McPherson on Beckett

'I felt that Endgame was very filmic,' says Conor McPherson, 'because it's set in a room, one location, and I discussed with Edward Beckett [the executor of Beckett's estate] that I would need to somehow situate this room. They seem to be beside the sea in this room, with two windows. This could be an attic. And he said: yeah, it could be. That gave us the freedom to set it in an attic. Once we had that, I could see it as a film.

'In the theatre, actors have to project their voices so they have to pause after each line, and it's artificial and very difficult to make it look real, but this on film meant they could talk at the ordinary volume of conversation, so I thought this would give it a whole new dynamic. The dynamic of a film is much faster than people ever see it on stage.

'Whenever there was a stage direction for a pause, I didn't tend to be too reverent about that. I didn't want to have very long pauses – I thought that a pause can be a tiny beat, a tiny breath. So we kept it moving, we kept it lively. I also felt that the play was very funny, and I wanted to be able to bring out the comedy. There's lot of slapstick in it, like a vaudeville piece. They are feeding each other lines, like a double act. And on film you can cut very quickly between two characters and I felt we could bring out the comedy. We had to be lively and inventive with the camera to create humour and pathos and keep surprising the audience.

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'Hopefully, the film will demystify Beckett's reputation for being hard going. I just wanted to make sure it was funny, because, if it was funny, it could be understood. It's a comedy, a bittersweet comedy.

'Beckett's characters are like sitting on the edge of a cliff at a table, and everything's laid out, and the cliff is crumbling and they are going to fall into the sea, but they're actually concerned with using the right fork. It's these silly details that we're all concerned with, when in fact we don't know if there is a God and what will happen when we die. We're probably all afraid of abandonment and of being alone. I think the humour that he found was that this is really the core of human existence, this kind of great uncertainty, but yet we all walk around looking like we've got great wisdom. He found that intrinsically funny. I think there's a great comedy to his work.

'We had two 90-year-old actors in bins. They loved his work so much they had no problem doing what I wanted. They never complained, despite the discomfort. It was very hot and demanding.

'Beckett's plays, and Endgame in particular, are almost like a template of the perfect play. It has a nice beginning, it introduces the characters in an very good way, it gives you just enough information all the time to keep you going, and just when think that something is just beginning to maybe dip or drag a little bit, he introduces a mad new element which fires it all up again.

'I think writers should examine his work in terms of form and structure, about how to keep something lively to keep something interesting how to keep it buoyant.

'Beckett had such a strong vision of his own work, and he found working so hard – he had to pull it out of himself every day. He really found writing an awful task. He hated it, it was really an unpleasant, lonely, alienating experience for him. But it was his vocation, and because of that he put his whole being into it. He felt: this really has to be worth something. He kept plugging away at it. So his plays are probably more finished and polished than most modern plays.

'Endgame is about a character who doesn't want any responsibility and so he has denied that the world exists. He's sitting there and they're talking about how bleak everything is. The only pleasant thing that can happen to anybody is that their life would end. And there's this very funny bit where he asks Clov for this little toy dog that he keeps playing with, and Clov throws this dog at him and it bounces off Hamm's head. This gives Hamm great hope that one day Clov might do him great violence and that his life will stop. It's a very comic moment. Beckett turns a very stupid moment with a toy dog into a very dreadful moment which is all about death and murder.'

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