Review: ON BECKETT at Shakespeare Theatre

Back when everyone still wore a hat, Nobel Prize-winning writer Samuel Beckett specified that Didi and Gogo, the protagonists of his most well-known play, Waiting for Godot (1952), must wear bowlers. So Bill Irwin has brought his hatboxes, for he will indeed perform sections of Godot during his entrancing, 90 minute one-man show, On Beckett. But he's packed additional headgear so that he can emulate the first generation of silent film actors that Beckett saw in his youth in Ireland accompanying patter-driven vaudeville (aka Music Hall in Great Britain. Chaplin's bowler always seemed a size or two too small; Irwin has brought Charlot's cane too. And Keaton often wore a straw boater.) Because Irwin's a trained clown as well as a Tony Award-winning actor, he wants to explicate and, best of all, demonstrate how Beckett's writings operate. As previous Librarian of Congress poet Archibald MacLeish once wrote: a poem must not mean/but be. Bill Irwin is.

Irwin is not giving a poetry reading here; he has gathered sections of some of Beckett's drama and prose, especially Texts for Nothing (1955) and embodies for an audience the passages he has chosen. (Published originally as Nouvelles et Textes pour rien, Irwin marvels that Beckett wrote much of his work en Français and then served as his own translator.) Indeed, haunted by Beckett's language, by his use of language, Irwin's way to parse Beckett's poetic abstractions is to do what actors have to do with all texts: figure out what the character they're playing wants/seeks/needs and then determine how that makes a person sound and move. Knowing how baggy pants and clown feet can sometimes amplify that process, Irwin's (exceptional!) skills bring all abstractions to life onstage. Still, Irwin acknowledges that Beckett is not perfectly solving the mysteries of human existence with his word choice; as I was saying, Beckett asks many more questions than he ever answers. (With Happy Days playing up the street at Washington Stage Guild, DC audiences have been given extra helpings of important questions; timing is everything.)

Throughout On Beckett, Irwin just chats with the audience about how he thinks and works. During talk shows and podcasts, in interviews, and on red carpets, actors seem to always be “engaging” with the public. On Beckett is so not that; this is an hour and a half of one genius (Irwin earned his MacArthur Fellowship in 1984.) casually discussing another genius with a roomful of people, who were at least genius enough to procure a ticket. On Beckett, conceived and performed by Bill Irwin: unique, challenging, funny, interesting, entertaining, thoughtful, entrancing, through March 15 @ Shakespeare Theatre's Klein Theatre ( 450 7th St NW).