by Ben Brantley | New York Times, October 16, 2000
The head decomposes and recomposes, a flesh- shedding skull one instant and a smooth rubber mask the next. The abruptness of the transitions is scary, matching the tones and rhythms sometimes primal, sometimes mechanical Irwin never coasts on the hypnotic musicality of the prose. On the other hand he has obviously and deliberately stopped short of overanalyzing, a process that is fatal to Beckett. To say Mr. Irwin articulates very clearly Beckett's ambiguities is not to say he clarifies them.
Instead he presents the Beckettian state of living in uncertainty as a bizarre, heroic and pathetic spectacle. And if you go with the meandering flow of Mr. Irwin's performance, you'll find the experience less cerebral than deeply emotional.
Composed around the middle of the century, in the period when Beckett wrote "Waiting for Godot," "Texts for Nothing" is a series of 13 burrowing ruminations that elude category. In them, as the scholar S. E. Gontarski observed, Beckett abandoned the "ideology of a concrete presence, a single coherent being" that is traditionally the essence of the monologue form.
You could call them the ultimate exercises in self-consciousness, except that there is no solid sense of self here; consciousness is rendered as something often outside the individual. (When Mr. Chaikin was first considering adapting "Texts" for the stage, Beckett proposed alternating a recorded voice with the live voice of an actor.) They are not, in other words, obvious candidates for strong theater.
All the more remarkable then is Mr. Irwin's ability to give a purely theatrical anchor to his chosen "Texts" (1, 9, 11 and 13) without pinning them down. True, Douglas Stein's setting enhances Irwin's work: supporting a sense of circular symmetry in which infinite, self-surprising variation is possible. Giving balletic life to the rebellion of arms and legs, finding momentary assurance in a music hall shuffle step, arching his exposed neck as if to some cosmic guillotine: Mr. Irwin finds the eternal in the particular and vice versa, only rarely stooping to too literal interpretive gestures.
His voice sometimes suggests a randomly programmed robot, sometimes a self-admiring lecturer and sometimes an autistic child. The words alternately come with suspicious ease and agonized struggle, and the mouth that gives them form can suddenly stretch to suggest a hole as fathomless as the one by which the speaker will ultimately be consumed. At times the mud- smeared face, with its protuberant pale blue eyes, seems to belong to a corpse.
Which reminds us of Beckett's link not just to classic comedy, which has been abundantly discussed and which comes so naturally to Mr. Irwin, but to the horror stories with which we scare ourselves. The tramp embodied by Mr. Irwin may immediately bring to mind Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, but but he also recalls the fearsome creatures brought to movie screens by directors from F. W. Murnau to Wes Craven.
This splendidly funny and haunting evening reminds us that the basic human fear of losing control or, as Beckett suggests, not even having it to begin with, is responsible for our fascination both with slapstick and with fantasies of the living dead. One keeps falling down in life until finally one has fallen for good. You can either shiver or laugh. Mr. Irwin guarantees both responses.
Contents produced by JSM | Ed: December 10, 2001