshine, two portraits of a craggy Samuel Beckett behind him. The other is in a chilly Sussex, his window casting a dull grey light.
The first starts to recite. “Before Pim long before with Pim vast tracts of time,” he says. “A few traces that’s all seeing who I always.”
The second interrupts to correct him. “Thoughts,” he says. “Kinds of thoughts.”
The first man begins again. “Before Pim long before with Pim vast tracts of time kinds of thoughts same family diverse doubts emotions too yes emotions …”
And so it goes until it is the second man’s turn to incant these mysterious words. An hour later, they are still in full flow, a ritual as mesmerising as it is strange. Phrases loop and repeat. Themes fade in and out of focus. Rhythms emerge from the unpunctuated text to form a dreamy, austere poetry.
It must be hellish to memorise, which is why these two men must test their recall so frequently. The words are from Beckett’s novel How It Is. The first man is Conor Lovett, who with Judy Hegarty Lovett is the driving force behind Gare St Lazare Ireland, a company renowned for facing Beckett head-on. The second man is Stephen Dillane, the screen star and National Theatre regular.
“If you’re not careful you’ll go off on page 23 instead of the page you’re actually on,” says Conor Lovett before their line run. “You have to be on the ball.”
“There are many occasions when both Conor and I feel exposed on the stage in a way that you don’t in a conventional piece,” says Dillane. “There’s no character. You’re not even sure that you’re there. You’re not sure if it’s the past or the present, so how on earth can you possibly speak?”
The staging has a long history. In 2018, towards the end of a three-year residency, they performed How It Is (Part One) at the Everyman, Cork, as well as at London’s Coronet theatre. They had just given the second part an airing when the Covid pandemic struck. That led to a six-hour online version for the Dublin theatre festival in 2021. The Irish Times said it was “difficult to click pause”.
Now, they are bringing the second part to London, with music by Mel Mercier and the Irish Gamelan Orchestra, and setting their sights on a live staging of the whole book. “It’s a wonderful text to stay with and revisit,” says Dillane. “It’s continually shifting, continually revealing itself and disguising itself again, while always, because of the sheer perfection of the language, maintaining your faith that there is something worth staying around for – and more.”
As a veteran interpreter of Beckett works, including First Love, Molloy and The Unnamable, director Judy Hegarty Lovett is unfazed by the novel’s open-endedness. “Very often the characters in those prose works are nameless and aren’t drawn that heavily,” she says, and is delighted to have been awarded a doctorate for her PhD on the making of How It Is (Part One). “It’s less to do with specifying character and more to do with expressing thought.”
Published in English in 1964, the three-part novel features an unknown narrator speaking from the darkness, his circumstances reduced to a sack, a few tins, the mud beneath him and the memory of meeting someone called Pim. With not so much as a comma, never mind a full stop, it is wide open to interpretation, even if its rhythm points to units of meaning.
“Rightly or wrongly, we have both identified where the full stop is, where the paragraph break is, where the turns are, but they are entirely provisional,” says Dillane. “There are syntactical arrangements that are self-explanatory and have to be the way they are, but it’s by no means all of them.”
When commentators attempt to suggest a meaning for this elliptical work, their claims can seem nebulous. Critics talk vaguely about the “human condition”. Summing up Beckett can make him seem banal. What interpretation do the actors have? “It’s something to do with a mind trying to understand itself and recognising the absurdity of that task,” says Dillane, whose repertoire also includes TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. “It seems to be an attempt by a binary, logical mind to make sense of stuff in order to continue to exist while recognising that it can’t possibly do that.”
Yet, even then, the book resists. “There is no point at which you say, ‘Ah, that’s it,’” says Conor Lovett. “We go through moments when it’s crystal clear what it’s all about and then a day later we say, ‘Why did we think that?’”
How It Is (Part Two) is at the Coronet theatre, London, from 20 April to 7 May
