Finding the darkness and light in Beckett's work

Ahead of Sunday’s opening of MARK LAWLOR’S new exhibition, ‘After Endgame’, inspired by Samuel Beckett’s play, the Celt’s DAMIAN MCCARNEY invited the Cavan artist up for tea and a natter about abandoning writing for visual art, what he finds so enthralling about Beckett, and why dead rats aren’t a bleak subject.

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Mark Lawlor is a Beckett nut. “I’m a hopeless case,” he accepts, responding to the look of astonishment on this interviewer’s face.
He’s just admitted to learning French to read Beckett’s plays in their original form.
If further proof of his Beckett-worshipping credentials were required, when asked in passing what he makes of Beckett’s poetry, Mark immediately closes in to unleash a giddy recitation of a poem - ‘Roundelay’.
Words dance and tumble into the narrow gap between us, but to the startled ear, beyond their seductively hypnotic rhythms, their meaning’s lost.
Mark can trace his love affair with Beckett back to The Hacklers’ production under Dermot Healy’s direction of Waiting for Godot, which won the 1980 Drama All-Ireland.

The ignition
“That was just amazing. I was in the front seat of the audience and just went back and back [each night]. I was amazed that people were able to talk like that. This was like somebody hit you on the head,” he said affecting a stunned look. “There were real things being talked about in a way I’d never heard before.”
He’s heard it enough times since. With the same company that ignited his Beckett devotion - The Hacklers - he directed a production of Endgame, which won numerous awards in the one-act amateur dramatic festival in 1987.
Then, while attending Trinity’s drama and theatre studies in the early 1990s, his course involved a Beckett studies in the Samuel Beckett Theatre. On completing his courses, he concentrated on writing, and had some short pieces of fiction published in The Irish Press and Tribune.
Undertaking an MPhil in creative writing proved a decisive moment for Mark: “It really focused me, and I knew that my thing wasn’t writing anymore, it was pushing me more towards the visual.”
Mark says his writing was “very visual anyway”, for instance he was interested in how the actual words looked on the page. He has combined his passion for Beckett’s writing and visual art in this collection of monoprints called ‘After Endgame’.
While acknowledging that he certainly fell in love with Beckett’s work, the Celt ponders whether he was also disturbed by it?
“Absolutely,” he cheerfully confirms. “It disturbed me no end - I think that’s what he set out to do anyway.”
The question was prompted by some of the bleak images (attached at the end of the article).
“I don’t think they are,” he says, genuinely surprised that a dead rat or a magnified flea complete with hairs and droopy mouthparts forlornly staring back could be regarded as bleak. “I think they’re fierce funny. I’m amazed that you find them bleak.”
Well there is a dead rat lying on the ground the Celt blurts, amazed that he’s amazed.
“There’s a dead rat in the play,” he replies, incredulous. (He later points out it’s not even dead.)

The theory
Mark has a theory. He hasn’t claimed victory in the good-natured rat dispute, he’s merely taking the Celt by the hand to his way of thinking, and his theory’s the first step. Beckett was fascinated by the artist Cézanne, that much is known for sure. Mark suspects that the opening of Beckett’s play, ‘Molloy’, which features two blokes meeting each other by chance along a road in France, are meant to represent Cézanne and himself.
“What he [Cézanne] was doing in the visual arts was something very akin to what Beckett was doing in his writing. I feel that there are two people in that - Beckett and Cézanne and they are having a little joke together... I suppose I’m being a bit crazy.”
So, Cézanne’s style, and predilection to painting apples is the next step.
“It wasn’t a case of getting an apple and painting it. He wanted to paint it in a way to make it strange. He looked at it in another way, and this is what I’m trying to do with the rat.
'I’m trying to look at it in the way that Beckett was doing. He was using the detritus, the rubbish out of life - all around, simple things, and trying to look at them in a new way.
'And I’m trying to look at the rat in a new way.”
And what way did you look at the rat?
“He’s in the painting there,” says Mark cracking up with laughter.

The process
For Mark, the process of making the monoprints are significant in its interpretation.
“Lithographic ink is put on copper, and you clean off what you don’t want, to leave an image there. What is important is that the image that you create will be the opposite of the image that is produced. That can give you another way of trying to get at - the rat.”
This reporter offers his ‘10 cents’; that the sparseness of Beckett’s writing is echoed in Mark’s use of only one colour; and that what Beckett leaves unsaid is as significant as what he writes, and that’s reflected in the technique of removing ink from the copper.
“That’s remarkably well put, sure why am I here at all?”
We’re on the same hymn sheet now.
“Okay, I’m going to say this now,” he says, bracing himself for a final explanation of why his prints aren’t bleak.
“There is darkness and there is light in all of these pictures.
So Beckett is talking about the rage - the absolute rage of the light dying and the loss there was in that and the guilt and regret.
“All the people in the play are having doubts about all the lost chances there were of saving someone, or touching someone.
“I’m doing the same thing, clearing the darkness out of them and letting some light in - the one with the lamp - now you didn’t find that bleak did you?”
“Noooo,” lies the Celt in a gesture of reconciliation, having not actually seen that print. So, what’s the attraction of Beckett?
“Loss. I don’t know. Reality. Doing away with shit, or looking into shit that’s all around us and seeing what it is. And of course, absolutely - the humour. The f*cking man’s hilarious. Like you just can’t stop laughing. Out loud your laughing, and people [are] looking at you like you’re mad.”

The Loss
The loss Mark detects in Beckett’s Endgame, is amplified in his work by his own experiences.
“Beckett wrote Endgame, after visiting with his brother who had Parkinson’s disease and there’s ‘Parkinsonisms’ in the play.
“My father now has Parkinson’s and I’m dealing with that. It’s a means to get through some things that are difficult.
“He is in hospital at the moment in Cavan and I was out there a couple of nights, and the people who were in the ward have a camaraderie; you only see it in Cavan at times like this when it’s most needed - it’s funny, it’s humorous, it’s the same lines that are said in Beckett. It’s incredible.”
Any examples?
“One man, who was opposite my father, said something like ‘grains of sand all around you’ or something, and that’s like Diogenes. It’s like the thing in Endgame, where Clov says the little grain of sand and you wait for that to build up to a life. So, I did a monoprint on that and I used sesame seeds in a little pile and printed them out. It probably will be put in front of a window so you can see the little pile of seeds made to represent a life.”
The conversation turns to whether Beckett’s Endgame is better in its original French - Fin de Partie.
“It’s different. It really is different. You can see Beckett at work there in producing the English play and in the French. It’s not just a straight-forward translation, it’s another thing.”
Mark suspects that Beckett wrote in French to adjust his focus.
“To write in another language, for me anyway, it means you’re thinking, you really have to think about what you are putting down instead of using old words. He said once that habit is the ballast that chains the dog to its vomit.
“He wanted to get out of the habit of writing in English, [and accept] the strangeness that comes with writing in another language because he wanted to get to something deeper than just nice writing.”
Was your move from writing to art your attempt to unchain the dog from its vomit?
“It probably is, I’m running away.”

Mark Lawlor’s exhibition ‘After Endgame’ runs in the Moth offices on Main Street Cavan until September 14.