5 March 2013. Samuel Beckett’s Watt with Barry McGovern at the Barbican.

An amazing presentation Barry McGovern who is on stage for 50 minutes presenting the history of Watt who arrives one day on the train, wearing a shoe on one foot and a boot he had bought off an amputee on the other. He makes his way to Knott’s house, liking neither the moon nor the sun on his journeying. When he arrives, at first he gets no answer from the front or back door; but eventually finds the back door ajar. He works initially on the ground floor for Knott who has the same food each day, instructing that what he doesn’t eat is fed to the dog. But there is no dog in the house; instead Watt has to make do with feeding a stray ugly looking dog. Later Watt moves to work on the first floor. While at the house, it is visited by two piano tuners , one blind, who comment on the degradation to the piano caused by vermin; he also encounters a character whose speech manner causes him to say turd and fart instead of third and fourth. When he arrived, Arsene left the house; when another arrives, Watt leaves, goes to the railway station and asks for a ticket to the end of the line. “Which end?”, asks the Station Master. The Barbican version is apparently a paring down of what Beckett himself said was ‘unsatisfactory’. I’d love to get a recording of this presentation, as like a dream, it was fantastic at the time but hard to remember the detail – and the detailed language is almost everything. “And if I could begin it all over again a hundred times knowing each time a little more than the time before, the result would always be the same”