Irish actor Jack MacGowran is probably best remembered as one of Samuel Beckett’s foremost performers, though he also appeared in material as wide-ranging as the plays of Sean O’Casey and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. With Beckett, he crafted a monologue called Beginning to End based on Beckett’s prose writings and toured this to great acclaim through the 1960s. In 1966 MacGowran filmed the performance for Ireland’s RTÉ Television. Until recently the film was hard to come by, but this too recently cropped up on YouTube in its 50-minute entirety, and it is presented below.

More information on MacGowran and the film, directed by Chloe Gibson and photographed by Tony Barry, can be found at the RTÉ Web site. It appeared earlier this week at Rhys Tranter’s A Piece of Monologue blog.