“Even words fail, at times, what is one to do then, until they come again?”

E non ci sono neanche parole per descrivere l’indimenticabile rappresentazione di ieri sera, Happy Days di Samuel Beckett, al teatro comunale di Amsterdam.

Winnie, il personaggio principale, è interpretato dalla bravissima Fiona Shaw, che, a sua detta, ha avuto non pochi problemi a memorizzare il testo smozzicato.

Rehearsals began in December, and I found my lines hard to learn. Images did not build in the mind, they disintegrated instead – Beckett’s writing is all interrupted thought. It is as if he wrote in reverse, ideas appearing as x-rays. This struck me as ungenerous and cruel of him. As a female actor, one longs to have parts that deal fluently with universal destiny, rather than the re- lativity of womanhood, and here was a character who did not seem to have enough words to make her stageworthy.

When rehearsals got dull and slow and I could no longer sit in the sacks of sand being built up around me, we stopped to play badminton. Sometimes, Happy Days didn’t seem like a play at all, more an installation that talked – sometimes from the subject’s perspective, sometimes as the voice of the subconscious. I kept remembering those lines from TS Eliot’s The Wasteland: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” What luxurious fragments they were next to the half-lines Winnie had been given to build an internal world.

Su YouTube c’è anche un’intervista breve, ma interessante.

Postato da: IM