--- title: Samuel Beckett: Dead Laughing description: Ralph Fiennes, head nearly shaved, thin frame draped in mud-brown haberdashery, stands in an implied graveyard and works his mouth into a sour scowl as... canonical: https://time.com/archive/6909123/samuel-beckett-dead-laughing/ author: Richard Corliss article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2008-07-30T04:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-22T15:39:43.149Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: Samuel Beckett: Dead Laughing og:description: Ralph Fiennes, head nearly shaved, thin frame draped in mud-brown haberdashery, stands in an implied graveyard and works his mouth into a sour scowl as... og:url: https://time.com/archive/6909123/samuel-beckett-dead-laughing/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4dd851b1701de422/698a4adb47ca3894d43bc4c7/360_beckett_0728.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: 360_beckett_0728.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Samuel Beckett: Dead Laughing twitter:description: Ralph Fiennes, head nearly shaved, thin frame draped in mud-brown haberdashery, stands in an implied graveyard and works his mouth into a sour scowl as... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt4dd851b1701de422/698a4adb47ca3894d43bc4c7/360_beckett_0728.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # Samuel Beckett: Dead Laughing > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Jul 30, 2008 4:00 AM UTC  Ralph Fiennes performs in Beckett's First Love, directed by Michael Colgan. Ralph Fiennes performs in Beckett's First Love, directed by Michael Colgan.Stephanie Berger by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Jul 30, 2008 4:00 AM UTC Ralph Fiennes, head nearly shaved, thin frame draped in mud-brown haberdashery, stands in an implied graveyard and works his mouth into a sour scowl as he says he doesn’t mind the smell of corpses. “A trifle on the sweet side perhaps, a trifle heady, but how infinitely preferable to what the living emit, their feet, teeth, armpits, arses, sticky foreskins and frustrated ovules.” Fiennes enumerates these body parts with slow precision, and in a tone of crescendoing disgust. It might be a litany of curses, a bill of criminal charges brought against a species about to be condemned. Liam Neeson sits on a bed on the left side of the stage; on the right side is a blank wall on which his face is projected in closeup, as a woman’s voice softly, insistently works its way into his head. “Anyone living love you now, Joe? Anyone living sorry for you now? That slut that comes on Saturday, you pay her, don’t you? Penny a hoist, tuppence as long as you like.” Once another woman did love him, and he shrugged her off, and she tried killing herself several ways, until one worked. And Neeson stares ahead, and the dead voice drones on: “It stops in the end. You stop it in the end. Imagine if you couldn’t. Ever think of that? If it went on. The whisper in your head. Me whispering at you in your head. Things you can’t catch. On and off. Till you join us. Eh Joe?” And Neeson stares. It’s appropriate that the just-concluded season of Samuel Beckett plays produced by the Gate Theatre of Dublin for the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City took place not in the Center’s usual theater space but at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (familiars call it the John Jay College of Criminal Knowledge). For the oeuvre of the Nobel Prize-winning Irishman contains testimony from, and about, people guilty of a long list of particulars, most particularly being born. They solemnly declare all crimes of commission and omission, which Beckett sets down in crystalline phrases that might be spoken from the witness stand, or from the hangman’s platform just before execution. “Gate Beckett,” which ended a brief, triumphal run on Sunday, is a welcome addendum to the [1996 banquet of all 19 works he wrote for the stage](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,985033,00.html), from the full-length _Waiting for Godot_, _Endgame_ and _Happy Days_ to the 40-second _Breath_. That two-week event provided New Yorkers with what may have been their greatest theatrical experience of the decade. This time the Gate’s artistic director, Michael Colgan, presented three pieces from Beckett’s writing for other media: TV, for _Eh Joe_ (Neeson), the short story, for “First Love” (Fiennes) and the novel: Barry McGovern’s tour-de-force _I’ll Go On_, a distilling of the Beckett novels _Molloy,_ _Malone Dies_ and _The Unnameable_. Why do it? Why transplant the work of an author who exercised such meticulous control over his plays that he itemized the number of seconds between pauses, the precise level of gloomy light? Presumably Beckett meant “First Love” and the novel trilogy to remain in the forms in which he created them. Yet there’s reason in Colgan’s audacity. He wanted to prove that even Beckett’s fiction has theatrical verve, that the static can be dramatic, that pieces written for the eye can entrance the ear, that, for this most “internal” author, the page was also a stage. Colgan’s strongest case was the most evident: all three adaptations worked gloriously. The story, the TV show and the novels are all monologues, thus suitable for reading. And all take place in what the woman’s voice in _Eh Joe_ describes as “that penny farthing hell you call your mind.” Some of Beckett’s characters may never understand the harm they’ve caused or allowed, until “the agenbite of inwit” — a medieval phrase, often used by Beckett’s mentor, James Joyce, to refer to the remorse of conscience — forces them into self-knowledge, into an act of contrition. In _Eh Joe_ Neeson’s face hardly moves a muscle; the play’s director says the performance is “the longest reaction shot in movie history.” Yet by the end of the half-hour play, his face is creased into something like penance. The plays also reinforced the argument that Beckett was, in large part, a comic writer: unquestionably deadpan but characterized by (his phrase, from _Happy Days_) “laughing wild amidst severest woe.” _Godot_ is really a spectacle of mordant vaudeville; the role of Estragon in the first Broadway production was taken by that comic Cowardly Lion, Bert Lahr; and in a 1988 Lincoln Center revival, directed by Mike Nichols, the stars were Steve Martin and Robin Williams. The set up to the play’s gag: they wait for Godot. The punch line: he doesn’t show up! Maybe this is concept comedy, an essay on the deflating and the persistence of hope, but it’s as comic as it is cosmic. Laughing wild certainly abounded in the hour-long Saturday matinee of readings from Beckett texts by Fiennes, Neeson, McGovern and Julianne Moore. Among the readings was a passage from the short story “The Expelled,” published, like “First Love,” in 1946\. Its protagonist is a dour brute not far from the nameless necrophile in “First Love,” and Fiennes again took the role. He describes walking down a city street when “I had to fling myself to the ground to avoid crushing a child. He was wearing a little harness, I remember, with little bells, he must have taken himself for a pony, or a Clydesdale, why not. I would have crushed him gladly, I loathe children, and it would have been doing him a service, but I was afraid of reprisals. Everyone is a parent, that is what keeps you from hoping… They never lynch children, babies, no matter what they do they are whitewashed in advance.” As Fiennes spat out this comic misanthropy, the audience let out communal barks of involuntary, sometimes chagrined giddiness, and at the end erupted in applause. The guilt of Irish laughter resounds through much of _I’ll Go On_, McGovern’s and Gerry Dukes’ selection of passages from the three novels. McGovern, one of the foremost players of Beckett, mines every vein of showmanship in the works. Riding a bicycle while holding crutches, or squatting nearly naked and spitting out whole paragraphs in a long breath, he’s a veritable Cirque de Solo. Even on his deathbed (in the _Malone Dies_ section), the McGovern-Beckett character finds much to laugh about, though his smile is a rictus. What won Beckett his Nobel Prize — the grim death gargling at you from every page — may also keep audiences away; they think he’s a sanctified chore, homework for Mensa members. But as McGovern, Fiennes and Neeson demonstrated, with their considerable artistry, Beckett was a mesmerizer, a spellbinder, who held a cracked mirror to humanity and saw the humanity in it. We’re pitiable creatures, no doubt, and birth is just the first step toward death, but funny in our cruelties and yearnings. At least that’s what this Beckett fan thought at the end of the Gate marathon, Laugh? 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