Images of Beckett - Index of

with her husband, Willie. The three figures in their
urns in Play are totally separated from one another.
Mouth in Not I relates the tale of a lonely, alienated
life, while May in Footfalls, who ‘has not been out
since girlhood’, paces up and down in the room of
a deserted house. 85 Alienation of all kinds became
a constant in Beckett’s theatre: alienation from the
world; alienation from the other; alienation from
the self.
Whenever he had the opportunity, Beckett sought
out the work of modern painters, and, in the late
thirties in particular, he became friendly with many
painters, not only the Dutch van Velde brothers,
Geer and Bram, about whom he wrote after the
war, but also the 42-year-old Polish artist, Jankel
Adler, one of whose paintings he bought in 1939, 86
the painter-sculptor, Otto Freundlich (who died
in Lublin concentration camp in 1943), 87 the
New-Zealander, John Buckland Wright, and the
master engraver, Stanley William Hayter, who
taught so many famous artists about engraving
at his ‘Atelier 17’ studio in Paris.
Beckett’s trip to Germany in 1936–7 is much
better documented now through the discovery
after his death of his personal diaries. That visit
gave him the chance to see work that was regarded
as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazi regime, as well as to
meet local Hamburg painters Eduard Bargheer,
Karl Kluth, Willem Grimm and (Beckett’s personal
Penelope Wilton, Ronald Pickup and Anna Massey in Play,
1976
IMAGES OF BECKETT 87