So I arrived at the Malthouse/ACCA precinct lateish afternoon, planning to see the Kosuth first; the main event was "(Waiting for -) Texts for Nothing" itself, an installation of neon white Beckettian (including Godot) words running high on the walls on the inside of a large dark room, and immersive, the kind of installation that you think about while experiencing, but whose effect is much more in the way that it sinks in, subtly, at the time and afterwards as it stays with you.
After that, picked up tickets for The End (and also Moth and A Golem Story) and then went outside, planning to maybe start a letter I've been meaning to write and also do some reading for uni - only to come across Kim at one of the outdoor tables, waiting for a photo shoot of some kind (I'm hazy on the details). So we shot the breeze for a while, and after a bit, the photographer and other subject came by, they wandered off, I read for a bit, and then Sunny arrived, and then Trang and a friend of Sunny's, Caroline, then Kai and Neil (we'd had dinner in the meantime).
In due course, the call came and we filed into the Beckett Theatre (incidentally, and curiously/coincidentally, not named after Samuel B). Completely bare stage - plain black backdrop. Performance started unassumingly and unannounced - Robert Menzies entering through an unobtrusive door in the black backdrop, moving to the centre of the stage, and then spending an age peering at his surrounds, before beginning to speak, the beginning of a remarkable performance, a 70 minute-ish monologue, a ruined tramp, recounting the some of the last days of his degraded existence in language everyday, profane and occasionally lyrical and finally ending on a note of something else...
Afterwards, I said that I wanted to read it, and Sunny told me that it wasn't in fact a play at all, but rather a novella - and today I remembered that I actually own a book purporting to compile the complete short prose of Beckett (a gift from a while back), and turns out that that indeed includes "The End". So I did read it, this afternoon, and it's given me a renewed appreciation for the craft of the stage production, as well as for Beckett himself...the word 'genius' gets bandied about, but surely he must qualify.
