Bill Irwin Clowns Around – Kind Of – In STC’s ‘On Beckett’

Now on stage at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Klein Theatre, On Beckett brings the spare, searching prose of Samuel Beckett into intimate focus. The production, performed and shaped by stage savant Bill Irwin, is part lecture, part lament, part lightly mischievous master class.

Irwin, of course, arrives with a résumé that reads like repertory royalty and red-nose renegade. He is both an accomplished actor and a trained clown, a dual identity that proves pivotal in parsing Beckett’s famously formidable texts. In lesser hands, the language can feel hostile. In Irwin’s, it becomes human: halting, humorous, and surprisingly tender.

The evening unfolds as an exploration of Beckett’s short works, anecdotes, and artistic preoccupations. There is no elaborate scenery to soften the starkness; instead, Irwin stands before his audience with scripts, silences, and a body attuned to every pause. He leans into Beckett’s rhythms, the repetitions, the ruptures, the razor-edged wit, all without sanding down their strangeness.

It is here that the clowning counts.

A clown understands failure as form. He knows that a stumble can be storytelling, that stillness can be seismic. Irwin’s physical precision (an arched eyebrow, a tentative tiptoe, a slow-motion sag) renders Beckett’s abstractions accessible. When the language loops or lingers, Irwin’s body provides ballast. When the text teeters toward despair, he introduces the faintest filament of foolishness, reminding us that Beckett’s bleakness is often braided with mirth.

The result is complexity without condescension. Irwin does not “explain” Beckett so much as embody him, allowing audiences to feel their way through the thicket of thought. The clown’s candor mirrors the existential (oh that word!) bewilderment at the heart of Beckett’s work. In that shared vulnerability, comprehension quietly blooms.

There are moments of droll delight, as Irwin recounts Beckettian biography and backstage lore, and stretches of near-monastic minimalism, where a single sentence seems to suspend time. The production trusts its audience, but it also guides them gently and generously through terrain that might otherwise seem forbidding.

On Beckett offers something bracingly spare. No pyrotechnics, no political punchlines. Just a performer, a playwright, and the persistent question of what it means to go on.

By evening’s end, the applause for Irwin is gratitude for his craft. For his clarity. For a clown who, by embracing awkwardness and austerity alike, helps Washington audiences encounter Beckett not as an academic assignment, but as a living, breathing companion in confusion.

On Beckett runs through March 15th. Runtime: 90 minutes with no intermission.