ABSTRACT
In a recent essay in The London Review of Books, Colm Toíbín walked the streets of city centre Dublin: recalling a coffee shop he once frequented, his days reading at the National Library on Kildare Street, and one frightening explosion in 1974 when the Troubles in the North migrated south for the summer in the form of a car bomb on South Leinster Street. For Toíbín, these memories and the press of daily responsibilities-paying bills, traipsing along O’Connell Street to the General Post Office (GPO) to mail letters, finding a quiet place to enjoy lunch-usually trump more literary and cultural ruminations. Moreover, he observes, some Dublin streets possess such a “peculiar intensity,” a quality that has grown ever “more gnarled and layered” over the years, that the past and the books that record it “hardly matter” any more and seem almost a “strange irrelevance” (10). He thus admits to seldom thinking of Leopold Bloom’s trek along these streets, and yet on this day he does, which through a chain of other associations leads him to the sign “Finn’s Hotel” where James Joyce famously met Nora Barnacle. Other flotsam from Ulysses drift into his consciousness, lemon soap and the racehorse Throwaway, for instance, as does one bit of arcana concerning Beckett’s novel Murphy and the exact distance between the floor of the GPO and the posterior of Cuchulain’s statue prominently displayed there. In actuality, Toíbín’s essay has nothing to do with Joyce, Murphy or Cuchulain’s arse; rather, it is a brief biography of Jack MacGowran and Patrick Magee, two actors who rose to prominence in the 1950s impersonating Clov and Krapp, respectively, in Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape. MacGowran in particular, who occupies the limelight of Toíbín’s thoughts, was long associated with Beckett, in large measure because of his celebrated one-man show comprised of scenes from Beckett’s work and his role as the Fool in Peter Brook’s famously Beckettian 1971 film production of King Lear in which Magee played Cornwall. (Here, the term “Beckettian” resonates in a totally untheorized, almost banal way: lines from Beckett are transposed into Shakespeare’s play, Lear’s throne room resembles Hamm’s shelter, and of course the presence of MacGowran in the cast all support the use of this adjective.)
An essay on Beckett’s actors that starts with Joyce is perhaps surprising, and it may seem almost eccentric to pause at the statue of Cuchulain or to recall Joyce and Nora’s first date, which began with their rendezvous outside the office of Sir William Wilde’s surgery. More intriguing for my purposes are Toíbín’s playful allusions to Ireland’s largest industry-tourism-and its relation to the nation’s literary history and culture. “Tourists must love” the sign at Finn’s Hotel, he reflects, just as they flock to see the “funny colourful statue” of Oscar Wilde in Merrion Square opposite the office in which his father practiced, the same statue unveiled in 1997, as Paula Murphy reminds us, that irreverent Dubliners refer to as the “quare on the square” (127).1 Such thoughts then give way in this network of associations to the attic in which Beckett temporarily resided over his father’s quantity-surveying business on nearby Clare Street, which in turn inspires Toíbín’s notion of having a plaque inscribed and positioned conspicuously on the building: “This is where Beckett got away from his God-forsaken mother.” And then he adds: “Must tell tourist board.” In a city littered, if this is not too flippant a term, with statues of well-known figures from Irish mythology, of acclaimed writers and influential politicians, even of fictional characters-the most infamous being the often vandalized Anna Livia monument, known more familiarly as the “floozy in the Jacuzzi”—Toíbín’s epiphany seems oddly appropriate, yet prompts an obvious question: Why would tourists, especially those Americans of Irish heritage who pour into Ireland every summer, be interested in Beckett in the first place? True enough, Waiting for Godot was once heralded by Variety as the “laugh sensation of two continents,” but Americans have scarcely crowded into theatres to see Beckett’s plays, save perhaps for the 1988 Lincoln Center production of Godot starring Steve Martin and Robin Williams. And even this much-anticipated revival was far from an unqualified success, as reviews were sufficiently negative to motivate Martin to swear he would never act on stage again.2
