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"Embers"
By Samuel Beckett. Directed by Gavin Quinn.
BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn.
718-636-4100. www.bam.org/theater/2014/embers
Opened Sept 17; closed Sept. 20 2014.
Reviewed by Lucy Komisar Sept. 19, 2014.
"Embers" is deadly vision of Beckett play
Can a director and a set designer destroy a play? The production of
Samuel Beckett’s "Embers" at BAM provides a strong
argument.
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| Set
of "Embers." Photo by Ros Kavanagh |
A huge skull sits in the center stage. Inside are two
actors (Andrew Bennett and Áine Ní Mhuiri) who read
the lines of the various male and female characters of Beckett’s
play. I thought the production was dreadful. And I thought that maybe
the play was also dreadful.
But then I read the script. I realized the play is much better than
this production would have you believe. Beckett’s play is about
a man, an unsuccessful writer, who is thinking over his life and relation
with his father, who may have committed suicide by walking into the
sea. His father had told him that he was a "washout," a
failure.
The man does not have happy memories about his late wife, who is presented
as a nonetheless affectionate lady. He also hates his daughter, whose
only fault appears to be playing Chopin badly.
As lights flicker over the skull, illuminating one part and then another,
taking your attention from the text, I realized that Director Gavin
Quinn of the Pan Pan Theatre decided that he was the star, not Beckett.
So, he overwhelmed the script and the characters with a kitchy "avant
garde" set (the skull by Andrew Clancy) and direction.
If the play had been done with the characters, and different actors
for the various characters in the script, in a relatively normal
setting where everyone was seen (normal meaning not naturalistic,
but that you can see the characters interacting), it might have been
interesting. The way director Trevor Nunn did superbly last year in
"All That Fall," another Beckett radio play. Pan Pan did
the same play a year earlier and used no live actors: the audience
sat in darkness listening to recorded voices. Not too sorry I missed
it.
Quinn destroyed Beckett’s "Embers," entombing the
actors in a giant skull, so you never see them. Sitting on stage left,
I sometimes saw the female character though the ghastly eye of the
skull, but never the male. That was for the audience at stage right.
And the loud miked voices provided no difference or subtlety in delivery.
The skull in fact was a perfect commentary on this production. Deadly.
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