Interview: Barry McGovern, actor

‘THE hardest eyes to catch are a barman’s,” says Barry McGovern, as we sit in a Dublin hotel trying in vain to flag down two cups of coffee. “Beckett said that.” And for a moment, we can picture the craggy features of the ageing writer trying to summon a waiter in the lobby of the Hotel PLM St Jacques in Paris, where admirers would seek him out in his later years.

McGovern, who will bring his own one-man adaptation of Beckett’s novel Watt to the Edinburgh International Festival this weekend, knew him at that time. The leading Irish actor has since ­become something of a Beckett authority – accidentally, he says – having done two one-man Beckett shows and all the major plays, including more than 400 performances of Waiting for Godot.

“I admired him enormously, both as a writer and as a person,” he says. “He was a wonderful man: very dry, wicked sense of humour, ­wonderful laugh. And also great melancholy, just a remarkable presence. He was almost monk-like in a strange sort of way. A very complex man, but ultimately very simple, in the true sense of the word ‘simplicity’. Integrity shone out of him. And he was terribly kind.”

Beckett, who lived most of his adult life in France, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, but he carried the mantle of his fame very humbly. He shunned public recognition, though he did allow fellow creative people to seek him out. “He had huge intelligence. He must have known his place in the literary world, but he handled it very, very well. It’s a huge burden, but you can be very gracious.

“I’d always heard that you don’t talk to Beckett about his work – he doesn’t like talking about his work. I asked him a few questions about things like pronunciation, things I was thinking about as a performer, and he was quite frank with me about it. There was no problem. I only wish now I’d asked him more questions.”

There are plenty of questions he might have asked about Watt, Beckett’s second novel in English. Stylistically it forms a bridge between his early, Joyce-influenced writing and his productive ­middle years when he wrote his major plays. He himself described it as “an unsatisfactory book, written in dribs and drabs, but it has its part in the series, as will perhaps appear in time”.

It was written during the Second World War, while Beckett was on the run from the Gestapo and working for the French Resistance, for which he was later honoured with the Croix de Guerre. It follows the eponymous protagonist through Dublin to the house of the mysterious Mr Knott, for whom he becomes a manservant. Much is ambiguous and unclear: Watt may have a breakdown and end up in an asylum; the book may or may not end with him boarding a train. Its enigmatic closing words are: “No symbols where none intended”. Even the names of the characters are a riddle.

Watt has been described as “the most lovable of all Beckett’s texts, once the reader learns to respond to its curious charms” but it presents major challenges for anyone seeking to adapt it for the stage, not least for the idiosyncracies of its text, including lists run on for many pages. “It was tricky, I went through a lot of drafts,” says ­McGovern. “What I had to try to do is get the ­essence of the book into this show, to give a ­flavour of what the book is ‘about’ – though that is always a difficult question with Beckett.”

Watt is, he says, a man “who isn’t able to comprehend the world that he lives in”. “I see lots of Watts in the street. Watt – perhaps he has ­Asperger’s syndrome or something like that – he’s slightly ‘other’. There’s a lovely description in the book: ‘Watt smiled, and clasping his hands raised them to his breastbone and held them there. Watt had watched people smile, and thought he understood how it was done.’ There’s that quality in a lot of Beckett’s characters, they see people behaving in what is a normal way but they don’t understand because they’re detached from the world of normal emotions.”

In the right hands, however, all this can also be very funny. McGovern says Watt is “one of the few books that have made me laugh out loud on public transport”. “Beckett’s humour is very black, very deadpan, a bit like Dave Allen. I like dark humour because it gets you through life. You need to leaven the seriousness of Beckett with the humour of Beckett.”

He says the play will have succeeded if the ­audience – whether or not they enjoy it – are ­persuaded to go and read Watt for themselves. “All the words are Beckett’s. I just wanted to be true to him and do a show on stage which would bring this very unread novel to more people. It is unlike anything else you’ve ever read. If this brings more people to read the book, that will be good enough for me.”

A leading theatre actor, and a contemporary of Liam Neeson who has also appeared in films such as Braveheart and Far and Away, McGovern “always loved Beckett as a writer” but becoming the theatrical equivalent of a Beckett scholar was never on his agenda.

That began when Michael Colgan, the artistic director of Dublin’s Gate Theatre, asked him to develop I’ll Go On, a one-man play based on Beckett’s three novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, in 1985. He brought it to the Fringe the following year – in an afternoon slot at the Assembly Rooms, sandwiched between Ivor Cutler and Rory Bremner – and has toured with it all over the world.

“I think it was then that this Beckett mantle descended on me, which I never wanted, but people kept saying, ‘Oh, you’re the Beckett actor’. I’ve done more Shakespeare plays than Beckett plays. I’m a freelance actor, I don’t go round doing Beckett all the time, I love doing new things.”

But he has reached an accommodation with the label since Colgan called for a second one-man show, and persuaded him, despite his own hesitations at the complexity of the task, to adapt Watt. “He pushed me into it, and I’m very grateful to him. It will get a certain amount of limelight, so again people will associate me with Beckett. But that’s fine, there are worse things to be associated with.”

Isn’t Beckett’s universe a bleak place to spend a lot of time? “No. It’s wonderfully exhilarating. it’s terribly funny, it’s not bleak at all. There is Beckett­ian universe that people like to think of as bleak, but actually it’s very realistic, and there’s a lot of humour in it.

“It is about treading a very fine line between humour and despair. The two are very close. It’s like a lot of life, we tend to bury the despair, you have to open the paper or turn on the television to realise what an awful world this really is. We can sit here having coffee in a hotel and it’s all very fine, but no matter what we do to help our less fortunate brethren, most of the world lives in pretty miserable conditions. Beckett saw this, he felt this all the time. During the war, his friends had died in very bad circumstances, he witnessed a lot of hell.”

l Watt, Royal Lyceum Theatre, 11-14 August. www.eif.co.uk/watt