Lessness
by Samuel Beckett
Performed by Olwen Fouere
Directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett
Premiered at Kilkenny Arts Festival 2002.
Beckett wrote this short prose work in French, under the title Sans in 1969. His English translation appeared the following year in the New Statesman. In this strange, experimental text, Beckett employs an aleatory method to arrange his text, "first in one disorder, then in another," as he said himself. It is composed of six "families" of ten sentences each, giving sixty sentences in all. Beckett then constructed a "Montage" of twelve paragraphs, each one having no fewer than three and no more than seven of the sentences. He then randomly selected the sixty sentences to fit this grid and, having done so, repeated the process a second time. The resulting text, unsurprisingly, has only residual narrative drive but has extraordinary evocative power, denying and affirming past and future, registering the capacity of the imagination to imagine its own extinction.
