There is no stage, only an attic: crammed with the flotsam and jetsam of memory, a filthy, dusty place infested with rats and recollections.
Attics allure children in search of life’s hidden secrets and distress the elderly in flight from death. Nevertheless, it remains the reign of childhood, strictly off-limits for adults. That’s why it is a small place:  children take refuge in crevasses to stay out of reach of elders.
Beckett’s scene descriptions are reduced to tools of the trade: the arrangement of scenes, objects and various characters/figures can to be seen as a reflection of humanity itself: forever on the verge of crumbling, but also of creating itself.
It is the chamber of cruelty.
Such wholesale slaughter of organs is, without a doubt, the perfect representation of a de-created world, but it is also a cry of inconsolable hope: there were chances, there still are, but they are buried, ignored, dead.
Everything that is no longer needed is sent to the attic. You never know, could be useful again, some day. What interests me is precisely the impossibility of ridding oneself of certain “meaningless” things. Things such as memories, or assisting powerlessly to inexorable physical decay. Salvaging an object at the peak of its worthlessness, saving a wreck from destruction,  these, for me, are the most precious moments.
Such objects serve only to recount the past, like talismans.
Herein lies the boundary between life and art: the human rubbish heap.
We cluttered the space with objects unabashedly pillaged from Beckett’s works. To begin with, we annulled any relationship between these objects. then, after a period of improvisations, the objects were accepted and treated as mere props occupying space. As such, they took on a livelihood governed by their own laws, the laws of memory’s attic, where everything is often piled up in a disorderly way: the realm of the uncompleted.
Every object in Beckett’s works has a life of its own. The presence of these objects is not fortuitous, they perform. To analyze the conceptual meaning of such objects would be ridiculous. There is no room for such speculation. Given that Beckett describes each object in such detail for us, all that is left for us to do is to make them emanate.
But for an object to emanate, it must first be “charged” with life: the worn-out object.
The final task consisted in preventing the stage and objects from appearing to be something they were not.
When dealing with Beckett, even the most beautiful of sets ends up being a puerile illustration of the text. How can one be so naive as to presume to depict a universe that is in itself a remnant of reality?
Treating the Beckett’s characters as objects and not as characters was the second task: emancipating oneself from an embarrassing “interpretation” of the character, from the actor’s attempt to translate would-be emotional states using alleged mimic and vocal equivalents.
I am more than ever convinced that the only viable strategy for an actor lies in elevating him/herself to the rank of puppet (a term that evokes childhood), which does not mean slavishly imitating the movements of a marionette, but absorbing its essence.
What an enormous task for the actor, that of creating an empty form, a resonating void, a harmonic receptacle. Creating the conditions for dreaming, the precious dimension in which human beings lose all notion of space and time, the realm common to lovers, soldiers, artists, and whoever be so engrossed in what he or she is experiencing as to behave as a sleepwalker. As in trance or prayer, sleep entails absolute attention, total presence.

Like a cat about to die, the old man slips discretely away to go expire in the attic, surrounded by objects and memories.
It is then that two dubious figures appear, more similar to entities not-born than to returning dead, incomplete beings, almost sacred, very like children, armed with mysterious attributes and an intolerable gaze. These assistants are like the crepuscular creatures that appear in fables at the peak of desperation: their purpose is to redirect the story towards the happy ending. And then, faithful to their rarified nature, they vanish just as suddenly as they appeared.
The assistants resemble Hamm’s dog: incomplete, lacking a ribbon. Every action that Beckett describes, regardless of whom it refers to, becomes the physical language of the ghost character.
Like a dance, an apparently meaningless score: we have the metaphor of man’s incapacity to act outside the limits of his own body, of his own voice, incapable of following his own profound VOCATION because he is all too caught up in the score.
The ghost yearns to pet that three-legged, stuffed dog. With a simple gesture he would like to transmit the warmth he feels capable of giving, but the substance of which the dog is made – foam rubber, papier mâché, cloth – transmits no warmth: he yearns to pet the dog but Beckett’s score directs him to abandon the dog to its imploration.
When Beckett’s texts are reduced to their essence one remains awestruck by the beauty of the characters’ dance: in no way does the simple succession of physical actions described in the text appear fortuitous. A rhythm exists. The cohesion between action and reaction is stunning, especially when the single characters remain isolated, each in their own nocturnal dance. It is as though the figure could actually breathe within its rigorous score of movements, without the author’s intervention and without the support of the voice.
The two not-born entities assisting the old man are acquiescent and cruel and do not fear time, having never learned to measure its passing.
In this place time ceases to exist.
Everything grinds to a halt and the qualitative sum of every “pause” in Beckett’s works can be contained in the course of five seconds.
I believe that the only image worthy of representing the immobility of Beckett’s pauses and silences is the human figure immortalized for the first time in history on a plate of silver halide in 1836. It is a daguerreotype photograph of the Boulevard du Temple, as seen from Daguerre’s studio. Surely the street at that hour must have been bustling with people, carriages, passers-by, etc., yet, due to the prolonged time of exposure, every trace of humanity has evaporated into meaningless blots. Humanity is exposed but does not remain imprinted.
Only an insignificant dwarflike figure, motionless in the plain, ordinary process of getting his shoes shined, is committed to eternity.
uch is immobility in Beckett’s works: no higher meaning, mere motionlessness while one’s shoes are shined, with humanity running its course, exposed but out of focus, a meaningless blot.
It is against the backdrop of this meaningless blot that the figure of the old man who goes to the attic to die stands out, surrounded by memories and the chorus of the two assistants. My hope is that the spectator will share the chorus’ vision. Those acting (the universe of ghosts and of objects) do not really exist. The spectator will witness beings contemplating life as they recount it, make it visible. Thus, action becomes dream and the shadowy wake of our lives already constitutes the initial event bridging the stage to the audience, allowing the contagion of this total illusion to spread to those arriving last from the outside, the spectators.