Gate Theatre ***

“My plays are not about something”, Samuel Beckett wrote late in his career, “they are that thing itself.”

Waiting for Godot,

for example, is a journey in waiting, its inaction reflecting a fundamental existential condition back upon the audience gathered for its enactment; form and content, for Beckett, are indivisible. In this condensed adaptation of Beckett’s 1945 novel

Watt

, neither the adaptor Barry McGovern nor director Tom Creed give us the theatrical impulse necessary to make the transformation from page to stage entirely successful.

McGovern enters in formal coat-and-tails, listening attentively and playfully to the usher’s pre-show announcements. Against the butter-washed backdrop of Eileen Diss’s minimalist design he traces Watt’s unexplained journey to the house of a Mr Knott. With his gravelly Dublin voice McGovern revels in rather than resists the absurdity of language as Beckett uses it in the novel: playing with the puns that the central characters’ names offer, and with the lists and rhymes and the audiences’ expectations.

But, despite director Tom Creed’s witty aural interventions (the sound of a choir, birds at dawn), it all remains an exercise in language games, although it certainly succeeds in making the novel “more accessible” as McGovern writes of his motivation in the programme note. In a mini-festival devoted to celebrating language, perhaps this is all fair enough. However, Beckett was foremost a writer for the stage, and this adaptation might have done better to celebrate the theatricality of his novels.

Run finished