Texts for Nothing III, VIII & XII
by Samuel Beckett
Performed by Conor Lovett
Directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett
Premiered at The Masonic Lodge, Cork 2005 European Capital of Culture.
Beckett wrote these thirteen texts in French between December 1950 and December 1951. He said that the texts were "the grisly afterbirth of L'Innommable" but then he was always given to disparaging his own work. They appeared piecemeal in English starting in 1959 and did not appear collected together until 1967. It is best to regard these texts as meditations or essays - in the French sense of that term - attempts to come to some conclusion or determination. They are not in any real sense narratives but rather self-interrogations, though Beckett is very sparing in his use of the question mark. Some of the texts feature landscapes or settings that are recognisably Irish - the Harcourt Street to Bray train line, the Featherbed mountains. Occasional glimpses of Irish characters are given, for example in Text III: "The sport of kings is our passion, the dogs too, we have no political opinions, simply limply republican. But we have a soft spot for the Windsors, the Hanoverians, I forget, the Hohenzollerns is it." Equally there are fragmentary recollections of places and people in London and Paris. In Text VI there is a particularly poignant memory of a shaving-mirror that his father used and that was later used in another house by his mother when she fixed her hair with "twitching hands."
The thirteen Texts are distinguished by great rhythmical variety and stylistic variation, from the colloquial and lyrical to the labyrinthine and dense. Nevertheless each Text relentlessly questions the reliability of language and the nature of self.
