BUCKETS O’ BECKETT
Splinter Group
Into that evening, however, are packed five of Beckett’s shorter plays directed by Splinter Group artistic director Matt O’Brien and Neo-Futurist Greg Allen. Of these the most satisfying–if I can use a word like satisfying to describe Beckett–are those directed by Allen. This despite the fact that the plays he directs (Come and Go, Act Without Words II, and What Where) are much colder and more forbidding, formal, and abstract than the two O’Brien is responsible for (Footfalls and Embers).
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By contrast, O’Brien, working with relatively longer, less obscure texts, seems more than a little lost. Part of the problem is that he must contend with an embarrassment of linguistic riches. Both Footfalls and Embers, which was originally written as a radio play, are intensely wordy texts. Still, as any Shakespearean will tell you, given the right actors and the right direction it’s possible to communicate even the densest monologue.
In the second half of the show Pike and Baker accomplish something even harder: they successfully translate to the stage a difficult prose work full of sentences like “For could one not in his right mind be reasonably said to wonder if he was in his right mind and bring what is more his remains of reason to bear on this perplexity in the way he must be said to do if he is to be said at all?” Believe it or not, even this convoluted sentence seemed crystal clear when delivered by the Beckett Boys.
