Our next show is billed as “The Man Himself.” Up until now we have only included short excerpts from Beckett’s works and indicated connections to the Bible, the Greeks etc. With our performed reading of King Lear it was the actor/audience discussion afterwards that brought out Shakespeare’s influence on Endgame in particular but also the writer’s  world view. In our next evening we have decided to examine the whole of one of Beckett’s prose works, COMPANY, published by John Calder in 1980. The author combines ‘autobiographical’ passages with reflections on the interior dialogue with which most of us are familiar when we find ourselves lying on our back in the dark, an inner monologue which seems to have a voice and a listener- “You are lying on your back in the dark.”  The biographical references are “figments” of memory which may or may not accurately represent Beckett’s own past as his chosen biographer, Jim Knowlson, has pointed out in his highly regarded  “Damned to Fame.”

This is the penultimate show in the MAPPING BECKETT season.

Peter Marinker (Bookshop Theatre Director)