(Derek Scally’s article appeared in the Irish Times, 7/19.)
The inauspicious meeting leads to an auspicious outcome. It was 1976 and Samuel Beckett was hard at work in Berlin’s Schiller Theatre where, a year previously, he had caused a theatrical sensation with his directorial debut of Waiting for Godot. Now he was working on the German premieres of That Time and Footfalls.
On September 20th about noon, the dramatist-turned-director was visited in the Werkstatt rehearsal space by the American composer Morton Feldman.
“I was led from daylight into a dark theatre, on stage, where I was presented to an invisible Beckett,” said Feldman later, who had poor eyesight and thick glasses. “He shook hands with my thumb and I fell softly down a huge black curtain to the ground.”