You don’t often get the chance to see one Beckett play and then three come along at once.
The late Quentin Crisp defined culture as anything too boring to be called entertainment, and at first sight this Royal Court production of these three late Beckett plays appeared to fit that description perfectly, what with the producer’s governessy warnings about audience silence and the insistence on total absence of light.
Yet there was light, both literal (if dim) on stage and metaphorical in the sense of visceral enlightenment, and that’s always worth leaving the cat dozing in front of the telly for. Because this production is a genuine triumph – three minimalist portrayals of human lives, the raw material art is always about, performed by the sterling Lisa Dwan.
Birmingham Rep’s Studio proved a great space for the first short work, Not I, in which a disembodied mouth (Everywoman?) tells the tragic yet commonplace story of an illegitimate still-birth, the product of a moment’s by-blow in a closed community. Yet here misery tortured by a very Irish notion of sin achieves a voice despite its socialised self to succeed in being heard.
Footfalls sees another woman, sole nurse to her bedridden mother, pacing and repacing backwards and forwards, her measured tread and similarly measured language revealing a hard-won control.
Rockaby seems to show that same mother herself, mesmerically rocking, rocking herself in and finally out of a life reduced at last to single, very human, oft-repeated words.
An engrossing, deeply moving evening. If you love theatre, miss it at your peril.
The production runs until tomorrow (September 20). For tickets call the box office on 0121 236 4458.
