Being Beckett

The actor talks about his new film, Dance First, in which he embodies the dark genius of the Irish dramatist

- Gabriel Byrne

IN 1969, SAMUEL BECKETT AND HIS WIFE learned that he had won the Nobel prize in literature in a telegram from his publisher. "Dear Sam and Suzanne," it read. "In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel prize. I advise you to go into hiding." Both were notoriously celebrity averse. Suzanne described it as a "catastrophe". Beckett declined to give a Nobel lecture, and refused to talk when a Swedish film crew tracked him down to a hotel room in Tunisia.

Into this temporal void, a new psychological biopic has poured a monumental reckoning, in which the 63-year-old playwright scrambles out of the Nobel ceremony to find himself in a rough-hewn underworld. In Dance First, a small masterpiece that premieres this month at the San Sebastián film festival, Beckett confronts the events and people who shaped him, from his domineering mother to his experience with the French resistance, his dalliance with James Joyce's daughter, Lucia, to his later inability to choose between Suzanne and the radio producer and translator Barbara Bray.

"You know this is going to be a journey through your shame," he solemnly informs himself. "Isn't everything?" he replies. It's interior monologue played as dialogue, presenting an unusual challenge for the actor Gabriel Byrne, who found himself in an old quarry outside Budapest for three days, speaking to a broom.