Paralyzed by success, self-exiled SAMUEL BECKETT is summoned from Paris to hometown Dublin to his first love ETHNA MACCARTHY's deathbed.

SYNOPSIS:

1959 Paris winter finds avant-garde writer SAMUEL BECKETT changing world literature with Waiting for Godot. But he is drinking too much with his buddy ALBERTO, his marriage to SUZANNE has grown stale, and his stomach is killing him. We’re not just talking writer’s block here, as an important commission comes in from London; we’re seeing complete blockage – spiritual, emotional, physical. Beckett is coming close to becoming his own, private black hole.

After a decades-long affair, his best friend, Dubliner A.J. “CON” LEVENTHAL finally married his first love, Trinity College classmate ETHNA MACCARTHY. That was the last time the self-exiled Beckett visited his hometown, a few difficult years ago. The successful pediatrician and poet, Ethna is now dying of throat cancer.

Beckett receives a letter from his friends, summoning him for one last Dublin visit. “Must go, on this typical Irish errand,” he tells Alberto. “I plan to stay just for a week.” A chatty dinner with their new friend Stravinsky, at a local men's club, doesn’t improve his mood. His unhappy wife grows increasingly unhappy, as she helps him pack.

To Dublin Beckett flies.

Around intense, daily visits to Ethna and Con, Sam almost freezes on a train, runs into old flame NORAH and re-ignites long forgotten sexual passions, and is even stabbed by a drunk on a street corner, hallucinating a theatre vignette, then fearing “blood is running out of me”. His closeness to Ethna flashes back their Trinity days, his father teaching him to swim, his mother’s long illness, and his brother’s quick demise.

Driving through the Irish landscape with his brother’s widow JEAN, helps peel off more armor, inhibitions, suppressed memories. Ethna is revealed as a mysterious force in Sam’s writing; a first love that continues to nourish him. Con, a rare Jewish man of Irish letters, is exposed as a protective enabler to Ethna’s peculiarities. We are in Beckett’s head, as he becomes stronger; in Ethna’s being, as she fades away. Sam sheds more protective layers, improvising a beautiful original theme on their old piano, playing chess with Ethna a-la Bergman, and even sings her a Schubert lied.

Back in Paris.

Sam realizes the new freedom and energies that have emerged. He drinks less, writes more, meets that big deadline for a new play, and travels for his directorial London debut.

After one intense rehearsal of Krapp’s Last Tape, the lead actor Magee, Beckett’s visiting American publisher Rosset, and his ever-aloof wife Suzanne are out for dinner. Finding much to be happy about, Rosset proposes a toast: “This is the kind of day that makes you glad to be alive!” Sam, raising his whiskey glass with a wry smile, says “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”

AN IRISH ERRAND