The plays of Samuel Beckett are so famous they tend to eclipse his remarkable prose work. This is a real shame and something that the Gare St Lazare Players aim to correct. They have adapted the difficult novels that make up the Beckett trilogy and condensed them into three succinct and streamlined hour long monologues. Much of the detail is lost, but what remains fully encompasses the feel and philosophical bent of the prose.

While Beckett’s dramatic work tends to have a strong and visceral visual element, with the isolated floating mouth of Not I being perhaps the most extreme example, these productions instead take more the form of storytelling and are no worse for it. As Malloy, Conner Lovett talks of how one of his legs, he can’t remember which, is damaged beyond repair. As Malone, he tells us of how he is confined to bed, and might even be unconscious. That he is wandering animatedly around the stark bare stage does not detract from our belief in his infirmity. His delivery is that good.

In Molloy, we hear the tragicomic tale of a tramp and his derailed journey to leech off of his mother. On his way he is accosted by a policeman for his vagrancy and accidentally runs over an old woman’s dog. All this drama brings unwanted attention to a man who wants to shun all that is human.

In Malone Dies, a bed-ridden and demented man tells stories to distract from his ‘misery, pain and impotence’. His yarn, about an asylum run by a madman, is spun merely to kill the time until time kills him. He hopes that through invention, there is perhaps something outside of his pitiful existence, and yet his monologue returns faithfully to autobiography as if he cannot fling his consciousness onto anything grander. ‘Am I incapable of lying on any other subject?’ he asks.

In The Unnameable, the narrator is even less defined being without name, location or time. His anxious and disenchanted search for meaning boils over into rage at being spat into a universe that he never asked for. All the characters find existence meaningless and tedious, and feel lost and powerless. They all forget themselves, correct themselves, and in spite of their self loathing, futilely seek to find themselves. Though they have nothing but contempt for communication, they struggle to fill the void with words.

Bursting at the seams with existential angst, Molloy asks, ‘Can it be that we are not free?’, before dispensing with his philosophical musings by adding with deadpan delivery, ‘Someone should look into it’. This constant humour acts as the antidote to the incessant nihilism. Lovett’s comic timing is spot on, his performance, perfect. But with punch lines like, ‘She is dead’, ‘He is dead’, ‘We’ll soon be dead’, ‘killed her with a hatchet’, ‘He hanged himself’, the mood can only be lightened so much. You laugh until you cry and then you cry some more. Bleak yet brilliant, this is Beckett at his best.

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