Samuel Beckett's plays are infamously challenging to stage. Intonation, pauses, nuances of light and sound, paces (the number of steps the actor is instructed to take) , head rotation, angles of motion, even how far a character should lower his trousers - the list does not begin to cover Beckett's binding proviso on every conceivable letter of stage direction. His personal involvement in productions was dictatorial. Coaching actors in cadence and timbre, he typically shunted aside token directors to monitor rehearsals and checked microscopic betrayals by the staged script.
These strictures are no less acute after his death. Draconian control by Beckett's estate means swift sentence served to those who transgress. In 1994, for instance, the highly esteemed Deborah Warner who directed the play FOOTFALLS, mounted at the Garrick in London, was censured for reassigning lines and getting actress Fiona Shaw to walk a few extra steps - what one critic has humorously called "walkabout". Warner was held under threat of lifetime debarment from Beckett's scripts.
Happily, the prose is relatively exempt of these pressures. The absence of stage directions bestows considerable freedom on dramatisation. Or, so it would seem going by Motley's quirky adaptation of Beckett's short story 'First Love', directed and performed by Naseeruddin Shah.
The story consists of the link between death and sexuality described through the reminiscence of a nameless narrator. His memories are straightforward. One day on his father's death, having suffered ejection from his family home, the man arrives at a bench. Various interactions there, with a woman, who he only much later discovers is a prostitute, lead him to her flat. They cohabit, she conceives, and on the day of her labour, when the wails of the new-born child fill the air, the man decamps.
In the span of ten pages of tight prose, Beckett conjures a protagonist for whom life improves by escaping the social sacraments of love and parenthood. 'First Love' is, thus, characteristic Beckett: misanthropic wit, exacting observations verging on unkind, sexist asides, non-sequiturs, and an emotionally destitute plot assured to nettle the diehard romantic.
So with these motifs animating the prose, opening the performance with a lovely nazm by Javed Qureshi, beautifully sung by Ali Sethi, is bound to prompt an 'Eh, what? moment'.
Here are the first two stanzas out of five in the nazm:
Dil jalane ki baat karte ho
Aashiyane ki baat karte ho
Hum ko apani khabar nahin yaron
Tum zamane ki baat karte ho.
One cannot be faulted for being baffled by the wistfully charming score. Not, though, that Beckett's text lacks beauty. But his lyric in 'First Love', if one can refer to his language as having one, is embedded in jumpy word order, mannered jabbering, and in the tasteless well of human selfishness, all stubbornly locked in the 'I'. This is not a speaker who is afraid of not being heard.
So, despite its gentle ironies, a song with an emphatic 'you', or interlocutor, implied in each stanza, is deeply antithetical to Beckett's story about the impossibility of communication between minds. Added to this is the fact of the nazm's Urdu. Its soothing formal register so lubricates the distressing text, that were 'First Love' a play, one imagines the Beckett estate might object.
The central set piece is a coffin flanked by four plastic chairs on either side. Across an hour and a quarter, Shah's character, embellished with a seemingly Endgame-inspired addition of a bright red sponge clown's nose, migrates from inside the coffin across stage. In transit, he stacks the chairs into a shambolic mound before predictably coming home to the coffin at the end.
Shah negotiates the journey with an assortment of suddenly executed, stagey physical moves that look like cribbed but diluted versions of stage directions from Beckett's plays. The roster of crouching, darting hand and arm gestures, and full body twirling seems intended to lend a vaudevillian touch to the otherwise caustic text, which, mark you, is filled with so many linguistic acrobatics that a physical layer of antics is almost overkill. But more importantly, is sometimes difficult even for a seasoned actor to handle. In the Motley production, the precision and dexterity of the motions are occasionally sub-par, when in fact the movements were perhaps envisioned as a tight fit with the many lively phrases for which they were devised.
All his life, Beckett was a dedicated athlete; a fact that observers claim repeatedly reflects in his stage directions. In some plays, legerdemain becomes a language unto itself that vies linguistic capability. This strategy is evident, in reverse, in Beckett's play HAPPY DAYS where Winnie the chief protagonist is trapped in a mound. Speaking is her only form of escape. So she talks, natters, desirous at each point to be heard by her laconic companion Willie who is not trapped in the mound but lives in a cave directly behind.
Beckett's narrator in 'First Love' is of course not needy like Winnie but like her also trapped; in his case, in a world of his recollection. He is expressive, over-expressive even, intimately at ease airing his thoughts, be it about scatological content or the rise of his penis to stimulation. And like Winnie, though unlike the athletic characters in some of Beckett's supremely physical one-act plays, 'First Love's narrator's most powerful instrument of action is not physical motion, but language in its capacity as a tangible moving thing.
Considering this, the slow pacing of the Motley production does not seem in the spirit of Beckett's short prose, even though it would be at home in his plays. A shorter performance, at least by a third, would have displayed the panoramic range of the story's incredibly funny rat-a-rat of verbal neurosis. The long flex pulls apart the densely adhesive prose. It lets Beckett's compactly arranged phrases linger in the air and acquire an emotive weight that is anathema in the writer's world. This could have been avoided by tighter pacing.
Then again, a man on a stage needs more room than words on a page.
*Prajna Desai is a writer of fiction and non-fiction and an academic editor. She was trained as an art and architectural historian and currently teaches history at Rachana Sansad Academy of Architecture, Mumbai.
