Adapted from Samuel Beckett’s novel, Malone Dies, for the actor and comedian, Max Wall.
Author’s note: In the early 1980s, Max Wall returned to the London stage in a one-man show. His come-back season was the talk of the town, and the artist Maggie Hambling painted a series of portraits which hung in the National Portrait Gallery. I interviewed Max for LBC and suggested that he should act in Beckett’s plays, sending him a copy of Krapp’s Last Tape, which he performed with great success at Greenwich Theatre.
With Beckett’s permission, I edited parts of Malone Dies for Max’s solo reading at the National Portrait Gallery, which went so well that he was invited to perform at the Edinburgh Festival. I adapted the book, ruthlessly slashing the text to keep the performances within a limit of two hours but to retain the structure of the story.
‘The supreme achievement of the Festival’s Beckett Season’. The Scotsman, Aug 1984 (→further press). → Journalism (theatre reviews).