Theatre: The End is in the Beginning

Pippa Marriott experiences the magic of Studio 36 for Hello Beckett! on Sunday 22nd June

Have you been to 36 Denmark Road? You are bound to have noticed the sculptures outside, and the gallery of art on the board, but you need to go inside to experience the real magic. This wonderfully inspirational creative space known as Studio 36 overflows with joyful surprises.

Photos by Pippa Marriott

On entering the house you find yourself in a version of Charleston: every surface decorated, every wall bright with paintings. On closer examination, you realise the playful humour that shines throughout has none of the gloom of the deceased Bloomsbury set. No, this is the work of very-much-alive Veronica Gosling: resident and owner, artist, and curator of delight.

Moving past the temptations of the delicious cakes in the kitchen, you emerge into another world altogether, and not a very English one. The glorious figures of lumpy women and cross-eyed, oversized blue pigeons may look like the work of celebrated French artists but – like the paintings and assemblages inside – they carry the hallmark artistry and playfulness of our brilliant host.

Veronica doesn’t just make art, she hosts and encourages it in all its many forms. Sunday was a case in point. Hello Beckett! was a celebration of the Nobel prize-winning author and playwright Samuel Beckett. Treats on offer included Peter Nickol playing piano pieces that Beckett loved, and a hugely informative Q&A session with the University of Exeter’s Professor Laura Salisbury, previously president of the Beckett Society. James Turner shared his poetry, and there was participatory art as well, but the ‘main event’ in the afternoon was a performance.

Philip Robinson and Sarah White from Living Room Theatre in Hello Beckett! at Studio 36. Photo courtesy of Studio 36 website.

Over 50 of us sat in sunshine in the beautiful garden on an assortment of benches and chairs. The wind in the trees and the birdsong, even the chimes from the Cathedral, joined in supporting the transportive experience of The End is in the Beginning.

The Beckett omnibus: you wait ages for one and then 16 arrive together!

The show’s facebook page appropriately describes how this ‘80-minute collision of the comic and the tragic invites audiences into a Beckettian world of looping words, unravelling time, and familiar absurdities’. And that is indeed the world we were about to enter. Brilliantly performed by Philip Robinson and Sarah White, and deftly directed by Nikki Sved, this was a real ‘essence of Beckett’ feast. Lovingly compiled from 16 of Beckett’s plays, prose and poems, the show exudes not only the absurdity and poetic pessimism of Beckett’s work but also his humour and humanity.

Like all of Philip Robinson’s work, the sound design is seamless and central. Underscoring the world of the show, it variously adds texture and colour, humour and pathos. From the opening crackle and distortion of Melvyn Bragg on the radio we, as audience, drift away from the intellectual dissection of Samuel Beckett and into his work and words and the immediacy of this moment of beginning, presented to us in all its fragile self-consciousness and inarticulacy. We quickly realise that our job isn’t to find meaning: instead, we are encouraged to immerse ourselves in the confusion of the performers, allowing the playful and poignant poetry of Beckett’s rhythms and repetitions to carry us through. We begin to recognise ourselves in the familiar struggles they enact – struggling to communicate, to clarify, to find the right word or to work out who they/we are. We resonate with the difficulties and tiny triumphs that the various characters/not-characters embody, and throughout – whether in Sarah’s virtuoso articulation of a section of Not I? or Philip’s masterful clowning – we know that we are in safe hands.

The grey-swathed set reveals itself to be – like the soundscape – a meticulous and intentional array of costume and props, some referencing Beckett plays (like the dustbin) simply by their presence. The costumes are perfectly shabby and evocative, and at times hugely inventive: in an extract from Happy Days, Sarah puts her head through a hole in some fabric and suddenly a fantastically designed ‘mound’ envelops her (respect to Lindy Yellowlees for working her design magic).

Things happen, and don’t happen. Sometimes, we – and the performers – are held in the awkwardness of waiting, of an anxious, uncertain existential moment that lasts and lasts. Suddenly a phone rings and we all wait for one of the characters to pick it up. When they eventually do, we move in and out of a monologue that appears to pour from the earpiece, offering the hilarious minutiae of the best order to circulate beach stones around various pockets to ensure that you have sucked every single one of them (from Molloy). Sometimes this narration moves into live action, but each time the phone rings the anticipation of the running gag is an ongoing, laugh-out-loud pleasure.

At one point Sarah panics – “We’re not beginning to mean something, are we?”

And although sitting there in that sunny garden we would have struggled to say exactly what it all meant, it was impossible not to feel a deep sense of something important and timeless, something to do with being human. 

When the end came, the end was indeed in the beginning: Philip and Sarah took us back to where we started, and Beckett’s final poem, What is the Word? Repetitions of ‘folly’ and ‘glimpse’, coupled with the tantalising sense of something faint and in the distance that may arrive, that may be a turn for the better, or the worse, provided an appropriately inconclusive conclusion to an extraordinary and utterly engaging Sunday afternoon.

Whether you are a Beckett aficionado or a newbie, The End is in the Beginning is not only ‘a performance to witness, to inhabit, to endure’ but also to delight in – and certainly one not to be missed. You can book a performance for your own garden or living room, or look out for shows in September.