Photo by Tanya Voltchanskaya
A crowded theatre, dark as a tomb. Floating high above the stage, a disembodied mouth mutters and shrieks to itself, words tumbling from its red lips in an Irish brogue, as fast as thought.
Lit by a faint grey light, a woman paces nine precise steps along a landing, wheels about, paces again; a routine set in stone. Tears stain her cheeks as she talks softly to the disembodied voice of her dying mother – or is it only a memory she hears? Or is it she who is dead, her memory living on only in her elderly mother’s feeble mind?
A rocking chair, propelled by itself in a darkened room. In it sits a prematurely aged woman, eyes wide in her pale face. A voice speaks – it is not hers. Finally she utters a word. ‘More.’ She rocks. She listens. She speaks again, a single word. ‘More.’ She descends into herself, waiting for death to claim her.
Irish actor Lisa Dwan gives a masterful performance in these three short plays by Samuel Beckett, imbuing the difficult words with emotional depth as precise as the pin-spot that lights her mouth in the opening piece, Not I.
Billie Whitelaw, only the second actor to perform Not I, and who was personally coached by Beckett himself in 1973, said of the piece: ‘Plenty of writers can write a play about a state of mind, but he actually put that state of mind on the stage, in front of your eyes … the inner scream.’
Scream Dwan does, as well as enunciating every syllable of the play’s difficult text, a stream-of-consciousness babble of memories, interjections and colloquialisms that leaves the audience shell-shocked and raw, waiting stunned in the dark, mind flayed, for the next play.
Footfalls, written for Whitelaw and first performed in 1976, sees a grey-clad Dwan gliding like a spectre across the stage, dimly illuminated in a faint pool of light which may be spilling from an open door we cannot see. Somewhere a bell tolls, and from the darkness, a frail voice speaks to her – her mother’s voice, consoling her but also warning her, that unlike herself, her daughter has many empty years left to live.
Unlike the almost violent speech of Not I, here Dwan is hesitant, heartbroken, her voice rising up softly and sadly, like mist from the winter’s earth. It’s an achingly subtle and controlled depiction of grief and anguish.
Finally comes Rockaby, in which Dwan sits in near silence, slowly rocked to death – like all of us – by forces beyond our control. ‘More,’ she croaks, as if to plead for more time, as another voice, fatalistic and remorseless, dispassionately describes the details of her empty life, and her mother’s life before her. Hypnotic and compelling, it’s a compelling end to an bleakly beautiful evening of theatre.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby
Written by Samuel Beckett
Performed by Lisa Dwan
Directed by Walter Asmus
Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre of WA
14-20 February 2015
Perth International Arts Festival
www.perthfestival.com.au
13 February – 7 March 2015
Richard Watts travelled to Perth as a guest of PIAF.
