I'll Go On

First performed by Barry McGovern at Ireland's Gate Theatre in 1985 followed by productions at various international festivals, including Edinburgh last year, I’ll Go On has now made it to the Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City. Still performed by McGovern, who also had a hand in adapting for the stage Beckett's three post-war novels, “Molloy,” “Malone Dies” & “The Unnamable,” I’ll Go On is a more-than-worthy addition to the Beckett canon.

The text, drastically abridged from the novels, is spoken and acted in mesmerizing fashion by McGovern, who was last seen in L.A. in 2012, in Center Theater Group's Waiting For Godot (co-starring Alan Mandell).

As co-adapter Dukes explains in a production note, the structure of I’ll Go On is simple: "Firstly there is Molloy who tells how he came to occupy his mother's room. Then there is Malone, alone and dying, telling himself stories as he awaits the inevitable. And finally, the Unnamable, desperately seeking the right words that will permit him to utter his real self at last.” In other words, because one actor 'voices' all three monologues, the characters don’t come across as separate; they are lodged within each other “as successively deeper layers or strata."

Beckett's trilogy is the greatest work of fiction since Proust's “A La Recherche” and, even in its truncated theatrical form, the unique power, poetry and mystery come through. A mournful meditation on life and death, I’ll Go On also looks at the human condition with a blackly comic eye.

"If only I knew if I've lived...impossible to find out," the Unnamable says, and then in one great rolling sentence which carries through page after page, the voice reaches its end, the redeeming word still unfound, or perhaps not. Perhaps, as McGovern cries out in the last speech of the play, "It's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can go on, I'll go on."