Images of Beckett - Index of

Peggy Ashcroft, telling her that Beckett was
driving her mad and asking her what she could
possibly do. Ashcroft’s reply was: ‘You’ve got to
ask him to leave, dear...he’s impossible.’ 47 The
situation became so distressing for both Beckett
and Whitelaw that he was asked – at a hastily
convened dinner party at the house of Stuart Burge,
the Royal Court’s artistic director, with Beckett’s
friends, Jocelyn Herbert and Donald McWhinnie –
to absent himself from rehearsals for a few days
until Whitelaw’s shattered self-confidence could
be gradually rebuilt. 48
More often, however, difficulties arose out
of conflicts as to what Beckett wanted and how the
actor or actress was going to arrive there. Even
when only acting as advisor to the director, Sir
Peter Hall, with Dame Peggy Ashcroft as Winnie in
the National Theatre production in 1974, he made
himself deeply unpopular with the actress, just as
he had done with Brenda Bruce, by (among other
things) wanting her to play Winnie in a flat,
monotonous, unemotional style. As Hall wrote in
his diaries, an actress like Dame Peggy needed to
feel everything strongly at first, in order to be able
to hide it (or express it more subtly) later.
But the slightest sign of feeling disturbs Sam, and he
speaks of his need for monotony, paleness, weakness.
This is where, unlike Harold [Pinter], he is not finally
a theatre worker, great director though he can be. He
confuses the work process with the result. I suppose it’s
Pat Kinevane in Act Without Words II, 1999
BECKETT AS DIRECTOR 111