Beckett by heart

Completed in 1721, the Palazzo Diedo is one of those impossibly high-ceilinged, canal-fronting, fabulously ornate buildings in Venice that seem to belong to the next, more perfect life. Built by one of the city’s old noble families, the five-storey palace was taken over by the local government when the Diedo family went bankrupt in the 1890s. It subsequently served as a courthouse and as the grandest of school buildings before falling into disrepair a decade or so ago. It is now coolly restored and run as a gallery by the Berggruen Arts & Culture foundation. 

In the past couple of weeks the upper floor of the building has been inhabited by the celebrated Cork-based theatre company Gare St Lazare. They have presented the most ambitious of all possible two-handers: a first-ever staging of Samuel Beckett’s 1964 novel How It Is, a work written as a single riddling close-typed monologue, over 170 pages, without any punctuation. The performance in Venice lasts six hours, plus two lengthy intervals. 

The staging has been a long time in the works. Director Judy Hegarty Lovett tells me that Gare St Lazare, which has a storied history with Beckett, first started imagining and rehearsing back in 2018. Covid scuppered the original plans. All that trial and error and fate and frustration seemed appropriately embedded in the eventual, mesmerising opening afternoon (and evening). Beckett’s voice, an internal monologue in the head of an unnamed character who exists beneath or within the earth, is much concerned with getting the few events in an interminable life straight. In Venice, that wormy voice is inhabited by two wonderful loose-limbed actors, Hegarty Lovett’s husband Conor Lovett, and Stephen Dillane. 

I’ve no idea how actors commit lines to memory, but How It Is stretches that ability to uncanny limits. “It has become like a muscle to them,” Hegarty Lovett tells me, with a laugh. Using a minimalist set comprising four long magenta boxes on a magenta floor, designed by the artist Michael Craig-Martin, the pair wandered among the audience, letting the rhythms of Beckett’s prose become a meditative heartbeat – that authentic and unstoppable and intermittently hilarious stream of consciousness that the writer spent a lifetime perfecting. 

Some audience members lay down; others walked with the actors, through side rooms off the main palazzo hall. A few times, mid-flow, the actors pulled back net curtains and opened the high windows that let the sounds from the street and canal below into the room – all of Venice’s life-loving seduction like the whispers of the undead. And then we were back in the glittering mud of the monologue: “If he wants to leave him yes in peace yes without me there is peace yes was peace yes every day no if he thinks I’ll leave him no I’ll stay where I am yes glued to him yes tormenting him yes eternally yes…”

Some phrases kept returning in the rendition, hand-holds to cling to. One felt highly appropriate: “vast tracts of time”. When it seemed certain the voice couldn’t go on, it – marvellously – went on. And despite some prior anxieties – do you think we will be able to slip out unnoticed for a quick cappuccino? – no one who witnessed the full six hours might have wished them a second shorter. 

Illustration by Oscar Ingham/Observer Design