Beckett

I did nothing particularly special for my birthday apart from watching two plays by acclaimed theatre director Peter Brook, one on the short plays of Beckett and another a dramatisation of Doestoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. They weren't the most heart rendering and uplifting plays to watch on a day such as that but 'Fragments' led me to recall why Beckett remains my favourite playwright.

He spoke to me at 17 when I had to read Endgame for the A levels. It was a play about nothingness and meaninglessness. And it awoke something within, it gave voice to that which I've felt for so long. It helped me understand why I've always been like an alien, different and always on the fringes. In my youth, that was a painful thing to experience ... difference.

'Fragments' brings together Beckett's one act plays and monologues so well framed and staged by Brook. But it's Beckett's writing, his livid imagination, his chronically gripping realism, his guileless and brutal presentation of the futility of relations and life itself, all presented in the mode of absurdism, that made sense in what was meant to be absurd senselessness. Maybe that explains why my adaptation of Beckett's Endgame for the SYF a few years ago was so hard to go down with both students and judges. They could not see the 'reality' of the absurdity.

Beckett's plays are about nothing; they are about the insufficiency and inadequacy of human relations. They are always about strangers who meet and try so desperately to make a connection, even if that connection were antagonistic; strangers who so vilely suffer from alienation and loneliness yet so unaware of their condition. They are strangers who try to make a connection based on the mundane and the trivial - a meaningless action, a pointless gesture, an ignored yelp. And all these while the characters repeat these, caught in an endless cycle of futility, forming impermanent relationships that never come to mean anything more than necessity. And so Beckett's plays never have a beginning nor an end. There is just a presentation of a moment that could be located in all temporalities.

Human relations are perhaps as Beckett has revealed and 'fictionalised'. They are fleeting, transient, impermanent, painful, abused, but ... necesary. Because we all feel an innate desire to form connections and escape the damned condition of loneliness. Because we all desire to be needed so that we can know we exist. It is as how Kundera has written in "Identity" - we form relationships and for those whom we call friends and loved ones exist as only mirrors to reflect our desires and our existence. We see ourselves and who we want to be through them... but we never really see them.

And everytime I get close to people, adults or young people alike, I become painfully aware of why I'm doing it yet helpless to change the condition that is immutably human. Everytime I call someone a friend or tell them they are loved dearly, I say it with time collapsed into the present utterance knowing that with the fading of the present, the passing of time, they will go and the utterance 'You are loved' would cease to mean anything. And that is the inalienable and brutal condition of life. Yet I need to be needed; I need to love and be loved in return. And when I utter that expression of love and concern, I am always uttering in the hopes that those words would possess greater power to silence and defeat transcience and the eventual meaninglessness. They are uttered in the hopes that the same utterance, in a different guise perhaps, would be returned. But till now, neither have been true - neither the eternity of the utterance nor the returned voice.

An examined life is always painful. Existence for those who possess consciousness is a state caught between memory and desire, as T.S. Eliot wrote.