“They thought he was a sort of austere and rather forbidding, monk-like figure who looked at everything with a dark eye and saw nothing but human misery,’’ Brook said … . “And to find this man who loved women and good drink and good food and lived in Paris for choice, and was always every morning in a cafe, where he would be sitting enjoying himself with various friends, this man was not that.’’

Likewise the work, said Brook. He has been convinced for 50 years, ever since he saw the New York premiere of Happy Days, that there is “a shining thread running through’’ Beckett’s plays, even a capacity for joy. That it’s been largely overlooked, he said, is the fault of the existentialist movement.

“It was part of the human climate of the time,’’ explained the director, speaking from experience. In 1964, Brook directed the RSC’s Theatre of Cruelty season. “This was a time when in Europe there was a feeling that optimism was a bourgeois luxury that was too easy, and that the truth was something tougher and harder, and that the world’s bourgeoisie were refusing to look this in its face.’’

Brook engages rather dangerously with the biographical fallacy (as well as misinterprets existentialism, which certainly sought to engage with society for its improvement, to the extent that many of its founding members, including Jean-Paul Sartre, were Socialists or Marxists) — that the life, in this case Beckett’s gregariousness, contains at least one primary key to the work: “I knew Beckett, and I found him a man of enormous humanity and humor and a really good companion and friend. Nothing was more enjoyable than to be with him,” Brook says. Because Beckett’s kindness, generosity and delight in some bourgeois pleasures are well documented, both critics and audiences have found this a singular means of finding that “shining thread” as evidence of a hilarious Beckettian optimism, as if Beckett himself were only a slightly more reticent Brendan Behan.

Arthur Schopenhauer, too, loved a good wine, a fine dinner and a good play; but does this necessarily undermine the pessimistic character of either his work or Beckett’s? Because both writers surveyed the vast spectrum of human experience, there are moments of joy and happiness to be found in the work of both writers, but do they outweigh the darker conclusions to which their writing comes? It has been my experience that those of an ordinarily melancholy disposition in their work are, as people, excellent companions: often witty, quick to find a joke in the darkest conversation, and genuinely compassionate. But it has everything to do with the man, and the way in which he believes human beings should conduct themselves among others, and not the writing, which describes the ways in which human beings normally conduct themselves among others. Especially in early Beckettian prose, let alone the early drama, there’s considerable comedy: the spectacularly unfortunate Lynch family of Watt, the apparent reference to Jonathan Swift’s feckless Lemuel Gulliver in the Lemuel that concludes Malone Dies.  But I must say this “shining thread” is exceedingly hard to come by in the post-1962 plays Play, Not I, Footfalls, A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby (the climactic line “fuck life” being the shining thread of joy here, I suppose), Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe or What Where; or the post-1962 novels How It Is (especially here), Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, or Worstward Ho. These works constitute by far the majority of Beckett’s mid-career and late work; and perhaps one is reminded of film director Sandy Bates‘ frustration with an audience that is sorry that he’s stopped making movies similar to his “earlier, funnier” films.

So Beckett in Boston. For Beckett in New York, there is the current Monodramas production at the New York City Opera, which includes a staging of the Samuel Beckett/Morton Feldman opera neither. Anthony Tommasini renders judgment for The New York Times here; I look forward to seeing the production this weekend (a few years ago I caught it in a concert version in Helsinki). For more information about the opera, its music and the history of its composition and Beckett and Feldman’s “collaboration,” there’s an excellent Web page about the work at The Modern Word. Below, the first ten minutes of the opera, as produced by the Radio Sinfonie Orchestra of Frankfurt, conducted by Zoltan Pesko and sung by Sarah Leonard: