Beckett Revisited

All-star directors take on Samuel Beckett

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Nineteen texts, 19 directors, 18 months to make, 35 years to write: the plays of Samuel Beckett, regarded as the dramatic watershed of the past half-century, made into films by an eclectic group of moviemakers, from Oscar winners Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) and Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) to Brit Pack artists (Damien Hirst of formaldehyde-cow fame), to Charles Sturridge, my co-director on Brideshead Revisited, and others of similar heft, such as David Mamet (State and Main), Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter), and Patricia Rozema (Mansfield Park). An enterprise of extraordinary vision conceived by Michael Colgan of Dublin's renowned Gate Theatre and his producing partner, Alan Moloney, and featuring actors of great theatrical oomph (among them Jeremy Irons, Kristin Scott Thomas, John Hurt, Julianne Moore, and Harold Pinter).

The challenge was to follow Beckett's spare maps, minutely detailed and devoid of the irrelevant, to reach an equivalent destination in another medium.

My play was Waiting for Godot, shot in an abandoned warehouse on a tight (very) schedule with a sublime group of Irish actors who, in the Irish way, could turn on a dime or metric sixpence from jokes to bereft poignancy. The Marx Brothers meet Kurosawa.

So what do we have? What have we all made? A series of movies documenting the work of the most courageous, witty in the high sense, comic in the low, bleakly visioned, humane writer any of us have had the privilege and thrill to work with. I speak of Beckett as living because that is what his work is and will always be—vibrant, startling, and eternal.

MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG