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Hello Culture

Home | What is Hello Culture? | The grid | The interviews | Find out more | Credits

Matthew Collings: I saw you in End Game and Krapp’s Last Tape on alternate nights in the tour you were doing in the early 1980s. I knew .a bit about Beckett. I knew that he was this master of the English language and was incredibly clever and sort of sly with language and rather deep. But I also knew that the popular idea of him was something slightly different — of this sort of nihilistic, God-cursing, obscure, rather unpleasant character who did these plays that were rather unsympathetic to the audience.

Then I knew a bit about you. That you were an actor who had been an armed robbed and had been in San Quentin for 12 years. You’d shot somebody, kidnapped them, you'd been given the death sentence, which had been changed to life without parole — and Beckett had somehow saved you.

So these were all the swirling thoughts I had when I came to see you. It occurs to me now, seeing you here in this lovely setting with the dappled sunlight everywhere, the green tea on the table … why was Beckett so attracted to you? What did he want from you and what did he see in you that made him like you and continue to help you and to produce your plays and to ask you to help him?

Rick Cluchey: Well, I suppose there’s no easy answer to that question. But the fact that I had pretty much dedicated my existence to his work while in prison at San Quentin, how I came to theatre and to follow him to Europe while I’m still on parole, then meeting him in Paris, having given one of his plays in his honour, he was compelled to at least to say hello, to have a cup of tea with me.

MC: But he perhaps wouldn’t extend that courtesy to others who had dedicated their lives to him, who hadn’t had that other experience, because he was rather fed up with 'Beckett-ophiles' and people who loved him and thought they knew what he was about.

RC: Yes.

MC: There was something about the hardness of your life, as well as your dedication to him, that touched him.

RC: It’s possible. You know, he lived above La Santé prison in Paris and he’s always had a tremendous fascination with prisons, and a lot of his plays are about people in prisons, metaphoric prisons — yes, people in cages, people in darkness, as it were. As Martin Eslin pointed out in his book The Theatre of the Absurd, where plays by Samuel Beckett (and specifically the ground-breaking Waiting for Godot) had mystified the critics, they were easily understood by prisoners. And I think that there was something in Beckett that wanted to know why. That may have been part of the attraction as well.

MC: Yeah, that would have been a bit of chemistry that would have been exciting or moving to him. One could imagine that he was a bit fed up with all those cries of 'absurdity' and 'obscurity' and 'non-understandability', and if he saw that there was a key somewhere to understand in you, then that might have been touching to him.

RC: I think that that maybe we were reaching out to each other for this common ground. Here was the great Nobel Prize-winning playwright, the brilliant post-modernist, coming together with the armed robber.

MC: Well, it’s got a sexy side to it. It definitely guarantees half an hour of attention. But actually there’s something deeper there. Not so much the violence and so on, but the incarceration, the being trapped in something. But people think that he’s this sort of person who’s cursing God — that’s pretty much the message they get. Everyone’s grey, there are these wasted and bitter oldsters living in dustbins who are saying, 'Fuck you, God. Why did you do this to us? We hate you and we hate everybody else and especially anybody else in a dustbin.' You know, all the dreadful sort of bitterness in his plays. But you think that this is not only a reduction but it’s a reduction down to something that isn’t really there. That he’s not a hating kind of guy.

RC: Not at all. In my view, he was a secular saint, if anything, along with the brilliance of his writing, the clarity of it, and the fact that we’ve all had to come back to Beckett. He was writing about our lives, and his plays for me are parallels to our own lives, that we are, to some extent, dwindling men under an indifferent heaven, reaching for the abode of stones. However, this journey of our humanity, this explanation of our own human condition, makes him the master.

MC: He’s certainly a master of a view on ageing, and that view can be seen to be a horror of ageing — definitely in Krapp’s Last Tape, but in all of them, the real condition is waste that is full of bitterness and hatred. But do you think his take on ageing is something different than mere horror?

RC: Indeed. In order to explain it, perhaps we have to look at the dark side, but there is a light side and there’s a middle ground which is grey. And I think one of the beautiful things about Beckett, the poetic form of his work, especially while he’s directing it — one finds the splashes of paint, splashes of colour, that illuminate.

MC: Yeah, there’ll be shafts of light, lovely imagery, tears, feelings, and then there’ll be a bit of cursing, but nevertheless those feelings are there and those are things that life is about.

RC: Evocative of our own lives, yes, and the musicality of it. I mean, there is a tremendous poetry, the spoken word, the rhythmic sense of it. That beautiful, so-called lyric, liquid passage in Krapp’s Last Tape of the girl in the punt — ‘We drifted in among the flags and stuck, the way they went down sighing.’ This is gorgeous, this is wonderful. So you can’t say that he’s so macabre. That poetic soul is coming at us all the time in all the plays.

MC: Yes, you can’t say that he’s Doctor Grim and that he’s Mr Grey and Mr Unpleasantness and Mr Hate. Those shades are there, but that’s because those things are in life, but those aren’t the only things that are there. But nevertheless his settings tend to be on the grim side.

RC: They get our attention, yes.

MC: But why do you think there’s that perpetual returning to grimness as a setting?

RC: I don’t really know, but one could take the view that he wants to unveil something. He wants to get behind the mask. He wants the curtain to open on this vista of our human suffering and the courage it takes for a man, if man can see the point of his suffering. I mean, this is the existential premise of it all.

MC: So it makes sense that the dimension that you look at first is the extreme hardship and suffering of life, and then you take away the veils and see what is there. So, first of all, you’ve got to accept what is the bottom line of existence, the horror of it.

RC: We’re all part of the food chain in the end, you see, and one can paint it as bleak as he has and as beautifully as he has, or one can look behind the mask or go beyond the curtain and see that reality in other ways. The poetic form, the beautiful construction of the work, the stripping away of the façade to reveal the inner self.

MC: A moment ago, you used the word 'post-modernism' and everyone knows that’s what we’re in. No one quite knows what it is, but they know that it’s got to do with no one believing anything, anything goes, you can occupy any position for ten minutes and you can then occupy another one. It’s very different to the 1950s.

RC: Difficult to find the realities any more.

MC: There are lots of hyper-realities or pseudo-realities going round. It’s a kind of Walt Disney, childish world. Yet you say that Beckett opens the door on to that. How does that work out — from an existential kind of grim guy to weirdo reality, post-modern guy?

RC: Well, as we go on, as we get deeper into what Beckett is saying, I believe one always discovers new dimensions.

MC: His work got more and more pared down. His popular image was less that of an existentialist or an absurdist than of a minimalist.

RC: Well, the work is 'too pale blue', if you will. The lessness itself, the reading of lessness. In Beckett, incidentally, that's an expression which recurs over and over: 'too pale blue.'

MC: OK, so he got paler and paler. But minimalism implies a sort of extremeness, but again that’s not really our current condition. What we’re involved in, what culture seems to be about now, is presenting more and more illusions, not taking away illusions — in fact, saying that illusion is all we have. Perhaps behind that there’s a profound disillusionment. No one wants to hear about that. They want to hear: 'Have a nice day and here’s another 12 illusions for you.'

RC: Other clichés, yeah.

MC: Yeah, absolutely. Live in a cliché, recognise it as a cliché, but don’t worry because, when it runs out, there’s another one for you. But Beckett wasn’t really about that. He seemed to be opposed to all vanities, all illusions, all distractions. He wanted to look at what is the hard core, what it is that we have on this earth.

RC: And there is beauty in that — to be able not to occupy the space of despair, but to examine the journey in a poetic form with the skilful brushstrokes of a writer like Beckett. And then, when he directs his plays, there’s that unveiling. There is that cutting back into the stone to find the shape, the true shape. So he is a sculptor in human flesh, or a painter in human flesh, if you will. Examining that, he destroys our perceptions and that hurts.

However, we’re left with a truism, with truth of our human position. In the 1950s, reading the work and seeing the work in the prison and being a part of it offered to me a look at my own soul. And I think prisoners in general don’t find Beckett bleak but find him real.

MC: Well, a lot of what is thought to be nihilism is really realism. There’s a sort of realism about telling the truth as it really is, as opposed to falsities, and when you take away the falsities, people don’t like that and, as you say, it hurts.

RC: Yeah, the comfort zone is gone.

MC: And he certainly is the great master of that. But I suppose a prisoner’s life is extreme. Yours was extremely extreme in that you had no possibility of parole.

RC: Correct.

MC: You were going to be there for ever, so your routine was something really quite extreme. Clearly, when Beckett met you — after by some good luck you were able to escape the fate of life without parole in prison, to be released — he saw something of himself in you.

RC: Well, I was on parole from prison — ticket of leave, if you will — it could have been revoked at any point. He knew I had written a play, The Cage, and since a lot of his work for the theatre is about people in cages, people at extreme ends, I suppose there was common ground between us. I had found a great resonance in his work. It was about him writing about my life as far as I was concerned, and I think he enjoyed that.

MC: There’s a moment that you do beautifully in Krapp’s Last Tape, when you say, 'Wasn’t once enough for you?'

RC: He was very emphatic about that moment. He would act it out for me, as director, always trying to catch the right nuance, always looking for it.

MC: Was that something that touched you as well? When you were in prison, you had to live on memories a lot. I mean, as one gets older, one lives in the past more, but you were in prison from the age of 21 to 33, for 12 years, with no way of getting out. You must have thought about the past a lot and that must have meant pain to some extent. Did you have that feeling of thinking the past was bad and reliving it is bad as well?

RC: Yes, my past was painful, and to be revisiting it in that setting, at San Quentin, was another kind of hell, so I turned to the church. I turned back to my cradle, Catholicism, and in looking at Beckett’s plays found spirituality in them.

MC: Which is an odd paradox. One thinks the last person on earth …

RC: … The one who would curse God. Well, in the view of people in the theatre, those curses come from his characters, not from him. He is providing that mirror for our nature, as Shakespeare provided it so many times. What’s a greater existential premiss — ‘To be or not to be?’

MC: So you’re saying that within him was a spirituality? Even one with a sort of God tone to it?

RC: The last time I saw him in Paris, while he was in the nursing home, having a Jameson with him and saying goodbye to him, although we exchanged correspondence after that — it was 'God bless, Sam' and his reply was 'God bless, Rick.' So come and go, that was our common exchange over 10 years. So one can’t say that, when one paints the human condition, it has to be somewhat grey.

MC: But he himself was not allergic to God?

RC: Not at all. I think he had deep spirituality.

MC: When it was on his lips, it was when he felt tender to people.

RC: I mean, certainly the rogue, certainly the peasant slave — go back to Shakespeare — but the secular saint emerges.

MC: Could you describe to me your last picture of him?

RC: A man suffering. Suffering for all humanity. Suffering the pain as he did all of his life. Common things like giving the last sou or the last franc or the last pound note to a beggar on the street and being stabbed in the back for it. A man who knew suffering in ways that other men probably have not known it. The poetic soul suffering — and still able to articulate the pain for us in these beautiful plays.

MC: He had those last days alone because Susanne died before him, didn’t she?

RC: She passed away before him, yes.

MC: And he was there alone. Ironically, a lot of his plays have this perspective on ageing with an element of grimness and a horror that might be unveiled. Do you think he himself — in his last days, as he got more and more old and wasted — took pleasure in his memories, in his success and the things that he’d done well and the effect that he had had on culture and life and art and people’s consciousness, or do you think he went out grimly?

RC: From speaking with various Beckettians, all of whom were nearby at the end — no. He went peacefully and he went with great clarity, too. Even at the end, there was no dissipation of his mind. Deterioration of the body, yes, but never of the mind or the soul.

MC: That’s often what seems to be the horror of those plays. Like in End Game, when they’re in the dustbins …

RC: But we had to come back to that moment again. At one point in New York, they were advertising the mum and dad dustbins as an insurance policy. They were selling insurance on that image.

MC: So there’s something so profound and touching on human consciousness that even advertising can get it.

RC: I would say, though, that Madison Avenue had to go back to cubism, didn’t they?

MC: So there are various things that Beckett does. There’s a wonderful, Shakespeare-rivalling richness of the language, a love of the language and a way that he’s an artist of language, so we can say, 'Boy, this guy’s good, you know, he’s worth seeing.' Nevertheless, the question remains: why is it that he always returns to the utterly grim setting that will be the focus of all those plays? The grimmest that life can be, why does he come back to that?

RC: Well, I would say it echoes his history. That he knew after his work with the Irish Red Cross in St Lo, which was the town that was devastated by our bombers and had to be rebuilt. The Irish Red Cross had set up a hospital there and Beckett was there, and he’d also been part of the resistance in France. That, in my view, is where the darkness starts to come in, in the oeuvre.

MC: So he had seen the worst that human life could be?

RC: The worst of it.

MC: Why must he come back to that in the settings? However much there are shafts of light and there is the richness of life’s experience, why must the settings always be the grimmest?

RC: Well, Godot is a country road, evocative of what he was doing, running before the Nazi killing machine with his wife Susanne, living in the unoccupied zone and wanted by the Gestapo. His whole resistance cell wiped out, executed by the Gestapo. Sleeping in abandoned prisons while running. So there, I believe, is the setting for human experience which we find in the writing.

MC: So it’s not a sort of sentimental, crying tramp, the thing the bourgeois always thinks is rather nice to think about. You’re talking about a real experience — of a wasted landscape and a hopeless life and horror all around.

RC: Well, the courage it takes to live in desolation, with desolation and with suffering and to find that human spirit which lives on through the pain. Once Beckett paints this picture, he explains our pain, he explains our suffering. He leads us to that point where we know human courage is necessary to sustain our own existence.

MC: It's a very concentrated experience to be in a play, and it’s very artificial compared to life, although it must draw on life experience. But is it physically exhausting?

RC: Exhausting, totally exhausting.

MC: Is it any more so in Beckett’s case or just the same as anything else? Is there something particular about the experience of being in a Beckett play?

RC: I once appeared with David Warrilow in Chicago and the late Alan Snyder directed the piece, Highway Impromptu. We sat at the table and David was reading the text, and I would stop him by knocking on the table, which signified that you would like to have that passage read again. (And this was evocative of Beckett reading to Joyce while Joyce was nearly blind, so that, I think, is the genesis of the piece.) Anyway, David would say to me afterwards, after keeping this perfect sculpture alive through the reading, 'Aren’t you exhausted, Rick? I’m totally exhausted.' And I would say, 'No, I feel real power now, because it enriched me so listening to your beautiful voice.' But in Krapp’s Last Tape, yes, because you had to 'keep the icon', if you will, for 45 minutes.

MC: Yeah, a comic image of the old guy listening in pain.

RC: You know, your shoulders. The tension required just to listen to that tape and then to reconstruct his own feelings 30 years later.

MC: Can you recall your routine of prison life? What do you remember of it? What’s your picture of it now?

RC: Well, I have been back to San Quentin — there was a film made about our experience. I’ve been to many other prisons since, and each time -for example, last September, watching a Beckett play performed by the inmates — it is grim. That vision never quite leaves you, even though you could be on the Riviera or you could be in Monte Carlo, you could be in the South of France or you can be in Puerto Rico or here in California. I suppose it’s so deeply etched in the consciousness, and in the subconscious, that you can be having the greatest time and suddenly there’s that depression. There’s that echo of something past. I don’t know how to explain it, but I think it’s part of one. That one cannot deny that human experience, and if one does, one is being false to oneself.

MC: So it’s always with you?

RC: Yes, I think so. Some place in the consciousness or the subconscious, and the pain is there as well.

MC: What’s most missing in prison experience that makes everyone find life a drag? Freedom is missing, but can you describe it? What’s missing in that experience, knowing you’re never going to get out, there’s not even the possibility of parole?

RC: Well, that was dark, that was oppressive, and I turned, as I said, to the church. I turned to find my own spirituality — and learned that one can suffer for a good. One can find a good in the bad, but it doesn’t come free. You have to pay that price, and somehow one emerges a bit stronger for it.

MC: So in religion you found a rationale for the hell that you were in?

RC: Well, I saw something that explained my pain. If we take a Christian journey — it doesn’t have to be a Catholic one or a Jewish one or a Buddhist one, any form of human enlightenment — it comes with a price. We can be, you know, paraplegics, we can be blind, we can be deaf, we can have all manner of human affliction and find a spirituality that helps us cope.

MC: So it’s quite interesting in this context of looking at who are the nihilists of culture over the last few hundred years. We can never get away from a concern with spirituality and with God and with explorations of what is happening in our lives.

RC: Thank God, it’s there.