Dance First

From the director of The Theory of Everything, Dance First stars Gabriel Byrne as Samuel Beckett, in a beautifully realised biopic that reveals the Irish playwright and novelist’s inner life.

We meet Beckett as he is set to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature. Swerving the prize, he instead begins a dialogue with another version of himself – calling to mind Waiting for Godot – as they try to make sense of the fragments of Beckett’s past. From the loss of his father, who urges him on his deathbed to ‘fight, fight, fight’, to his years in Paris with James Joyce (Aidan Gillen), to his time in the French Resistance, to his love-hate relationship with his wife Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire), Marsh gives us Beckett’s life in all its extremities and contradictions. Shot in beautiful black and white and infused with Beckett’s mordant wit and surrealist flair, this is a fitting tribute to a literary giant.