Footfalls Rockaby Not I and Come and Go Review

✭✭✭✭✩

by Samuel Beckett, directed by Walter Asmus

Lisa Dwan, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

October 13-November 1, 2015

"... other only windows ..." (Rockaby)

With the "Beckett Trilogy", Irish actor Lisa Dwan gathers together iii of Samuel Beckett's monologues written in English for a female performer and plays them back to back without intermission.  Though other projects intervened in the writing of these iii works, the iii course a fascinating sequence and seem to develop in form and ideas from play to play.  Dwan has already won worldwide acclaim for her performance of these incredible difficult works and nosotros are lucky that Canadian Stage has been able to bring the "Beckett Trilogy" to Toronto so that we can encounter what are probable the definitive performances of these pieces in our time.

The evening begins with Non I (1972) followed by Footfalls (1976) and Rockaby (1981).  The full running time for all three is 59 minutes, but the three are each such intense experiences one would hardly want more.  For Not I, the most technically difficult of the three, the auditorium is fabricated pitch blackness.  Even the go out signs are covered.  The darkness is essential because all Beckett wants us to run across on stage is a adult female'due south oral cavity (known as "Mouth") speaking a rapid, uninterrupted stream of words.  Beckett said that the slice must be spoken every bit quickly as possible – "at the speed of thought", in his own words.  Billie Whitelaw, whom Beckett coached himself, delivered the work in 14 1/ii minutes.  Dwan, who in turn was coached by Whitelaw, delivers it in an incredible nine minutes and 50 seconds.

This faster speed may be fifty-fifty closer to what Beckett wanted, just it brings with it a very practical difficulty.  Dwan may exist able to speak the words that rapidly merely we cannot perhaps empathize them that speedily.  I, who have previous taught the piece at university, got very piddling out of Dwan'south performance except for the fairly frightening image of a disembodied mouth spewing forth a nearly unprocessable stream of words.

If I, who already know the text well, gathered little from its performance, I tin can't imagine what those unfamiliar with information technology could glean.  Judging only from what I heard, rather than what I know, I had to rely on Mouth'due south repetitions to make any sense of what she was maxim.  Mouth makes fun of her historic period as coming up to lxx rather than sixty.  Nosotros can tell she has a dim view of religion given the long, witchlike laugh she makes betwixt the words "merciful" and "god".  Nosotros tin tell she is pained by a continual "buzzing' in her caput.  Most of import for this play and the ones that follow, we can tell that Mouth is telling a story, nominally about someone else, except that she periodically feels the need to emphasize the indicate that the story is not most her (hence the championship).  Five times we hear the sequence "what? . . who? . . no! . . she!"  In Dwan'due south performance the word "she" is an infuriated scream as if Mouth had suddenly idea her story would be mistaken equally her own.

Information technology's useless to go into all the aspects of the text that are missed by Dwan'due south rush for the Olympic medal in speed-speaking.  I realize that many perversely grant virtually godlike status to whatever of Beckett'southward pronouncements, all the same in this instance I must say I accept constitute slower performances of the text (such as Barbara Gordon'due south in 2004) much more constructive.  The key is not and so much to give the impression of rapidity every bit that of unstoppability, every bit if a dam of silence had all of a sudden broken and all the pent-up words behind it finally come pouring out.

If Not I turns out to be a frustrating experience, Dwan'due south performance of Footfalls and Rockaby are absolute perfection. Footfalls is the longest of the three works and the most mysterious

.  It has four sections, each signalled by the ringing of a bell.  In the first iii sections we see a woman in a nightgown slowly pacing a lit rectangle of the stage exactly nine steps each way.  We learn the woman's name is May when she speaks with an off-phase vocalization who is her invalid mother (besides voiced by Dwan).  May offers to help her mother but her female parent replies each time that it is "as well soon".  In the second section May now speaks as her ain mother and tells us that May has been pacing later on some unnamed event and has never left the house since.  In the 3rd section May speaks as herself and, like the Mouth in Non I, tells a story supposedly not about herself, except that the main grapheme is a girl named Amy, an anagram of May.  In this pseudo-Victorian story Amy and her  mother fence whether Amy was or was not at church at evensong.  Amy insists she was not.  In the fourth department the rectangle lights up merely no ane is there.

The mystery, of class, concerns what we have actually witnessed.  Is May'due south mother really at that place or in her imagination?  Or, as in the second section, is it the other way around?  Or, as in the third section, are they both fictions, which their absence in the fourth section would seem to deport out?

Footfalls is the closest Beckett comes to writing a play in the style of the noh plays of Japan, which he would have known through W.B. Yeats's interest in them and Yeats'south imitations of them.  Hither every bit in noh, we have the impression of seeing ghosts reenacting by events, though Beckett adds the twist that the past events are non known nor who exactly the ghosts are.  By the stop we feel we've seen the subsequently-prototype of a life but before it disappears into nothingness.

Lisa Dwan'due south functioning is extraordinary.  As May her voice grows more than delicate as she she seems to be weighed down by whatever past event obsesses her.  Her mother's vox, completely singled-out, seems weighed down with intendance.  Notwithstanding, in her story Amy'due south voice is very like May'due south only more lighthearted while the female parent'south is very like May'due south mother'due south voice just more vigorous and imperious.  If the story is actually autobiographical and not a fiction, we can see in retrospect how the two lives of female parent and daughter run down from energy to impotence to nothingness.

In Rockaby the idea of an internalized speaker discussing the self as if it were a separate entity is taken to its terminal limit.  The pointless pacing of Footfalls, is replaced by rocking in a rocking chair whereby the face of the onstage character "Due west" plunges into and out of darkness.  The play is also in four sections, each begun past W speaking the word "More" afterwards which nosotros hear the r

ecorded voice of "Five" (in fact, Westward's own vox) describing in fragments what West is doing, rocking by a window, her simply window, looking out on "other only windows".  W joins in with V's speech for certain central phrases such as "fourth dimension she stopped" or "rock her off", merely the word "More" is the only one she speaks on her ain.

In Waiting for Godot (1953), Pozzo remarks, "They give nativity astride of a grave, the calorie-free gleams an instant, then it's night once again".  In Rockaby, Beckett suggests the process is not all that quick.  From the championship, the two-beat out verse form of the speech fragments and from the rocking, it is clear that Beckett is presenting united states with the image of a human beingness in the concluding stages of beingness rocked to slumber, or death, a process that began in infancy and will be repeated by W's own daughter.

Equally Five, Dwan brings out a broad variety of tones in the poetry – lulling, hypnotic, regretful, resigned.  It's quite beautiful, but we wonder when West will finally obey her inner voice that tells her "fourth dimension she stopped".  Dwan's performance makes this the nigh moving of the three plays and makes us experience this is 1 of the most moving of Beckett's works.

For fans of Beckett and of 20th-century drama in full general, Dwan'due south performance will probable be the closest whatsoever of us will come to experiencing definitive performances of whatever of these three works.  Nosotros may disagree with the goal of speed in Not I, for if Beckett was satisfied with Billie Whitelaw's timing why should Dwan try to shorten information technology?  All the same, it is definitely an unusual feat that must exist heard to be believed which contrasts profoundly with the sensitivity she reveals in Footfalls and Rockaby.  Indeed, these concluding ii are performed so beautifully that they alone justify a visit to he "Beckett Trilogy".

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Lisa Dwan every bit Mouth in Not I, ©2014 Justin Downing. Lisa Dwan in Footfalls; Lisa Dwan in Rockaby. ©2014 John Haynes.

Beckett Trilogy: Non I, Footfalls, Rockaby

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Source: http://www.stage-door.com/Theatre/2015/Entries/2015/10/16_Beckett_Trilogy__Not_I,_Footfalls,_Rockaby.html