In Dance First (2023), director James Marsh has ventured, with a temerity bordering on irreverence, to offer us a version of Samuel Beckett’s life most curiously polished by the hand of Hollywood. Here is no dry recital of dates and deeds, but rather a whimsical, even fantastical, opening tableau: Beckett, that austere sentinel of silence, is depicted forsaking the solemnities of his Nobel ceremony to confer with a shadow-self — a suave, roll necked alter ego, more at ease in the world, more forgiving of its follies. Together they muse upon the peculiar question of how, or rather to whom, the laureate might dispense the prize money, his conscience summoning a cavalcade of old ghosts and grievances which unfurl the tale in retrospective reverie.
One hardly requires the gifts of prophecy to surmise what Beckett himself — that tireless architect of despair and economy — might have murmured about such a portrait. Yet despite a tendency now and then toward theatrical indulgence, the film is played with considerable spirit and sincerity. Marsh does not shrink from the essential paradox of his subject: that the creator of a world defined by paralysis and silence lived, in truth, a life marked by gallant service in the French Resistance and romantic entanglements of no small consequence.
Gabriel Byrne lends Beckett a weary gravitas, dry as old parchment yet glinting with wit, while Fionn O’Shea sketches the younger man with all the hauteur and hungry idealism of youth. Sandrine Bonnaire inhabits the long-suffering Suzanne, whose constancy Beckett betrayed in his affair with the incisive Barbara Bray, brought to life here by Maxine Peake.
And so the film, for all its softening edges and its faint sweetness, proves a persuasive companion, offering its audience not despair, but rather a bitter draught tempered by the smallest, most human dollop of hope, distilled in the film’s quiet, melancholy farewell.
