The film documents the Irish writer's life, from his childhood, his friendship with James Joyce until the incarceration of the latter's mentally ill daughter Lucia Joyce, his relationship with his future wife Suzanne Dumesnil, his time as a fighter for the French Resistance during the Second World War, his postwar literary rise and subsequent Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, his affair with translator Barbara Bray and his later life until his death in 1989. Throughout the film, Beckett carries out an interior monologue.[3]
In November 2021, it was announced that James Marsh was to direct the bio-pic with Gabriel Byrne playing Beckett from a screenplay from Neil Forsyth and a title taken from Beckett's ethos on life of "Dance first, think later". The project was developed with Sky Arts in the U.K. and produced by 2LE Media's Michael Livingstone and Tom Thostrup, alongside Viktória Petrányi of Hungary's Proton Cinema and Belgium's Umedia.[5]
Casting
The project isn't the first time Forsyth has written about Beckett - his Sky Playhouse short film Waiting for Andre was about the real-life friendship between Beckett and a teenage Andre the Giant.[6] In May 2022, it was announced that Aidan Gillen joined the cast along with Sandrine Bonnaire and Fionn O'Shea as a younger Samuel Beckett.[7] Gillen confirmed to The Times that his role was that of James Joyce and that Marsh is “a great film-maker, so the Beckett story is in good hands.”[8] In September 2022, it was revealed that Maxine Peake, Robert Aramayo, Leonie Lojkine, Bronagh Gallagher, Lisa Dwyer Hogg, Barry O'Connor and Gráinne Good had joined the cast.[9]
On set in Budapest Byrne was interviewed by The Guardian and described the project as an effort to flesh out a character whom “people know very little about. He was a man who had a sense of humour, who was deeply emotional, who was a failure in his own eyes for a great deal of his life”. Byrne described how the man's sense of self contrasts greatly with the global notoriety and fame that came from being subsequently awarded the Nobel prize, and yet how he remained a man “who lived the last part of his life alone in a very simple room in a nursing home”. Discussing his performance Byrne said “Physically I can sketch him, but with this film we are not looking for an impersonation of Beckett, rather a sense of who he was. What you want is people to believe the man, not focus their attention on the wig or the makeup or the false nose.”[12]
The Guardian's Claire Armitstead called Dance First, "a small masterpiece" and said of Byrne's performance, "such is the power of the storytelling that within minutes you believe in him entirely".[17]The Irish Times called the film "striking" and praised O'Shea's "excellent" performance and Gallagher's "fine turn".[18]The Times called Byrne "one of Ireland's great actors".[19]Screen Daily called the film's formal premise "ingenious", adding there is "definitely a Beckettian ring to the dialogue" and called Byrne's performance, "rueful but often tartly humorous evocation of Beckett as a vulnerable, tender figure, he convincingly humanises a writer often represented as an inaccessibly lofty secular prophet".[20] In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw mentioned Gillen's performance as one of the best in a supporting role on film in 2023.[21]
