Just before the first of these three monologues started, a rather assured usher moved to the front of the stage and spoke. “There will be three parts to this evening’s performance,” he explained to the audience. “The first will last for ten minutes and will take place in complete darkness. The lights over the exits will be turned off for this part of the performance. If this will make any member of the audience uncomfortable, then please raise your hand and you will be helped from the auditorium.” There cannot be many plays that are prefaced with a health warning of this sort. But not all plays are by Samuel Beckett.
And then the lights began to fade, then fade further, and then completely to black. It is rare to experience perfect blackness—“as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room,” as Pliny the Younger put it when describing the descent of the Vesuvius ash-cloud. The effect of the perfect darkness was immediately unsettling. Round one to Beckett.
And then the noise started. A ruptured, stifled, gurgle and then in the distance, emerging from the void, a shape. Red. Round. A mouth, gyrating horribly in the darkness. No body. Just a mouth, suspended ten or so feet above the stage, with very red lips and white teeth, illuminated in a small circle of light. The strangest thing. And then without any time to adjust to the darkness, or to the hideous appearance of a disembodied orifice suspended in the black, the words started to fall, like a torrent. The actress propelling the words was Lisa Dwan, who took the lead role—if that term applies—in each of the three pieces. She tore through the fragmented text of “Not I”, the delivery verging on unintelligible.
It was hard to know how to react. The assault on the consciousness was almost unbearable as the monologue continued, the words flowing with such speed as to be almost on top of one another. What sense there is in “Not I” is gleaned only from the overall effect of the words, of the half-formed allusions to characters, their torments and then the repeated shrieked retort: “…who?... no!... she!” bellowed by Dwan in the only pauses in the monologue. And then the single light illuminating the mouth began to fade, and the words began to choke and degrade and the voice seemed to sink back into the swamp from which it had emerged.
A slightly stunned applause rose up. The emergency exit lights flicked back on and it was as if the auditorium had become filled with light, even though they only gave a weak green hum. Then through the gloom a soundtrack began to play, not music but noise suggestive of a mood—not a good one. The pulses of sound sang out through the auditorium. After a few minutes of this, “Footfalls,” the second piece, began. On stage, a figure in white: Dwan, dressed in a long white gown, apparently suspended in air, pacing back and forth, the light falling across her shoulders and face, and the folds of her skirt. Her chest was in darkness, as were her feet.
She then began a conversation with her mother, offstage, whose voice came as if from nowhere. The woman, May, was pacing outside her mother’s bedroom door. The two conversed, occasionally interrupted by a lowing church bell.
It is hard to overstate the hideous power—and also beauty—of this. The older woman whom we never saw, died, or so it seemed, and the dialogue continued, but with the dead mother as the lead speaker. A ghost? It was unclear. But throughout, the younger woman in white continued to pace back and forth across the stage. Just as the mouth in “Not I” had continued its incessant activity, so the woman paced, pausing to speak in a voice that eventually became that of her dead mother, as she painted the final images, which were of a church and of the older woman asking her daughter whether she would ever stop turning “it all” over in her mind. The younger woman paced, back and forth in such a way that suggested that whatever “it” is, she will not stop turning it over, relentlessly, as she walked. The steps continued as the lights faded.
Again, the light, such as it was, dropped to black. The audience, too scared to move during the performance shuffled and coughed in the stalls as the soundscape rose up again to fill the blackened room. And after a few minutes, “Rockaby,” the final piece, began, the gentlest of the three, but in many ways the most disturbing. Without the visceral attack of “Not I,” or the immediate agony of “Footfalls,” “Rockaby” lulls the audience. This time Dwan was seated in a rocking chair, dressed in black. A disembodied voice came from offstage, that of a woman, softly speaking long, repetitive sentences as the chair rocked back and forth mechanically.
Each time the disembodied voice halted, the woman in the chair seemed to snap awake and shout “more”. The long incantation would then begin again: soft, disturbing words, describing people trapped behind windows and looking out at views that were of yet more windows. And the chair rocked on, relentless activity—but futile. The woman in the chair was still, her cries of “more” becoming ever weaker, until the voice and the motion of the chair had lulled her apparently to death. In the final moment, the woman’s head fell sideways. It ended. The applause was prolonged.
What to make of all this? First, that the performance by Dwan was extraordinary. When she rose from the chair to take her bow, she was breathing deeply, apparently exhausted despite having been seated in a chair for ten minutes. As for the cumulative effect of the three pieces, “powerful” doesn’t come close. The sense of loss and darkness boomed out of this trio of monologues—the terrible isolation of the individual, the impossibility of love, the collapse of language, of thought.
It was a series of existential hammer blows, delivered with supreme skill—but not very enjoyable. One of the great redemptive elements in Beckett’s drama is the humour, brought out so brilliantly by, for example, Harold Pinter, in his performance of “Krapp’s Last Tape.” The summary of the state of his health as “The sour cud, and the iron stool,” is immortal. The leavening effect of the humour does not divert the narrative from its plunge towards death, but makes it more terrible. There was no such glint of hope in either of these three pieces.
But that is perhaps more a criticism of the writing than of the production. A churlish one? Perhaps. The texture of Beckett’s work when it descends to these dark psychological vaults is unique. His shorter fiction and also his novels—especially the concluding passage of the Unnameable—are testament to the enormous power that his writing generates. And certainly, this excellent production will linger long in the memory. I only suspect that most people will feel it unnecessary to see it twice.
