Enough
by Samuel Beckett
Performed by Ally Ni Chiarain
Directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett
Premiered at The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin Fringe Festival 2004.
This prose piece was first published as Assez in French in 1966 and in English the following year. It is a retrospective narrative by a narrator of deliberately indeterminate gender who tells of his/her companionship with an older man which began when the narrator was about six years old. For years they travelled on foot together, hand in gloved hand because the old man could not bear the touch of flesh. The old man was so bent over that his head swept the flowers as the two ascended a steep incline. He had to resort to a pocket mirror if he wanted to inspect the stars, though the narrator records that the old man thought the "sky seemed much the same." Four times the narrator alludes to parting from the old man at "the scene of my disgrace." This conclusive event took place at a crest but the account says the pair were never in the mountains. No reason is given for the "disgrace" nor is an inkling given of the narrator's subsequent life. This is one of Beckett's most enigmatic and ambiguous prose texts, contriving to be abstract and crudely literal at the same time.
