Becks @ Beaubourg

Yesterday I went to the Samuel Beckett exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. I found it fascinating, thrilling, disturbing and quite wonderfully moving.

Fascinating to view different versions of his plays; side-by-side French and English productions highlighting the brilliance of this self-translating writer. Thrilling to see scores of handwritten manuscripts (surely that's tautological?) with doodles and crossings-out giving insight into the genius behind Waiting for Godot, Play and Oh les Beaux Jours. Disturbing to be assaulted by such powerfully stark images, such unsparing metaphors for the human condition. Moving to come face to face with yourself with a shock of recognition, mirrored in the bleak, buried, broken characters of the Beckettian universe.

Finally, it was inspiring to be reminded what can be done with words. Or, in Beckett's case, with words and the spaces between them. It is above all his language which dazzles. And so let me finish with a few of my favourite Beckettisms:

"All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. "

"In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness. "

"I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo. "

"Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must. "

"That's how it is on this bitch of an earth. "

"Words are all we have. "

P.S. Better get your skates on if you want to experience the exhibition: it closes on 25 June.