By FRANK SCHECK
Rating: 
Last updated: 4:19 am
July 22, 2008
Posted: 3:49 am
July 22, 2008
WHEN he first appears onstage in a bowler hat and ragged overcoat, Barry McGovern looks like a vaudevillian who's seen better days. But then he speaks - with bitterness, despair and pitch-black humor - and it's clear we're in Samuel Beckett territory.
In "I'll Go On," the second of three Beckett adaptations from Dublin's Gate Theatre - Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes star in the others - McGovern exploits that dark humor well in a brilliant performance.
Face gaunt, head close-shaven, the veteran Irish actor has been performing this solo piece - adapted from the novels "Molloy," "Malone Dies" and "The Unnamable" - for more than 20 years, and he inhabits this distinctive universe with a scarily intense naturalness.
In the first segment, he plays Molloy, a tramp who recounts such colorful events as accidentally running over a dog with his bicycle (the owner turned out to be grateful) and canoodling with his girlfriend atop a rubbish heap.
When we next see him, he's Malone, lying prone and clad in a white sheet. "I shall be quite dead at last," he announces, but he's clearly found no peace in this world: "Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody."
The final segment is a disquieting monologue distilled from "The Unnamable," delivered in a hysterically breathless fashion and featuring that most famous Beckettian summation of life as we know it: "You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on."
The evening doesn't match the stark simplicity of Beckett's best plays. But as an illustration of the author's genius and the actor's brilliance, it succeeds beautifully.
I'LL GO ON
Gerald W. Lynch Theater, 899 10th Ave.; (212) 721-6500. Through Sunday.
