Samuel Beckett comes to poetic life in James Marsh’s “Dance First”

The Nobel Prize-winning Irish author and playwright Samuel Beckett comes to a kind of life in direction James Marsh‘S Dance firsta uniquely formatted, strikingly framed view of life and debt, as Beckett looks back on all the people he owes something to.

James Marsh’s work could be revived in the film “Edge of the Street” Man on the wire which shows Philippe Petit’s globally acclaimed tightrope act between the twin towers of the New York World Trade Center in 1974.

Dance first(the title comes from Beckett’s motto: “First dance, then think”) is also a kind of high-wire act. Marsh has to combine the gentle with the dark, because Beckett’s life, like the life of most geniuses, was full of insolubility and chaos.

James Marsh and his author Neil Forsyth have cleverly divided the various experiences in Beckett’s life into book chapters, each named after an important figure in the author’s life.

In this way we meet all those who influenced Beckett’s life, including a very scary, intimidating mother, May Beckett (Lisa Dwyer Hogg), and a very accommodating, long-suffering wife, Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire), who reminds me of the wife of the other genius in Bradley Cooper’s maestro.

The connecting factor between Bradley’s Bernstein and Byrne’s Beckett is that both are convinced that they are immune to the rules of civilized behavior and that their wives have paid a price for the unconventional thinking of their brilliant husbands.

Gabriel Byrne like Beckett is absolutely perfect: stubborn and unforgiving, the actor interprets the Godot The author is disturbing and uplifting at the same time.

Interestingly, the film presents Beckett’s life story as a dialogue between the author and his alter ego. This gives the biographical narrative a dispassionate, discursive dimension. Not that the narrative lacks genuine emotion. In every relationship we revisit with Beckett, we sense the author’s anxiety and incompleteness.

When Beckett’s neurotic mother tells him as a teenager (Fion O’Shea is a serious teenage version of Beckett) that she has devoted herself entirely to him, he calmly replies, “I hope for your sake that’s not true.”

The emotions underlying each chapter of Beckett’s narrative are underlined by pithy dialogue, which sometimes conceals centuries of strangled screams. During his affair with his translator Barbara Bray (Maxine Peak), Beckett defends himself to his wife by saying that Barbara is a widow.

“Me too,” replies Beckett’s wife Suzanne. Ouch!

The film has a polished, edgy, visually plush look with an emotionally articulate underbelly. There are no superfluous shots, no beating around the bush, just Beckett, direct and unvarnished.

Dance first is a little gem, packed with insightful insights into the mind of a genius, not only Beckett’s, but also that of his mentor and later tormentor James Joyce(Aidan Gillenbrilliant), who tries to force his mentally unstable daughter Lucia (Gráinne Good) on Beckett.

Covered in a wave of nostalgic surrealism, Dance firstNot for everyone: tea (or should we say Irish coffee?) is a delight for connoisseurs.