In 1969, Samuel Beckett and his wife learned that he had won the Nobel prize in literature in a telegram from his publisher. “Dear Sam and Suzanne,” it read. “In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel prize. I advise you to go into hiding.” Both were notoriously celebrity averse. Suzanne described it as a “catastrophe”. Beckett declined to give a Nobel lecture, and refused to talk when a Swedish film crew tracked him down to a hotel room in Tunisia, leaving them with a surreal mute interview.
Into this temporal void, a new psychological biopic has poured a monumental reckoning, in which the 63-year-old playwright scrambles out of the Nobel ceremony to find himself in a rough-hewn underworld. In Dance First a small masterpiece that premieres next month at the San Sebastian film festival, Beckett confronts the events and the people that shaped him, from his domineering mother to his experience with the French resistance, his brief dalliance with James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, to his later inability to choose between Suzanne and the radio producer and translator Barbara Bray.
