"...when I worked on Winnie, it took me three months to learn the part... You know how we work. We sit and stare into each other's eyes and say the lines. It was very hard to learn; there were so many 'Oh, well's and 'Ah, well's. Sam would say, 'Oh, you missed something there.' He would keep reminding me, 'No color.' If I told him that I thought I sounded boring, he would say, 'Let it be boring.' You know it takes courage to go slow, to be boring. You have to have courage to work that way. Yet it it is so important to get the music right in Beckett, and I do think of the parts in terms of music. Beckett sometimes conducts me, something like a metronome. For example, I remember when we started working on HAPPY DAYS, I thought Winnie would say 'Another happy day,' sprightly. And Sam said [flat monotone] 'A-no-ther hap-py day." And in brackets I put in, 'Oh, Christ, here we go. Another sodding twelve hours to get through. Right. Off we go. Christ, okay, sun is up, we've got till sundown to get through.' And that is very different from the way I had originally heard it... "
On the Rockaby woman:
"Terribly lonely. I don't know why... but I thought of the loneliness of apartment dwellers, the desperate loneliness of New York, people sitting at their windows. I wrote on the margin of my copy of the play the words 'solitary,' 'monotonous,' 'lullaby.' She is again a disembodied voice. There I was working for a certain inflexion, a certain pitch in order to get that 'no color.' Different shades of grey."
Not helpful, but worth sharing:
"-Whenever I've read anything of Beckett's that I've been asked to do, the first thing that I've always wondered is how is it that everything he writes seems to be about my life. When I read HAPPY DAYS, I thought, what the hell was this man doing writing about me? He didn't even know me. Now having said that, Beckett's women are me, and therefore I don't know how I can discuss these women because they are all about me.
-...Do you find that the other women stay with you as Winnie has?
-Because these characters are me, there is no alternative.
-Can that be disturbing?
-Yes."
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Tochna. This is great.
ReplyDeleteWe, if we're taking Billie's philosophy into account, we were right on the ball with the solitude and loneliness of a New York City apartment complex and a series of windows. Lullaby... that rings familiar.
Different Shades of Grey... everything we've been talking about. What hits me is Sam's words of wisdom: It takes courage to be slow...don't be afraid. Words I should live by, or at least think about. I need that constant reminder: color is not always needed.