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Shows Worth Seeing:
Watt
By Samuel Beckett
Under the Radar Festival
Public Theatre
425 Lafayette St.
Box office: 212-967-7555
Samuel Beckett wrote Watt while
hiding from the Nazis in a small village in southern France. By
day he did menial labor, and at night he worked ploddingly on
this strange, digressive and hilarious novel about an Irish servant
who is so morbidly witty and preternaturally logical in his observations
that his world becomes a brilliant study in the pointlessness
of existence—as well as a testament to the joys of exercising
the mind by parsing that pointlessness with obsessive pedantry.
In this 55-minute work-in-progress from Dublin’s Gate Theatre
(part of the Under the Radar Festival), the veteran Beckett actor
Barry McGovern gives vivid physical life to the elusive title
character and uses his singular gift for drily ironical narration
to make the text’s strings of absurd logical digressions
cogent and funny. Only a few short sections of the novel are excerpted
for use here, and the piece’s neat and tasteful dramatic
structure of arrival-discovery-departure is consequently rather
too tidy, in my view, for a novel famous for its radical accidentalism,
unruliness and un-Aristotelian loose ends: while reading one tends
to forget the overall shape of the story, which is part of its
point. McGovern is always a joy to watch and listen to, however,
and his performance will very likely send some audience members
to seek out the book, and that’s good. In any case, the
show is a rare event, as only very few Irish insiders these days
are able to wrest permission from the strict Beckett Estate to
stage the author’s non-dramatic works.
