Searching for Sam: Adrian Dunbar on Samuel Beckett (2019) - full transcript

My name is Adrian Dunbar.
I'm perhaps best known as an actor,

but I also direct.

In many people's opinion,
Samuel Beckett is the most

influential artist
of the 20th century.

His work has become a source and
a resource for directors, actors,

sculptors and, of course,
other writers.

And Beckett has
a special draw for me,

because of the connections he has
with my native County Fermanagh.

Page 40, paragraph 4...

His play, Waiting for Godot,
still remains the last time

that theatre was profoundly changed.



The sequence will just
have even more...

Beckett once said that his life was
completely separate from his work.

But, then again, someone else
remarked that he never wrote
anything he had not lived himself.

And that's where the enigma begins.

Samuel Beckett went to school here
in my hometown of Enniskillen.

And I was aware of Samuel Beckett,
growing up as a child.

But when I went to the Guildhall
School of Music and Drama

to start my journey as an actor,

I saw a production of Waiting
for Godot and at the end of it,

I just did not know
how this man had...

..got me to a place where
I was so moved by
the compassion of the piece.

I didn't know how he did that, it
seemed like an abstract play to me.

And then, the questions started
to arise - who was Samuel Beckett?

What were the journeys in his life
that really set him on the road



to being this incredible innovator
in literature and the theatre?

And so...

..I decided that I'd have
to make that journey myself.

Most people know Beckett from the
photos taken of him as an older man.

But what was
the youthful Beckett like?

And how did he get a reputation
for being bleak, even obscure,

when personally, I find
engaging with his work

life-affirming and uplifting?

What was it about those early years
that informed his imagination

up to the writing
of Waiting for Godot?

It was here in his adopted
home of Paris

that Samuel Beckett died
30 years ago.

It's the city which inspired him.

The city where he wrote the play
which sent a lightning bolt

into the theatre of the 20th
century, changing drama forever.

En attendant Godot.

A tree. A country road. Evening.

Two figures in the landscape.

Godot was a moment
that became a movement.

It propelled Beckett into
the stratosphere, making him

the world's most famous playwright.

I would go further -
perhaps the most important.

I never met Samuel Beckett.

But his life - while elusive -
is still within touching distance.

I'm going to spend some time with
some of the people who actually
met this intensely privateman.

I don't know how many rolls
of film I put through cameras
on Samuel Beckett.

I mean, even photographing
his letterbox in Paris.

John Minihan was a young newspaper
photographer whose working life

brought him face-to-face
with Samuel Beckett.

It was the summer of 1969,
when a backbench subeditor...

..screamed across, rather
scornfully, that, "Some obscure

"Irish writer has just won the
Nobel Prize for literature," and,

"Do we have any photographs?"

And from that moment,

I knew I had to go and photograph
this obscure Irishman.

My signature picture
had to be Beckett in Paris.

He lived in the City of Light.

4:40, he says to me, "John, would
you like to take a photograph?"

And I point a camera at Sam,
and his eyes leave me...

..as if I don't exist at all.

When Beckett was awarded the Nobel
Prize for literature 50 years ago,

judges praised his work for evoking
the futility of modern life.

It wasn't immediately clear if he
would be classed as a French writer,

or an Irish one.

Ambiguity and uncertainty
became hallmarks of his work,

including the title of
his most famous play.

Samuel Beckett, he was well
known on the Rue Saint-Denis...

..erm, which is
the red light area in Paris.

Somebody said that "waiting
for Godot" was a catchphrase

when the women asked each other,
"Who are you waiting for?"

and they'd reply to each other,
"J'attends Godot."

And he could have picked it up.

No-one knows for sure
where he got the title.

People found Godot
difficult and obscure.

The shock of the new was too much.

Why doesn't he put down his bags?

You're being asked a question.

People stormed out of Waiting for
Godot, didn't they? Yeah, yeah...

HE EXHALES
Crazy.

Bags!

My fellow actor, Stephen Rea,
was lucky enough

to have worked with Beckett
in the 1970s.

Can you remember the first time
you laid eyes on Sam Beckett?

Like, this was very major for me,
Adrian, as you would know.

I was kind of pulled into the inner
circle of Beckett performers.

The wonderful thing about them
was that they'd no fear of it. No.

You know, there was a fear,
growing up, about Beckett...

"Oh, well, we don't get it.
We don't understand it.

"What's he playing at?"
and everything.

But the thing that
I found with Beckett -

he never, ever talked
about meaning.

He only ever talked about
adding more humour.

You know, that's the source
of Waiting for Godot...

James Knowlson knew Beckett
for over 20 years,

eventually writing the definitive
biography, Damned to Fame.

If I'm to get answers to
my questions about Beckett,

he is one of the best people to ask.

What did he call you,
just James or Jim or...?

Jim, always Jim.
He called you Jim? Yes.

Right from the start? Yes.

I guess I must have quickly
been told to call him Sam.

He was very magnetic.

When you went into a room,

and there he would be,
leaning against the mantelpiece,

like an Aztec eagle, an upright
middle-distance runner.

This extraordinary kind of
charismatic figure.

Barry McGovern is one of
the most acclaimed Beckett actors
of his generation.

A fellow Dubliner, he knew
and was directed by Beckett.

So, look, Barry, you are...

..as good an expert as
any expert on Beckett,

because you've been looking at him
and working with him and studying

since you were a student.

He had a fierce loyalty
to his friends.

And there was a fierce quality
about him, a fierce integrity. Yes.

He saw the world as a place of
great suffering - which it is -

but we kind of...

..ice over the suffering and
we make things nice, to survive.

But he saw lifting the stone
and seeing all the...

..awfulness underneath.

Beckett saw darkness at
the end of the Second World War,

and is associated with
the depression and pessimism
generated by that conflict.

But it would be wrong to believe
that he was without humour.

On the contrary...

The Royal Court, at that time,
was run by Bob Kidd.

And we're all standing on the stage,
and Sam was there, and he said,

"Well, Sam...

"..happy?"

ADRIAN LAUGHS

Beckett roared his leg off.

And we were all just beside
ourselves with pleasure, you know?

Yeah. I mean, imagine...

Imagine you're talking to the
arch-pessimist of the 20th century.

"Happy?"

THEY LAUGH

And this is the best advice
I ever had about Beckett.

"Whatever you do, Jim, don't
treat him like a great man.

"He hates being treated
like a great man."

He said, "You know,
I've always regarded my life

"as on the one hand."

"My work is completely
separate from it."

So, I said, "But all these images
from your childhood, Sam?"

And he said, "You're right, Jim,
you're right.

"They're obsessive!"

They're obsessive...
These images.

I've come right back to
the beginning, to Ireland,

to explore his formative years.

Beckett was born
on Good Friday, 1906.

The second of two children in
a solidly middle-class family.

I use the words you taught me.

If they don't mean anything
any more,

teach me others.
Or let me be silent.

Surely the seeds of his imagination
are sown in his Dublin childhood?

And as his great hero, Joyce,
once remarked,

an Irishman's heart is nothing
but his imagination.

Dublin is a place
of great contrasts.

You know, Dublin has status.
Its status is declining.

There was a time when
Dublin was regarded

as the second city of the empire.

And it had that Georgian facade,

which was once referred to as this
gorgeous mask of Ireland's distress.

People were packed into tenements.

The death rate for infants
were appalling.

They were some of the worst
slums that you could find.

Beckett, of course, comes from
a completely different milieu.

The Becketts led a comfortable life
in the family home of Cooldrinagh,

in Foxrock, a wealthy
suburb of South Dublin.

They were part of the ruling
minority Protestant community

in an overwhelmingly
Catholic Ireland.

He was born into that whole
history of colonialism in Ireland.

You know, that really strange
mixture of being Irish,

but being Protestant
and slightly outside of the...

..what it was to be Irish.

And all of that kind of
greying that was going on.

The Beckett boys and their
contemporaries were brought up

to expect positions of authority
inside the British Empire.

The church, the army,
the civil service,

or perhaps, the family business.

The prevailing ethos was one of
civic Christian responsibility.

Every day, they took
the train to private school

in the centre of Dublin,
passing through Dublin's slums.

He may have been shielded from
some of that, because he was
taking the Dublin Slow and Easy

every day, into Harcourt Street
station, and going back to Foxrock.

Absolutely. He was listening
to the people on the street.

Pick it up there. Get on with it.
God is love. Tender mercies.

New every morning. Back in the
field. April morning. Pick it up...

Not I is such an incredible piece!

Basically, it's a woman howling from
the margins of Ireland's history.

Nothing but the larks. Pick it up
there. Get on with it from there.

Out. Into this world. This world.
Tiny little thing. Before its time.

In a godfor... What?

He said that he didn't make up
one word of Not I.

He heard it from old women walking
round the roads near where he lived.

So, the women were out there on the
road, speaking - he was listening.

He couldn't have been
blind to all that.

Girl? Yes. Tiny little girl.
Into this. Out into this.

Before her time. In a godforsaken
hole called. Called...

Beckett's father, Bill,
spent all week in his office
as a chartered surveyor.

At weekends, he took Sam,
as often as he could,

to the sanctuary of
the surrounding Dublin hills.

For me, it starts with his father.

The deepest relationship -
although hardly anything was said

between them - is this relationship
he had with his father.

You are so right, Adrian.

It is so important.

When you get to it, the father
figure is there all the time.

It's a regular image that recurs.

Everything in Beckett's
writing is, you begin by walking.

You walk your way into thought,
you walk your way into action.

It's everywhere.

His walks with his father
along the Ballyogan Road
and up the mountains...

You know, even... He projects
a memory onto the time

when he was born, of his father
going out for a walk,

you know, because his father
couldn't stay there. That's right.

You know, so, walking became
the way of communicating.

And, this notion of the coat.

The coat becomes this symbol in
Beckett's work, you know, that
heavy overcoat of his father's.

His father, yeah.
And the boots.

This is, I think, where we find
the landscape of his youth,

the landscape of the...

..places where he spent with his
father on huge walks around here.

They went for, you know,
10-mile walks constantly.

He said they'd refer to them
as "fanatical trampers".

When he was going on those
walks with his father in
the Wicklow hills, I mean...

They're in his early stuff, but
they're also throughout his work.

Yeah. He mentions names again.

In Molloy, he talks about the Molloy
country and Ballybane and Ballybaba,

and what these names mean.

You can just tell where it is,
if you know the area. Yeah.

And if you don't know the area,
it doesn't matter, something of
the universality of it comesout.

Two figures on the landscape,
of course.

Exactly, two figures on the
landscape is essentially Beckettian.

And he's very evocative
when he talks about remembering
back to being a child,

and walking with his father,
and holding on to his hand.

And then, later, when
they weren't holding hands
and just silently going on.

As he says himself, at one stage,

"We were never on our way,
in particular, anywhere,

"but just on our way."

Women bond face-to-face, but men
bond shoulder to shoulder.

Absolutely. I think
that's very interesting.

You're right that, with the father,
there's a strange sort of intimacy

with him. But, you know, it's
an absolute silent intimacy.

But it's a hugely
affecting intimacy.

And theirs was an emotionally
tense relationship.

A strong, opinionated woman.

I think she and Sam were
cut from the same cloth.

The formality, the courtesy,

the old-style manners
of that upbringing...

..had rubbed off on to him, so that
it was very striking, this...

..in his gentlemanly conduct.

It was a very strong, passionate and
difficult relationship - the mother.

For me, that slightly odd
relationship with his mother

is very present in Company.

You know, with the scene where
he comes out of Connelly Stores

and he's holding his mother by
the hand, and he's a little boy,

just walking along, and he
looks up at the sky and...

Obviously, Beckett was
always questioning,
always looking around him.

And he looks up at the sky, and
he says to his mother, you know,

"How can we be sure how
far away it is, or what
the colour of the sky is?"

And she shook off his little hand
and she gave him a cutting retort.

Which he has never forgotten.

For some reason you could
never fathom,

this question must have
angered her exceedingly.

For she shook off your little hand

and made you a cutting retort
you have never forgotten.

That, for me, as a mother...

..is deeply moving.

He loved her very much.

"I am what her savage
loving has made me,"

he said in a letter - which
is a very significant phrase.

The element in Krapp's Last Tape,
by the canal,

waiting for the blinds to go down.

The mother dying in Krapp's Last
Tape's story is very similar

to the story of Beckett
waiting for his mother,

who died in the home there,
which is right beside the canal.

There is, of course, the house on
the canal where Mother lay-a-dying,

in the late autumn,
after her long viduity.

And the bench by the weir
from where I could see her window.

I was there when
the blind went down,

one of those dirty,
brown roller affairs.

Throwing a ball for a little
white dog, as chance would have it.

I happened to look up,
and there it was.

All over and done with, at last.

The start of the 20th century
brought with it massive social
upheaval and carnage.

The 1916 Easter Rising in
Dublin against British rule,
and the wider war in Europe,

were Sam's first exposure
to the savagery of war.

The execution of the leaders
of the 1916 revolution

turned public opinion in Ireland
towards independence.

He was 10 years old in 1916
and we know that the Beckett family,

along with quite a lot
of the residents from around here,

while Dublin was burning
during the Easter Rising,

went and overlooked
the city from the hills

and were peering down,
wondering what was going on,

what was going to happen.

So it's a point of turmoil,
coming very much home to Foxrock,

to the environs
of the very comfortable,

middle-class place he's living in.

With rising nationalist sentiment
in Dublin, the city was becoming

an unsafe place for a middle-class
boy from Foxrock.

You could see why the senior
Becketts would have been thinking,

"This is no place for our boys.

"Send them somewhere that seems
far removed from the troubles,

"somewhere where they will not only
get a good education,

"but they will be prepared for
a life of eminent respectability."

This is where Beckett's voyage
also becomes very interesting

and quite difficult.

100 miles north-west of Dublin lies
Enniskillen, where I grew up.

It was a garrison town where
Lower and Upper Loch Erne meet.

My hometown, on its own island, in
a time seemed more liquid than land.

So with the troubles in Dublin,
Beckett's parents decide

to send his brother Frank and him
north here to Enniskillen,

to Portora School.

A good Protestant school where
they would get a decent education.

Beckett excelled
at rugby and cricket

and I have no doubt Loch Erne's
moods and atmospheres

stayed with him, resurfacing
in his work many years later.

The thing that really struck me
about Portora was the boats,

the water. Yeah. And his whole
thing, I mean, Krapp's Last Tape.

And many of his shorter stories.
Stirrings Still.

Upper lake, with the punt.

Bathed off the bank then pushed
out into the stream and drifted.

She lay, stretched out on
the floorboards,

with her hands under her head
and her eyes closed.

I noticed a scratch on her thigh.
And asked her how she came by it.

"Picking gooseberries," she said.

I asked her to look at me

and after a few moments...
after a few moments she did.

With the eyes just slits
because of the glare.

I bent over her to get them
in the shadow and they opened.

Let me in.

We drifted in among the flags
and stuck.

It's like he absorbed everything.
Yes.

And then re-made it into
something else. Yes, absolutely.

And I think, you know, the whole
business of being up there

at such an informative age,
the reflectiveness of water.

Totally. The light. And the
quietness of that place. Yeah.

You know, and allowing you to absorb
things and think about yourself.

He came back to Dublin
and Trinity College

in the immediate aftermath
of the Irish Civil War.

The conflict that raged
over the last decade had been

a fertile ground for new writers
and at Trinity, Beckett was exposed

to ideas far removed
from his sheltered upbringing.

And so it is here in 1923
that the young 17-year-old

Samuel Beckett arrives up
from Portora to do his BA

in Trinity College Dublin,
just across the road

from the Parliament, the seat
of the Protestant ascendancy.

Here in Ireland since 1592.

Nearly six foot tall, reddish-brown
hair, piercing blue eyes,

wearing his little
metal-rimmed glasses.

He went out into the city
and he went to the Abbey Theatre.

He was there at the first night of
The Plough and the Stars

and Juno and the Paycock.

And he particularly loved
the work of John Millington Synge.

And it was on
this very cricket pitch,

as part of a university team playing
a Northampton side that was touring

from the UK, that he found himself
the only Nobel laureate

who has been ever been entered
in Wisden, the cricketing Bible!

I love the idea of him here
in Trinity being a real brat,

you know, because, you know,

some of the most interesting
students here are kind of brattish.

You spent long enough in
a place like this,

if you're a sponge, you just
absorb everything. Yeah.

Well really, it was his last year
rather than the first two years

where he really put on the spurt.

Because he read voluminously
in the Trinity library.

And worked very, very hard
and got a gold medal

and a scholarship at the end.

After three years in Trinity,
Beckett now had a choice.

He could stay with the comfortable,
secure, middle-class life

mapped out for him by his family,
or he could take a chance,

go against their wishes
and follow his instincts.

With his gold medal in languages

and an introduction from his mentor
at Trinity, Beckett moved to Paris.

He would never live permanently
in Ireland again.

A decisive moment in his life.

He arrives into Paris.

You know that song,

"How ya gonna keep 'em down
on the farm..."

"..Now that they've seen Paree!"
That's the one, yeah!

Paris in the 1920s was a fertile
and creative city where writers

and painters, musicians and dancers,
exiles from Communist Russia

and Prohibition America
lived cheek by jowl.

Culturally, it couldn't
have been further removed

from the Dublin of his childhood.

No prudential morality. Yeah. Which
is what he wanted to escape from.

And it was escaping
into a world of the mind

as well as a world
of a different way of behaving.

So that all of this
was an opening up,

and that's what France
represented at the time.

And so through his own
innate ability

he finds himself here
in the Ecole Normale Superieure.

The college was then, as now,
exclusive,

admitting only 28 students a year.

Beckett's duties as a lecturer
in English were not very demanding

and he plunged himself
into the vibrancy

of Paris's expat cultural life.

What attracted him to Europe,
I think, was the idea that there

wasn't a fixed notion
of a European identity. Yes.

Or a European language. Yes.

There's a fluidity there
that he makes an awful lot of.

And obviously has an enormous
talent for the languages

and being able to write
in different languages

and being able to speak
so fluently the different languages,

that he has a natural affinity
and ability.

Beckett's great friend
at the college was Thomas MacGreevy

who not only introduced him
to Paris, but also James Joyce.

Joyce's monumental novel Ulysses,
an avant-garde classic,

had been published in Paris
not many years before.

It's not hard to see why Beckett
was impressed by him.

You're sort of similar to Joyce
in what you're thinking,

and then you meet Joyce
and you get on with Joyce,

and Joyce likes you
and Joyce rates you.

This is the greatest writer
in the world at the moment.

This is how it is to be a writer.
How do I become a writer?

This is what I do.

SIRENS BLARE

Here we are in the Square De Robiac
where Joyce lived,

and where Beckett would come
every day to work with him,

read to him, write down things
for him, go messages for him.

Joyce was his hero.
And something very strange here

and to an actor,
this is very interesting,

he started to kind of possess
his hero,

he started to dress like him,
to sit like him, to drink like him.

To imitate him, to get inside
his head, to understand

what that great genius was about.

There's a story that
he started wearing shoes that

were about a size too small for him
because they were the size

that Joyce wore, or wore tight shoes
or something. Now, how do I know?

But you hear these stories.
Yeah, but I mean, there is...

It's kind of hero worship.
It is hero worship. And friends...

I mean, just as you or I might meet
somebody whom we hero worship,

like the first time I met Beckett,
I was quite in awe of meeting him.

I tried not to show it,
just be normal,

because people like that hate...

Most of them hate hero worship.

But he hero worshipped other people
when he was young.

Just as he had tramped
the Wicklow hills

with his father in childhood,
Beckett now bonded

shoulder to shoulder in Paris
with his mentor and hero.

And so it was here
on the Isle of Swans,

built bang in the middle
of the Seine

to protect the Port de Grenelle,
that you would find

Joyce and Beckett walking,

sometimes talking,
sometimes just deep in thought.

Here in Paris,
the very epicentre of all that.

What a sight that must have been.

He kind of had to be Joyce,
didn't he?

Well, that's true,
because in the early novel,

Dream of Fair to Middling Women,
which was only published

after his death, written in 1932,
when he was what, 26? Yes.

For God's sake! That is very full
of Joycean background.

You ask me to give you a task.

I think I've given you
a big enough task.

I long to see the thing you wrote
about my beauty, as you call it.

I must say, without any
compliments, I can't see anything

to write about except
the usual rot men write about.

It's a very weighty book,
weighed down with its own learning,

weighed down with its own attitude
to literature. Very self-conscious.

The book remained unpublished
until the 1990s.

Paris was more than just
a place for meeting other writers.

With Sam, it liberated him from
the stifling atmosphere of Dublin.

Relationships followed,
sometimes unorthodox and difficult.

In the late '20s,

Sam fell deeply in love
with the beautiful Peggy Sinclair.

She was a modern, sophisticated
woman from an art loving family,

but tragically for him,
she was also his first cousin.

It became clear his family
would never allow the relationship

to survive.

You have to wonder what effect
falling in love

so close to home did to him
at a very early age.

And you can't just discount it
as, you know, a crush.

It's something deeper than that,
and it's frowned upon.

And it causes consternation
at home.

Because it's too close to home.

I know of one person who
fell in love with his first cousin.

It's not...
It's not a nice place to be.

Because, you know, convention and
morality and so forth. Absolutely.

First cousin, a close relationship
with a family that had been

virtually disowned.

I think that this was something
which was very much

persona non grata stuff, wasn't it?

Yeah, his mother would not been
happy with all that.

When he wrote, of course,
about that,

it really caused something
of a rift with the family.

Sam broke off the love affair
with Peggy,

whose parents' lifestyle was at odds
with the straitlaced Becketts'.

I always remember,
as a very young actress,

reading he was absolutely
madly in love with her.

And they walked alone
a little bit on the beach

and he shivered, apparently.

And she said, "What's wrong,
are you cold?"

And he said, "No, no,
I just shiver sometimes."

And I don't know why,
it's a bit mad,

but that captured my imagination
as a young woman.

I thought it was the most
beautiful thing.

Sam's next important encounter
with a young woman

was arguably even more
turbulent for him.

James Joyce's daughter Lucia
became infatuated with Beckett,

who had by now become a trusted part
of their family life.

Where did she sit,
do you think, in terms of...

not just in terms of work,
but in terms of him

once again having to deal
with the feminine, you know?

Yes, well, she was throwing
herself at him, of course. Yeah.

And I think that was
a very difficult relationship,

and you could understand that
he wanted to see James Joyce.

Do you think Lucia
was very much in love with him?

Yeah, desperately so, apparently.
He was very kind and loving to her.

But not what she wanted.
Not in love. No, no, apparently not.

Beckett realised that Lucia's
obsession with him

could only lead to disharmony

and so he made the difficult
decision to shut the door

on her advances, which he must
have known would lead to a rift

with her father.

Famously, or infamously,
he once said to her,

"I came here to see your father,
not you."

Trouble!

And I think Joyce
was very upset at this, you know.

And there was a breach.

The two men would never be
close again.

Lucia's already fragile
mental health worsened

and she spent much of the rest
of her life in an institution.

One of the other striking
things about Beckett,

who remained faithful
as a friend to Lucia forever,

for the rest of her life -

he had this extraordinary
capacity for remaining friends

from whom he had, as it were,
separated in terms

of any kind of close
sexual relationship

or romantic relationship.

Beckett's rejection of Lucia indeed
led to an estrangement with Joyce.

Removed from his influence,
he drifted. But he also wrote.

He entered a poetry competition
and it was a poem,

not a play or any fiction,
the prize for which was £10,

that became his first
published work in 1930.

Are you ripe at last, my slim,
pale, double-breasted turd?

This abortion of a fledgling?

Beckett becomes depressed
with the news that his first love,

Peggy, has died of TB.

He is untethered further
by news from home.

Father died last Monday afternoon,

after an illness lasting
just under a week.

And was buried last Wednesday
morning in a little cemetery

on the Greystone side of Braehead,
between the mountains and the sea.

I lost my father when he was 50,
so I know that that's

the kind of background noise
to my whole life, in a way.

And I think that grief somehow,
and grief is very undefinable,

but pain makes you articulate.
Grief doesn't necessarily...

It actually stops
you from being articulate.

I don't believe that he ever really
got over his father's death.

It was so devastating,
all he can do with the father

is go out and pay homage to him
by walking over the same old places

and over the same haunts.

I wish I was in Dublin with a car
of my own, to bring you out

over the country
we both loved so much,

where we'd been so often
together.

Where, if there is a paradise,

Father is still striding along
in his old clothes with his dog.

At night, when I can't sleep,
I do the old walks again

and stand beside him again
one Christmas morning

in the fields near Glencullen,
listening to the chapel bells.

Or, near the end, in the lee of the
rocks at the top of the Three Rock.

Rubbing his feet with snow to try
and bring back the circulation.

Almost 10 years
after arriving in Paris,

a decade in which there was little
to show in terms of work,

a woman walked into Beckett's life,

the remarkable
Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil.

He met her, she saved his life,
that's the anecdote, the story.

He was about to be knifed
on a street in Paris

and she was there and nursed him
back to health.

And basically, they never
quit each other from that day on.

Suzanne brought him stability
and created a space for him

to think and write.

They lived together till the end.

They had a connecting apartment
where they both lived

in the same apartment,
but there was a connecting door

and they both
had their separate space.

Beckett seems to come
to arrangements.

It's not just about love.
It's also about friendship.

You know, that you can come
to an arrangement with a lover

that's more of a friendship than
it is a passionate relationship.

And, you know,
the bonds might be very deep.

It's very interesting that,
you know, Suzanne is there

until almost
the very end of his own life.

And whatever bonds were forged
very deeply between them

in the early days endured
but presumably,

they had to be adapted
at various stages.

Let's face it, and put my cards
on the table here, that Beckett,

it didn't matter very much,
sexual infidelity.

He seemed to very quickly
disassociate sex with love?

He could dissociate it

and I think that "philandering"
in that sense didn't matter.

The things that mattered were things

of the intellect and of the spirit.

And some women epitomised,
for him, those aspects.

You wonder how worked out that was!
You know!

I mean, that's the difficulty
of trying to comprehend

someone's intimate,
innermost thoughts

about their physical needs
and their emotional needs

and their intellectual needs.

And whether or not they can cohere
or whether they can combine.

I'm not sure they ever fully can,
especially for someone like Beckett.

Yes. Maybe that's one of the reasons
why he liked France.

The French tend to be a bit more
kind of broad-minded.

BELL RINGS

Action!

Ce que c'est qu'elle essaie...
ce que c'est qu'il faut essayer...

N'importe pas lacher.

Finir par tomber juste...
puis rendue... Dieu est amour...

bonte intarissable...

When you're acting
Beckett as a woman -

he wrote a lot for women,
unusual at the time...

WHISPERING IN FRENCH

..it's very complete.

You really do feel as though
he understands women, you know.

So women were central to his life.

So the further we travel down
this road of trying to understand

who this intensely private
and shy man, Samuel Beckett, is,

the more we get the feeling
that we're prying into places

that maybe we shouldn't.

And James Knowlson's wonderful
observation that Beckett

is damned to fame
starts to ring true.

Very true.

For her first thought was...
oh long after... sudden flash...

brought up as she had been
to believe...

with the other waifs...
in a merciful... Ha-ha ha-ha ha!

In May 1940, when the Nazis
invaded Paris, Beckett's life was,

for the second time,
disrupted by a European conflict.

He faced a choice.

He could turn his back
on his adopted home or,

as a citizen of a neutral country,
Ireland, he could stay.

The Second World War made a huge
impression on him, as he said,

famously, that, "I'd prefer
France at war to Ireland at peace."

There is a commitment
to his new home of France.

There was a moment
that I have never forgotten

when he said to me...
and he went like this.

He said, "After all, Jim,

"you couldn't stand by
with your arms folded..."

Folding his arms.

"..after what they were doing
to my Jewish friends."

But it was more than that.

It was a commitment
then to multi-racialism.

But also a commitment to France.

Beckett's commitment to France
was more

than just a romantic attachment.

He put himself into the firing line
and joined the Resistance.

I met the head of the Resistance
there, who was of that cell.

And then I met the man
that taught Beckett to shoot.

He said he was a terrible shot!

Heaven only knows what would have
happened if he'd to shoot anybody!

He would have missed! Yeah!
You know, they'd have shot him!

He couldn't stand idly by
and watch his friends die.

He had to take a stand.

Beckett's translation skills
and the experienced gained working

as Joyce's secretary made him
a key member of the Resistance cell.

It was one of the most exciting,
and for me, revealing episodes

of a side of Beckett that
of course he never talked about. No.

I did get him to tell me
about it on one occasion,

and he dismissed it
like Boy Scouts stuff.

But nonetheless, it was dangerous
and it was a crucial decision.

And it meant that he had made
the kind of decisive choice

that few of us get to make.

This private man worked
with characteristic discretion

for over two years before
the Germans cracked the cell.

Himself and Suzanne, when they left
Paris, they were very,

very lucky not to be captured
and perhaps killed, you know.

They left with hours to spare
after their cell was betrayed

to the Nazis.

Together, they escaped Paris,
moving south. Sleeping rough.

Two figures in a country at war,

in a landscape increasingly
scarred by conflict.

Does the landscape
that he experiences

when he's fleeing with other
members of the Resistance,

when in 1942, they've got to get
out of where they are,

what do they see on their journey?
What kind of landscape is that?

Does that find its way into later
work? I think it certainly does.

And it affects the way
he approaches his craft.

Through a contact of Suzanne's,
they come here to the quaint village

of Roussillon, among the red rocks
and the vineyards.

I think there are few places
more important in decoding Godot

than understanding Roussillon.

The Vaucluse
and the red soil are all there.

BELL TOLLS

Down there where everything is red,
as Vladimir says.

And you see the hills there,
and they're just...the ochre,

it's just pure red, yeah.
It is extraordinary, isn't it?

This is exactly the wasteland,
a bare, bare wasteland.

And also possibly
a futuristic kind of,

after the Second World War,
a bombed...

Yeah, blasted, blasted landscape.
Yeah.

We tend to think of the Wicklow
hills where he kind of walked

with his dad. He walked
with his father, yes. Yeah.

This is an elusive period
in Beckett's life.

Catriona is a friend who will help
me talk with one of the few people

still alive who was with him
in Roussillon.

Helene Albetini.

Bien entendu, bien entendu.
Donc c'etait...

He and Suzanne were thrown together
with few material comforts.

They undertook hard manual work
in the vineyards

and ate simple peasant food.

This is the house in which
Beckett and Suzanne lived

during their time in Roussillon.

They kept a low profile,
as technically,

they were still on the run.

Although Beckett and Suzanne
kept their work with the Resistance

in Paris secret when they got here,

because it was important
to be anonymous,

they did let the Maquis store
munitions around the property.

Towards the end of the war when
the German started to make raids,

they would hide in a cave.

And this recent construction
that's been happening

has pulled a road through here
and knocked down

what was left of the cave
that they probably hid in,

which he had logs built up
to conceal the entrance.

Beckett and Suzanne were
virtual prisoners in the place

because the Germans were in Apte
and they were in Avignon.

And they could raid
at any particular time.

And I think, really, to escape,
he started to write.

If you look at the way he writes,
up until the change,

when he becomes a different writer,
it closed him in. In his technique.

And he realises
he had to get away from that.

And as he says himself
when he has this great revelation,

"What I had to write about
was what was inside me."

He wrote Watt, that great novel
that changed everything,

in my opinion. Yeah.

And he'd started it in Paris, but he
wrote most of it down in Roussillon.

You just know where Watt is set.

The railway station
is Harcourt Street.

The line
is the Slow and Easy.

And the station is Foxrock,
where Watt gets off the train.

But it's not mentioned by name.

When the war finished,
Beckett longed to return to Paris.

But he also wanted to help
the ruined country,

to give something back.

He went to Normandy.

He volunteered
for the Irish Red Cross,

going to the town of Saint-Lo
in Normandy,

which had been bombed
out of existence by the Allies

in, I think it was June 1945.

And he worked there at
the Irish Red Cross as storekeeper

and interpreter, van driver
and rat-catcher, at one stage!

And that was called
the Capital of the Ruins,

the "Capitale des Ruines".

And that was where he worked for
a good few months until early '46.

It's been raining hard the last few
days and the place is a sea of mud.

And what it would be like
in the winter is hard to imagine.

There's an awful lot of internalised
trauma finds its way

through Beckett's work
after the Second World War.

You know, this search for meaning.

There's a nihilism there struggling,
of course, to make sense,

not just of his own personal voyage
to try and find his own voice,

but concepts of home, of stability.

Of what's it all about? You know.

What does memory do?
Where do we belong? Hmm.

Yes, all those things would be
thrown up by the kind of,

how people are so displaced
after major wars like that.

And landscape, too.

Is there a moment, do you think,
that you could pinpoint?

Or is it a gradual thing
where he kind of goes...

SNAPS FINGERS
..now I know?

It is to do with the war years, the
Capital of the Ruins and Saint-Lo.

When he realises there
that all this knowledge,

what has it brought him to?

It's brought him
to a sense that Joyce has done

all the putting everything in.

He realises that life,

and work,

have to be brought together
in a different way.

He saw the way he had to go.

That his success -
not a word he'd use -

would be in penury
rather than plenitude.

And that to write about things
that are less rather than more.

He talked about Joyce being
the great do-er, the great can-er.

Whereas he was one who...
everything was cut down.

It's to do again with death and the
fact of nothingness and non-being.

And going to that darkness.

This revelation
with the dark and the light.

But that his world
is exploring that

in a world of the being
and non-being.

After Beckett and Suzanne
returned to Paris in 1946,

he developed what he believed was
a malignant tumour in his cheek.

Locking himself away
for two fiercely creative years,

in what he called
"the siege in the room",

he wrote three novels and the play
that would change everything.

On this street here, his great play,
Godot, opens in French.

And the rest, as they say,
is history.

To reduce it down
to the bare essentials,

two characters talking to each other

and to go, "Rien a faire" -
nothing to be done,

the opening line from Godot,
just took everybody by surprise.

Even the French didn't know
what to make of that.

He hated Waiting For Godot.
He said that to me.

He said, "I can't stand that play."

Why do you think...? I mean...

Ah, he just couldn't...
When I said to him...

I had the cheek to say to him,
"Well, I think it's been absorbed."

You know, that Godot has been
absorbed. It's now "a thing"?

It's a thing. And everybody now
thinks they know it.

And it's all fine, you know?
And he said, "That's it."

What am I to tell Mr Godot, sir?

Tell him....

Tell him you saw me, and that...

..that you saw me.

You're sure you saw me?

You won't come and tell me
tomorrow that you never saw me?!

So I've met some of the wonderful
people who knew Sam,

and I've walked in the places
that matter to him.

The bleak landscapes, the silence,
the lightness, the water.

However it moves towards
abstraction,

there is still compassion
at the centre,

at the core of his work.

And that was what always drew me
to the work of Samuel Beckett.

We'll hang ourselves tomorrow.

Unless Godot comes.

In the future, if somebody
wants to see a writer

who talks about the essence
of what it is to be in the world

in the 20th century,
Samuel Beckett will be the man.

I believe Samuel Beckett
was right in saying his work

was separate from his life.

Yes, there was danger
and bleak days,

soul-searching and a broken heart.

But there was always friendship
and kindness and humour.

He became one of the great
European writers of any age

and in doing so, changed the way
the world thinks about itself.

Nothing is left to tell.

I would have been privileged
to have spent just one evening

in his company.

Nothing is left to tell.