Blobs, babble and blackness

Comedie (Play) - a forgotten Beckett film starring one man, two women and three urns

Saturday December 9, 2000, The Guardian

Blackness. Three bright dots reveal themselves as heads; two women and a man, their bodies lost inside grey urns. They are a long way away. A harsh spotlight illuminates them, interrogates them as they speak, turn by turn and all at once. When silence falls, darkness falls with it. The light goes on and off. That is all there is, in essence, to Samuel Beckett's Play, first performed in Britain at the Old Vic in 1964.

Anthony Minghella has recently filmed Play, with Kristin Scott Thomas, Juliet Stephenson and Alan Rickman, as part of a project to film all 19 Beckett plays. It is being touted as the first filmed production of Play. It is not. Comedie (Play in French) was filmed by Beckett himself, in 1966, working with a young French film-maker, Marin Karmitz. Then only 24, Karmitz hadworked as an assistant to Roberto Rossellini and Jean-Luc Godard, and had made a film with Marguerite Duras before meeting, and being befriended by, Beckett.

Comedie was shown at the 1966 Venice Film Festival. Unseen since, it resurfaced this year, in Paris, in an exhibition called Voilà. Now it is at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London. According to Karmitz, in London this week, Beckett was wholly engaged in this magnificent, disturbing film production. This is not a stage play revisited - although Comedie is filmed with the cast of the original 1964 Paris stage production - but made as though film were its natural medium.

The voices are almost an abstraction; they speak, but at first we can unravel very little from the compressed babble. The odd, singular word erupts: a shriek, a stifled laugh, a scripted hiccup. Karmitz and Beckett worked on the sound first, eliminating the gaps between words electronically, condensing the delivery to a near indecipherable, riven music. The actors mime the playback, the pressurised condensation of their bile, as they seethe in their urns, along with their stew of memories, jealousy, bitchery and bitterness.

Comedie becomes much more than the farcical depiction of a triangular relationship. It is a dynamic of spaces and distances, unbridgeable gulfs of time, space and intimacy. Sometimes the camera brings us too close. The man's face is a leonine sun, then the disappearing, decaying dot on a TV screen. Heads loom, out of scale, against their fellows, who appear like diminutive, mummified pupae. As Comedie progresses, there is a greying of the light, as though the heads were fuzzed with mould, like rotting peaches. The soundtrack becomes scratchy. Comedie is an endless cycle of rejections and recriminations. And like any bitter relationship, it goes over its ground again and again. Towards the end of the work, Beckett offers a direction to repeat the entire text, to do it again - and, the implication is, again and again.

Comedie is filled with excruciating things. It is also bizarre andfunny. Pared back to the irreducible, the symmetry of the relationship is reflected in the space of the film, the clustering of the line of heads, the grey bulk of their urns in the field of blackness. Under the shifting, inquisitorial spotlight, the grim melody of speech reduced to squirts and barks and babble is almost baby talk, the clay urns like swaddling clothes. The trio are like three writhing maggots. It is a primal scene.

Of course, the film has dated, but only in inessentials. There are moments when you see those disembodied heads, the kohl-rimmed eyes, the raggedy Weetabix mop-top wigs and hairdos, in stark chiaroscuro, and you think of the cover of With the Beatles, from 1963. The film's technique may have been superseded, yet, shown in a gallery, Comedie could be a film installation by any number of contemporary artists. Except it is better, more radical, more extreme than most.

Beckett's friendship with artists and interest in art is well-known. Many artists now would claim him for their own. A recent exhibition in Vienna concentrated on the relationship between Beckett's work and American artist Bruce Nauman, and in London there is currently a two-part show of younger European artists, influenced by, and paying their dues to, Beckett. Karmitz believes Beckett would be happy to see his works in this context, and that this is the right way to show Comedie. In the dark space of the gallery, film, set, stage and installation coincide. Our relationship to the screen is physical. We are not so much watching something, as inside it, in some transitional darkness of our own. The DVD projection can't quite emulate the precise yet infinitely nuanced gradations of texture and tonality of 35mm film, but Comedie still makes your hair stand on end.

Comedie is a rejoinder to the current project to film all Beckett's plays. Coming across a publicity still from Minghella's forthcoming film version of Play, I am horrified. It shows a field of urns in a dismal swamp, a gnarled, blasted oak in the background, a lowering, Chernobyl sky. Any minute, expect a dragon. This is adolescent, and worse, cliched and illustrational. Damien Hirst might be filming Beckett's painfully terse Breath (approximately: a stage littered with rubbish, a cry, another cry, curtain), and I can see a certain inevitability about this, but the current Beckett project fills me with dread. Not because Beckett is untouchable, but that he was so good, so rigorous, so exact in what he wanted and what he didn't want (these are not the same at all, yet taken together, they amount to his intention). Karmitz receives but one passing footnote in all the Beckett biographies. Comedie, itself passed over, largely unseen and unremarked by Beckett's commentators, has escaped its ownurn at just the right moment.

Comedie, Anthony Reynolds Gallery (020-7491 0621), London W1, until December 23, and from January 3-13

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