Take a deep breath

Edward Newborn in Samuel Beckett play Breath. Photo / Supplied

A partnership that shared one of Samuel Beckett’s great works is revived 30 years to the day. Linda Herrick reports

It opens with a baby's first cry and the inhalation of a first breath, and ends 35 seconds later with the final exhalation of a human being and another cry. Samuel Beckett's Breath, surely the shortest play in existence, has never before been staged in New Zealand but, next week, it comes to life at Q Theatre.

"It's life, death and everything in-between," says director Paul Gittins. "In the spirit of all Beckett's work, it's a serious comment, a metaphor for existence."

With lighting and sound by Michael Craven, actor Edward Newborn will follow the recorded cry of the baby with his own big intake of breath which he holds before letting it go. The work packs a lot of emotion into those short seconds, he says.

"For me, it's an installation work of art. It proves Beckett was ahead of his time."

Breath has an interesting genesis. In 1969, English critic Kenneth Tynan was putting together a revue which would become the then-scandalous Oh Calcutta! and Beckett contributed a sketch written on a postcard. But the playwright was outraged when he saw Oh Calcutta!, because his work now featured naked bodies. He threatened to sue Tynan then decided it wasn't worth the bother.

Beckett's instructions for Breath call for a stage littered with rubbish, a metaphor which is open to any interpretation you like. For the Q Theatre shows, Gittins has chosen a powerful image of a mountain of trash washed up on a foreshore with a cityscape of skyscrapers in the background. The photo, of Panama, was taken by Auckland photographer Kenneth Warne, but Gittins, who'd found it on Google, didn't know that then.

"It could have been taken by anyone from Timbuktu to America, but it was someone in Auckland," he laughs. "He emailed me and said, 'Fine, you can use it', and attached a quote from Beckett from Krapp's Last Tape. How bizarre. He's a Beckett fan!"

Gittins decided to use the image rather than litter the stage with detritus for practical reasons - it is sandwiched between two other Beckett works.

Gittins says That Time, first performed by Patrick Magee in 1976 to mark the writer's 70th birthday, is almost impossible to describe. It too has never been staged here before. It features Newborn's head, covered by flaring white hair, floating above the stage. He's an old man, sleeping, dreaming and blinking, with voices coming at him, representing different stages of his life.

"All the detail in the narrative is very specific biographical detail from Beckett's life that he has woven in there," says Gittins.

"How we are supposed to relate to it or know what it means, who knows? But when you listen to it, the overall impact is really interesting. He was into musical structure and the way he has designed this thing is very musical, a bit like a concerto for voice. It washes over you and you soak it up. It pings into the subconscious."

The final piece in this Beckett threesome is Krapp's Last Tape (1958), also first performed by Patrick Magee. Krapp has also been played by John Hurt, Harold Pinter, Michael Gambon, Corin Redgrave and Brian Dennehy. Centred on a 69-year-old man with a white face and a red nose - a drinker, a clown - who makes a tape each year on his birthday recording the previous year's events, Krapp is listening to a tape he made exactly 30 years ago. He is evaluating himself as he was when he was 39 - and he doesn't like him.

Director Paul Gittins with Edward Newborn. Photo / Jason Dorday

Fittingly, Gittins and Newborn worked together on Krapp's Last Tape exactly 30 years ago for Theatre Corporate.

"I did some of the archival work for Theatre Corporate," says Newborn, "and I was wondering if those tapes were still archived, so I phoned the library and they found some of those recordings. We did it back in 2010 as part of the Heritage Festival then I phoned Paul and said I wanted to do it exactly 30 years to the date."

"What you see is that guy at 69 at the end of his life, who is just so cynical about his earlier self, who was full of the stuff of life, seeking out this, got the answer to that," says Gittins. "What did it all mean? What did it add up to?"

Again, Beckett weaves autobiographical elements into Krapp - the death of his mother, throwing a ball to a little dog, a love he carelessly lost.

"I find it fascinating because the bit where he really gets stuck in is about this love affair he had," says Newborn. "He listens to this one passage three times. He didn't pursue it, he didn't know what he had, those missed moments. We all have those, don't we?"

Gittins has done Auckland theatre a great service in the past by staging dramas by Harold Pinter. Plays by the likes of Pinter and Beckett are, he reckons, "real works of art".

"They are not naturalistic slices of life, which are OK, but they are by playwrights who take life and fashion it into art, works that make a comment about life. It's something quite deep and intangible that affects you internally rather than rationally. Beckett was so ahead of his time. He pretty much flogs the same metaphor around in different forms; Happy Days with the woman buried in mud, Endgame, with a husband and wife in two different rubbish bins. He is the master of stripping away anything that's not pertinent. He's very uncompromising as well.

"This is another chance to see Krapp's Last Tape, which has been well-received in the past, and the chance to see two Beckett pieces you are very unlikely to see again. I mean, who's going to do Breath again?"

What: Breath: Three Samuel Beckett Plays
Where and when: Q Theatre Vault, April 8-18