He was weird. I don’t know what impression of him entered my thoughts first, the one of a comedian or of a tragic drama figure – however, this issue should turn out to remain unsolved until the end of the play.

The man who had come onto the small stage was tall and slim. He was dressed in the unmistakable garb of an elderly person of the previous generation, wearing very large shoes, an almost pathetic long tie, a checked shirt and a big brown overcoat. Most unusual, irritating was the hat. Someone had cut off the brim, which completed the clownish aspect of his appearance. At least it would have, if he had been funny. But he wasn’t.

With a nervy, halting demeanour he started to speak, putting himself up under four little spotlights just a few steps from the member of the audience seated furthest. During his speech he frequently stopped to interrupt himself, as he began to trail off into some random thought or story within the story.

But what the story was all about, I still couldn’t tell after several minutes. Picking single words with their meaning was easy, but understanding them in their context and function for the characterisation was almost impossible to me. Although the actor - Conor Lovett was his name - had the appearance of youth and was always precise and careful in his delivery, he gave the impression of age, guiding his audience on a surreal journey through the haunted landscape of memory and imagination. His bright eyes, demonstrating an openness and clarity, stood in contrast to his abstract monologue, which rather sounded like an endless stream of consciousness than a logically arranged narration, continually spiralling off into sub-narratives in which the lines between prose and poetry were blurred.

Thus it is also very hard to describe the background story. I can vaguely say that Lovett´s tale dealt with an old man called Malone who lay dying in an unnamed room. It was never explicitly revealed of what he was dying or where, neither whether single elements of his story were inspired by his own experiences. In any case he ended up in the care of an institution populated by eccentric characters whom he represented himself by imitating their manner and tone.

When the play had finished and cautious applause arose I was definitely confused. For the whole 60 minutes I had awaited a change, the start of a "usual narration", the end of the "introduction"– instead Lovett left the stage and I slowly realised that I wouldn’t be given any further information to sort my thoughts. My only relieve was that I wasn’t the only one parting lost in thought, not knowing what to do with this "special experience"…

Beckett´s Biography helps   In order to really understand Beckett’s "Malone dies" you presumably have to know a little bit about his person as well as his plays. Samuel Beckett was born in 1906 in a suburb of Dublin. Between 1946 and 1949 he produced the major prose narratives "Molloy", "Malone dies" and "The Unnameable", which were published in 1951. Today Gare St. Lazare Players are presenting the novel on stage, adapted by director Judy Hegarty and actor Conor Lovett and which today is performed at the Andrew’s Lane Studio. When Beckett died in 1989 in Paris he had experienced world fame with these and other books, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.

Unfortunately this richness of Beckett’s writing cannot necessarily be translated all that well into spoken word, because the scripts are filled with extraordinary images and complex linguistic constructions. While the reader is able to review difficult passages when reading the novel, the audience in the theatre must rely on the actor’s delivery and a great deal of concentration. In this case it is not the actor’s fault that he cannot quite overcome the complexity of the text. It is all too easy to drift away and to wonder about elements of the language. "Malone dies" is, after all, a written text first – Beckett didn’t design it to be played upon the stage, but concentrated on novel parameters and peculiarities.