‘On Beckett’ Returns to Irish Rep, and Its Star, Bill Irwin, Is as Essential as Ever

One of last year’s most delightful theater productions was a one-man show called “All the Devils Are Here,” in which the veteran trouper Patrick Page demystified Shakespeare by combining excerpts from the Bard’s plays — with a focus on their villains, as the title suggests — with elegant, witty, and highly accessible insights into the material.“Devils” put me in mind of a wonderful show I had seen several years earlier, “On Beckett,” in which Bill Irwin, another accomplished actor — also admired for his skills as a writer, director, and clown — had applied a similar approach to Samuel Beckett, another famously challenging scribe. Happily, Mr. Irwin’s roughly 90-minute gem has returned to Irish Repertory Theatre, and it’s just as invigorating, illuminating, and charming as it was the first time.Mr. Irwin is known to television audiences for roles as diverse as a psychiatrist on “Law and Order: SVU,” a serial killer on “CSI,” and the mime Mr. Noodle on “Sesame Street.” On stage, he has tackled giants from Shakespeare to Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, and August Wilson, but nowhere have his distinctive talents as both a physical comedian and a deft interpreter of dense text been better served than in Beckett’s plays.Although now in his 70s, Mr. Irwin retains the agility and charisma he has brought to these projects. For the Beckett passages featured in this show — several are drawn from the playwright’s work outside theater, prominent among them the prose collection “Texts for Nothing” — he employs props ranging from oversized pants to a succession of hats, emphasizing the bowler style associated with Beckett’s best-known work, “Waiting for Godot.”Bill Irwin in ‘On Beckett.’ Carol RoseggMr. Irwin refers at more than one point to the “language of hats,” and of clothes, and of the body itself, in Beckett’s work. “I am not a Beckett scholar,” he tells us, stressing that his is “an actor’s relationship … and also a clown’s relationship” with the repertoire. In fact, though, this piece brims with intuition into its subject’s writing, and it does so with a sense of joy and wonder, and of gentle mischief, that I only wish had been shared by the college professors who introduced me to Beckett.A California native of Irish stock, Mr. Irwin speaks vividly of the “Irishness” of Beckett’s oeuvre — while noting the irony that he wrote his best-known works in French — and contests the notion that he was not a political writer. Having nodded to Beckett’s “charged and slippery” use of pronouns when the show had its premiere, he has tweaked that portion to make the fresh and compelling observation that this is “another reason this language resonates with us today, when people are using pronouns to re-examine human identity.”“Godot” gets predictable attention; Mr. Irwin has performed in numerous high-profile productions of the play, in different roles, and he makes note of the “literary baggage” attached to it: “Sometimes people look at it as a kind of theater ceremony or eucharist,” he muses. “Actors often need to say, ‘Okay, fine, but for us it’s a play,” with “characters who have needs and desires.”“Godot” is also, Mr. Irwin proposes, “a rumination on supremacy and authority.” To illustrate this point, he presents a speech in which Lucky — its ironically named “beast of burden,” as the actor aptly puts it — breaks the silence he has sustained through the play, while being driven by a rope and whip held by the tyrannical Pozzo.Pondering the aftermath of this outburst, in which Pozzo regains control of his slave, Mr. Irwin notes, “Lucky is as he was — his ‘thinking’ is over. … Order is restored. That just seems like a political reflection to me. And it feels like a clown scene to me.”For all his perceptiveness and passion, Mr. Irwin admits that he is sometimes “pushed away” by the writing he honors here. “What I can say about Mr. Beckett’s work,” he resolves, “is that it haunts me. It will not leave me alone.” Yet be assured that the enchantment offered by “On Beckett” is entirely pleasurable.

‘On Beckett’ Returns to Irish Rep, and Its Star, Bill Irwin, Is as Essential as Ever

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