After the personal portrait of the French tightrope walker Philippe Petit in Man on Wire or the wonderful biopic of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, the British James Marsh dares with a “subversive” version of Samuel Beckett in Dance first, released this Friday in theaters . The person in charge of giving life to the famous Irish playwright is none other than his compatriot Gabriel Byrne, who plays two versions of the author in a story in which the depressed protagonist begins to converse with himself, looking back after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969, a recognition that he calls a “catastrophe.”
Combining black and white at the beginning and color at the end, the film reviews the career of the author who elevated the theater of the absurd with his masterpiece Waiting for Godot, from his childhood with a despotic mother and a kind father, through his complex relationship with his admired James Joyce, his role as a Resistance fighter in World War II, his womanizing side and his final years, consolidated as a world figure of letters.
“When I was a student I read some of Beckett’s works, but I always avoided him, preferring other authors. But at the time I was offered this project I saw it as a memory of that absence from my student days and an opportunity to to get hooked on Beckett again. My life experience was such that I was able to understand him much better than when I was young. So I really enjoyed reading his works and those of Joyce again,” says Marsh in conversation with La Vanguardia in San Sebastián, where Dance first closed the last film festival.
For Byrne, known for his roles in The Usual Suspects and Death in the Flowers, it has been a privilege to get into Beckett’s shoes. “He was an Irish icon, a universal figure. People know his name, but little about his work. I know where he lived and I even know someone who cleaned his house. They said he was a very messy man. Also that he was very folksy, simple and close. He was not influenced by Irish literature like Joyce, who was also a tormented person. They were both very original in the way they wrote. I think they would not have written the way they wrote if they had not been conflicted and very emotional people. The “People mistakenly think that Beckett was cold and desperate, but nothing could be further from the truth. When you see performances of his plays, you realize that he didn’t address themes like love or joy. But there was a lot of truth in them.”
Marsh maintains that the playwright’s experience when he enlisted in the French Resistance after the German occupation of 1940 changed his way of writing. “For me it was a discovery from my study of Beckett when facing this project.” Byrne considers that the writer “is not inaccessible, he is very human and you can connect with him. I have found it fascinating that a man’s reputation can be greater than who he really was. He suffered a lot in his life. He was not perfect, “No way. He was a real person and the myth does him no favors.”
The actor’s biggest challenge was “to clear the perception that people have of Beckett. It’s something that had marked me. I didn’t want to imitate him but try to find the humanity within the person. Thank God the script distanced itself from that public perception.”
Before becoming an actor, Byrne worked as a cook, archaeologist and even served as a Spanish teacher in Bilbao. “That was many years ago, when he was a young man who didn’t know anything and now I’m an older man who doesn’t know anything either,” he replies with a laugh. “I went to Spain and taught English to 36 burly police officers at the time when Franco was already dying.” And he blushes to think that there will still be people in Bilbao who will speak English with the accent that he taught them. For me it was very funny to hear how they repeated the phrases he told them as if they were parrots,” he remembers.
The Irish performer is in love with Spain and confesses that “I have always been fascinated by Spanish literature. I admire the Golden Age of Spanish theater and I have read translations of Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Don Quixote, Lorca… Although He has alternated his career between Europe and Los Angeles, he is critical of Hollywood cinema: “People are becoming more and more Americanized, especially in the way they see the world, and it is something directly related to movies. We are absorbing American values, its politics, its history and its perspective on the world. I think that what happens to Spain is like Ireland, our culture has been separated by what has come to us from the United States.”
Nor is there anything promising about the future of the seventh art. He points out that with the emergence of platforms and artificial intelligence “the era of cinema as we know it may be in its final days because we live in a post-truth society where the false and the artificial are accepted as something as valid or more than reality”.
