Damned to Fame by James Knowlson

Author:James Knowlson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury_UK
Published: 2014-11-10T16:00:00+00:00

But his offer was accepted and, at long last, on 6 August, the play was licensed for public performance, Beckett commenting to Barney Rosset that he hoped God was pleased at being called a ‘swine’ instead of a ‘bastard’,29 adding to Ethna MacCarthy, ‘There’s a nicety of blasphemy for you. I think I’d be rather less insulted by “bastard” myself.’30

Even then the Royal Court’s troubles were not entirely over. For, incredibly, the ‘Lord Chamberpot’, as Beckett used to refer to him, also found things to object to in Krapp’s Last Tape. Donald McWhinnie recounted to me how, with George Devine, he went along to St James’s Palace and climbed up a poky staircase to the Lord Chamberlain’s office to be told that part of the passage when Krapp talks of the moments that he spent with the girl in the punt was considered unacceptable.31 When asked why, the officer explained with a sense of shock that the line ‘Let me in’ on the recording clearly indicated that the man was, in his quaint terminology, ‘rogering’ the girl and that this obvious obscenity could not be allowed to be described on stage. I once told Beckett that one of my postgraduate students insisted on interpreting this passage as a scene of sexual intercourse. ‘Tell her to read her texts more carefully,’ Beckett said with a chuckle. ‘She’ll see that Krapp would need to have a penis at an angle of a hundred and eighty degrees to make coitus possible in the position he is in!’32 Such niceties of reading (or even human anatomy) cut no ice with the Lord Chamberlain and McWhinnie’s explanation that Krapp was merely alluding to the girl’s eyes was thought unconvincing. Eventually, such ludicrous objections to Krapp were dropped. But it was not until three weeks from its opening that the play was finally granted a licence.

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