Beckett, How it is

Beckett's How it is reads quiet after a performance of Part I by the Gare St Lazare the other night. I hurry along, looking for their performance on the page. There are some glorious moments of mental exercise. Despair too strong a word. Of course. As well as humour. Too comfortable. But, in tribute to the Gare St Lazare and their staging, lighting, their sudden shifts, their discomfiture, or was it ours? I was back in the Everyman Theatre, or wanted to be.

When I read How it is the last time, in my sprawling teaching Beckett period, I marked little, remembered less. 'I always liked arithmetic it has paid me back in full' leaped out of the dark, near or far, of the Everyman; the clouds parted with clarity and a smile. This is one of my Beckett quotes, one of the tenets of my faith.

Somewhere, perhaps more than once in the performance, two voices chased or echoed the same words, up on stage where we the audience sat, at the back, as wrong and as privileged as we can be (at the back of the stage looking out on the flats and the stalls), Beethoven, I thought, opus 31, maybe number 2.

There's a moment where we suddenly understand the piano to to be innately double, like ourselves, with our sack of memory, our native bent. That was, sometimes, what the Gare St Lazare players did with Beckett. Voices came from all levels of darkness and distance, within inches, within aeons, of each other. I fell among the interstices. It was warm and peaceful even as the voices carried on in the mist and a group of dark hooded creatures crossed the middle distance.