The bicycle is a great good. But it can turn nasty, if ill employed

Characters known for stealing a bike:

A. Uncle.


B. Belacqua Shuah.

They followed the grass margin of a ploughed field till they came to where a bicycle was lying, half-hidden in the rank grass. Belacqua, who could on no account resist a bicycle, thought what an extraordinary place to come across one. ... He changed his course and came to where the bicycle lay in the grass. It was a fine light machine, with red tyres and wooden rims. He ran down the margin to the road and it bounded alongside under his hand.

Beckett was parsimonious with details of Belacqua's physical appearance, leaving so many lacunae or perhaps hiatus (I never know which is which) that possibly the two characters are actually the same. Some might quibble and cavil at the incongruous image of an elephant in a purple dressing-gown smoking-jacket careering through the Irish countryside on a purloined bike ("on his right hand the sea was foaming among the rocks, the sands ahead were another yellow again, beyond them in the distance the cottages of Rush were bright white"), but hello? Is a traction-engine any more congruous?

This realisation has inspired me, after a long hiatus,¹ to finish my script for Interview with the Bicycle; needing only one more revision, a second coat of blue paint, and some builders' bog to hide the rust. This is of course a cinematic re-telling of Samuel Beckett's entire oeuvre, as seen by the bicycle that recurs through his novels and plays. If we cannot teach an elephant to perform the Belacqua scenes then it will all have to be done with motion-capture and CGI. [Memo to self: check if Andy Serkis is available].

In the second third of the film the bicycle falls into the hands of Molloy, and accompanies him for much of his descent into decrepitude and delapidation. These are both fine words and I cannot bear to leave out either.

I fastened my crutches to the cross-bar, one on either side, I propped the foot of my stiff leg (I forget which, now they're both stiff) on the projecting front axle, and I pedalled with the other... Dear bicycle, I shall not call you bike, you were green, like so many of your generation. I don't know why. It is a pleasure to meet it again. To describe it at length would be a pleasure. It had a little red horn instead of a bell fashionable in your days.

In one village Molloy is arrested for resting on his bicycle in a lewd manner, but the script dodges a bullet by calling for the bike's attention to be diverted elsewhere at this moment, so the scene is not witnessed directly and we can avoid a PG-13 rating. There is a sub-text here which can be narrated in subtitles. Also a backstory, so we need an actor with a broad enough torso for the backtitles.

The bicycle meets its tragic end in a scene carefully written to parallel the final disposition of Murphy's ashes in Murphy.² The bike frame, stripped by thieves of its wheels and rear light,³ is seized upon by drunken Hibernians and used to belabour one another around the head and shoulders until its molecules enter their skulls and vice versa. That is, it becomes an Endless Cycle of Violence.

Also a Bonus Epilogue:

HAMM: Go and get two bicycle-wheels.
CLOV: There are no more bicycle-wheels.
HAMM: What have you done with your bicycle?
CLOV: I never had a bicycle.
HAMM: The thing is impossible.
CLOV: When there were still bicycles I wept to have one. I crawled at your feet. You told me to go to hell. Now there are none.

C. Charles Manson but SHUT UP SMUT

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¹ Or possibly a lacuna.

² I.e. hurled back and forth as a projectile in a Dublin pub brawl until the bag bursts and the ashes are swept out at closing-time with the cigarette butts and the beer-soaked sawdust.

³ "Of it there remains, said Mercier, securely chained to the railing, as much as may reasonably remain, after a week’s incessant rain, of a bicycle relieved of both the wheels, the saddle, the bell and the carrier. And the tail-light."