Review of I'll Go On

I'll Go On, Gate Theatre, Dublin

Samuel Beckett, the most astonishing profiler of anguish, decay, death and the grim laughter in between, is today more watched than read. That certainly wasn't his intention. "Theatre for me," he once remarked, "is mainly a recreation from working on the novel." Pausing to write Waiting For Godot during the construction of his famous trilogy - Malloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable - Beckett inadvertently changed theatre forever and sealed his reputation as a playwright.

From its opening moments, Barry McGovern's dazzling one-man performance in I'll Go On - adapted from the trilogy by Gerry Dukes and McGovern, now celebrating its 21st year - reconciles Beckett's phenomenal impact on both the page and the stage.

"Well, well, so there's an audience," begins McGovern, creeping out before the curtain to deliver an appropriately self-aware prelude - part leer, part gag, part snarl. In the startlingly bleak routines, defeated stories and desperate endurance of his three ensuing monologuists, Colm Ó Briain's production takes the bare bones of existence laid out by Beckett and McGovern gives them flesh.

Tall and thin, hunched and crooked, his small bright eyes gleaming from a long, grave face, McGovern looks as though he has been delivered straight from pages of Beckett's fiction - an idea enforced by Robert Ballagh's minimal design, which spans out behind him like an open book. Under the subtle shifts of Rupert Murray's lights (which, following the designer's recent passing, still burn bright in poignant salute), the texture of the set seems to alter from dry stretches of cracked parchment to slabs of cool veined marble; the same transitions handled by McGovern's gruff and smooth delivery.

Inevitably limited to the highlight of the novels, the adaptation moves briskly from the trilogy's stark opening - "I am in my mother's bedroom" - through Molloy's macabre descriptions of his anti-social behaviour: knocking upon his decrepit mother's skull (by way of communication); the number and frequency of his farts; his accidental killing of a dog. All are bleached of emotion, rendered with near-autistic detail, conveying a distaste and rejection of the world, of his mother, of life. But such iconoclasm also makes for wicked, compulsive fun.

What can sometimes be a slog to read becomes a prickly pleasure to listen to. On stage Molloy's torturous, interminable dissertation on sucking stones, for instance - which causes a ripple of anticipation among the Beckettian faithful - attains an almost incantatory rhythm. The final, famous sentence of The Unnamable, however, may be a theatrical concession too far, the words "I can't go on, I'll go on," delivered not as an unbowed determination to persist, but rather as the payoff to a revving crescendo. Theatre audiences, it seems, need an ending with oomph.

The lingering impact of the production, however, may be to drive audiences back to Beckett's prose. The triumph of McGovern's performance, and the indelible association he has with the work, is that we will hear his voice in those words.

Until Sept 23