The Beckett way

By J.W.

MOST London notices of a recent trilogy of Samuel Beckett plays at the Royal Court Theatre respectfully mentioned that the director was Walter Asmus, then said no more about him. And that's a pity, because Mr Asmus has a knowledge of Beckett and Beckett's own vision for how to perform his plays that is unequalled in today's theatre.

A 73-year-old German living in Berlin, Mr Asmus was told last year about an astonishing nine-minute version of Beckett's "Not I" performed by an Irish actress, Lisa Dwan. (Its most famous performer, Billie Whitelaw, used to do it in 14 minutes.) Ms Dwan has been delivering "Not I", in which memories of childhood and other strangled thoughts are spat out by ghoulishly lit lips in otherwise complete darkness, since 2005. But she had hopes of doing a fuller Beckett programme, and after she had met Mr Asmus, the Royal Court asked him to direct her in two other “dramaticules”, as the playwright called his shorter late pieces, to be put on with "Not I".

So audiences at the Royal Court also got to see "Footfalls", in which Ms Dwan plays May, pacing up and down in dialogue with her mother, and "Rockaby", in which another spectral woman in a rocking chair listens to the musings of perhaps her own ghost. All three plays are being revived from February 3rd for 14 performances at the Duchess Theatre.

But why a director from Germany? Mr Asmus comes from a small town between Hamburg and Hanover where in 1956 he saw Beckett’s first play, "Waiting for Godot". In due course he became the playwright’s closest collaborator when he went to Germany. And Beckett went to Germany a lot. Both the country and the language had a profound influence on him. In 1928 he fell in love with a cousin, Peggy Sinclair, who lived in Kassel and studied in Vienna, where she and Beckett spent intense weeks in his early 20s. In 1936-37 he went on a self-educating tour through Hitler’s Germany, polishing his German and immersing himself in art. "Godot" was performed in Germany shortly after its Paris premiere in early 1953. And in 1965 Beckett turned around a "Godot" that was in deep trouble at Berlin’s Schiller Theatre by going there to direct it. He worked there and in other German cities on various occasions until his death in 1989.

When Beckett (by then one of the world’s most famous writers) returned to the Schiller in late 1974 to direct his own version of "Godot", Mr Asmus, who was on the staff, was determined to be the assistant director and says that he “spied around” to see who else might want the job. “I pushed things a bit,” Mr Asmus admits. “It was an exciting moment for me when he arrived. I saw him cross the courtyard of the Schiller and rushed down to meet him. The doorman made no fuss at all, just saying, ‘Ah, hello, Mr Beckett’.”

Mr Asmus says that he and the cast had made a decision to speak more slowly than usual, in deference to Beckett’s assumed unfamiliarity with German. They were, however, amazed to find that Beckett’s German was flawless. The great man knew "Godot" in German word for word, and directed it with his hands “like a conductor”. (The production of the play was considered, by Beckett not least of all, one of the finest during his lifetime.) Many years later, Mr Asmus recalls Beckett arriving out of breath after a long climb up some stairs to the offices of the bosses of a Stuttgart television channel and reciting, perfectly, a poem by the German Romantic, Friedrich Hölderlin. “The poem is about the Greek gods,” Mr Asmus says. “This was Beckett’s allusion to the TV bosses, sitting on high.”

Thanks, perhaps, to the fact that Mr Asmus had absorbed so much of Beckett's own views on staging from the mid-1970s, the German went on to become Beckett’s chosen director of his plays, "Godot" above all, and directed versions of the Dubliner's works in both English and German. From 1984, he was in charge of a renowned production by the San Quentin Workshop, which had begun life in the California jail in the early 1960s and which by the mid-1980s Beckett felt himself too old to help with. Mr Asmus's equally renowned 1988 production for the Gate Theatre in Dublin toured the world for the best part of 20 years.

Beckett started writing "Footfalls" while directing the 1975 Berlin "Godot". Mr Asmus was therefore familiar with the notes Beckett made, and remembers what Beckett said about playing May: “Try gradually when you speak the words to see the whole thing inwardly...” This is indeed how Mr Asmus has directed Ms Dwan. A quarter-century after Beckett’s death, his directing voice is still, surely, most intimately heard through this spry, septuagenarian German.

"Not I", "Footfalls" and "Rockaby" are at the Duchess Theatre, London, from February 3rd-15th 2014