I used to keep my ideas for future devised pieces hidden safe in a little black notebook, scrawled in big excited letters, waiting for the day when I had the time and resources to manifest them. Not sure where that book is today, and given that we live in an age of over-sharing, I’ll record them here. Feel free to steal them if they appeal to you.A two-person piece about Samuel Beckett’s relationship with his psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. At age 27, Beckett was in a deep depression after the death of his father and had an uncomfortable relationship with his strict mother. As psychoanalysis was illegal in Ireland, he traveled to London where he became Bion’s second patient ever. There’s ample source material (Beckett wrote about Bion and Bion wrote several essays that some speculate were about Beckett), and as long as I could keep the Beckett estate out of it, it could be a really beautiful, strange piece – genius, melancholy, friendship, healing, and the murky workings of the unconscious mind.
I totally agree. And I want to be in it.
ReplyDeleteIt does make me wonder if we need more plays about the depression/suffering/alcholism/mommy issues/daddy issues of Irish men. Not that it doesn't relate to anyone's suffering, just wondering.
And it is a step in the right direction: Irish men talking about their suffering without copious amounts of whiskey.
Do you want to be Beckett or Bion?
ReplyDeleteThanks for making me think more about it. I think this piece is actually more about male intimacy than it is about depressed & oedipally entangled Irishmen.
I also think there's a dreamy Jungian aspect in there too - they went together to a Jung lecture about a little girl who believed she was born too early or already dead. Beckett resonated strongly with her story and credits that lecture as helping him find his own psychic balance in the world.
Maybe that little girl is in the play too. The young female ghost haunting the strange formal love between these two powerful, brilliant men.
I think i'd be fucking delighted to play either roll.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree that it has more of Shepard's male vulnerability than O'Neil's emotionally abusive alcoholic Irish Catholic family issues. But I do think that the root of the conflict is connected to whatever mom/dad conflict Becket had in his life brought into focus by the death of his dad, right? And, like everyone's personal/parental conflict, it's actually about the individual coming to terms with who they are and who they want to become.
I think that's part of the transformation you're probably excited about putting on stage here. I didn't mean to diminish the importance of a story that depicts a man without the skills to communicate his pain and anger learning to heal without drinking. I'd love to see/make this play.