That the Biennale should claim him\u00a0on both islands is apt. Best remembered for his absurdist and teasingly obscure stage plays \u2013 Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp\u2019s Last Tape and Happy Days \u2013 Beckett is considered one of Ireland\u2019s finest exports, but a question mark has always hung over how Irish Beckett really was. After graduating from Trinity College Dublin in 1927, Beckett emigrated to Paris, never to live permanently in Ireland again. He didn\u2019t set foot in the country for the\u00a0last 21 years of his life, and is buried at Paris\u2019s Montparnasse Cemetery. Remaining in France during the second world war, he wrote\u00a0to his mother that he preferred France at war to Ireland at peace. He\u00a0subsequently wrote several of his\u00a0most-loved works, including Waiting for Godot and Endgame, in French before translating them into English \u2013 a fact that led the Irish literary critic Vivian Mercier to quip \u201cSamuel Beckett is an Irishman but not an Irish writer\u201d.<\/p>\n
His sense of alienation from his homeland no doubt sprang from his\u00a0upbringing as part of the ruling Protestant minority in an overwhelmingly Catholic country. Raised in the affluent Dublin suburb of\u00a0Foxrock, he and his brother were sent away to boarding school in Enniskillen, and were studying there\u00a0during the nation\u2019s partition, when Enniskillen became part of the\u00a0newly recognised Northern Ireland. The bitter fragmentation may\u00a0well have influenced \u2013 as he put\u00a0it\u00a0\u2013 his \u201cchronic inability to understand \u2026 a phrase like\u00a0\u2018the Irish people\u2019\u201d. It is no accident that the Biennale opens in Enniskillen.<\/p>\n
Samuel Beckett in 1989. Photograph: Ullstein Bild\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
But Beckett\u2019s rejection of Ireland was more likely driven by the country\u2019s theocracy, which he found stultifying. When clerical censorship demanded the removal of works by his\u00a0contemporaries Se\u00e1n O\u2019Casey and\u00a0James Joyce from the 1958 Dublin\u00a0international theatre festival, Beckett responded by banning the country from staging his plays for two\u00a0years.<\/p>\n
London, meanwhile, couldn\u2019t get enough of the arch pessimist\u2019s bleak portraits of existential angst, with the Royal Court, the National Theatre<\/a> and the West End\u2019s Arts Theatre all staging his plays in the 50s and 60s. There, Beckett was a modernist before he was an Irishman: an absurdist, a European formalist, a writer of the universal human condition rather than of any particular country.<\/p>\n Still, scholars have pointed out the\u00a0distinctly Irish traces in Beckett\u2019s characters and landscapes. His 1956\u00a0radio play All That Fall is unquestionably set in Ireland. And when the first Gaelic translation and subsequent staging of Waiting for Godot was mounted in 1971, it was\u00a0with the playwright\u2019s blessing. It\u00a0is also well documented that Beckett\u2019s preference for writing in French was not a dismissal of his mother tongue but a desire to \u201cwrite without style\u201d, thereby achieving rawness and simplicity.<\/p>\n
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