COME AND GO/FOOTFALLS. To 9 April.
London
COME AND GO/FOOTFALLS
by Samuel Beckett
Barbican Centre (The Pit) To 9 April 2006
Tue-Thu 7pm, Fri 8pm, Sat 2.30pm & 6.15pm, Sun 2.30pm & 8pm
Runs 50min No interval
TICKETS: 0845 120 7554
www.barbican.org.uk (reduced booking fee online)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 1 April
Other writes have said less than half in more than double the time.
Second in the Gate/Barbican Beckett centennial is this uneven-length coupling. Beckett called his 1965 Come and Go a ‘dramaticule’. In another word, a sketch, and a brief one – extremely brief if it didn’t employ, as Annie Ryan’s exemplary-paced production shows, the slow pacing and repetitive patterns that are a feature of clowning, mime and physical theatre comedy.
Do everything 3 times, slowly, has often been physical theatre’s way, and that’s how Beckett plays it here. But there’s a sad inevitability in the increasingly obvious pattern. Three women, identities hidden by identical hats, sit on a bench. Each leaves in turn. After a well-timed glance after the departed one, another shifts into her space and whispers some gossip, bringing a shocked response.
Funny, yes. But the opening, a variation on Macbeth’s Weird Sisters (when did we last meet, rather than when shall we meet again), and the women’s final patterned hand-holding (recalling Shakespeare’s “Weird Sisters hand in hand”), adds a weight, as does the anonymity and sense of inevitability.
Footfalls (1975) is more substantial, a devastating piece even among the images Beckett’s later plays offer. May treads a plank of light, forward and back, 9 steps each way, an interminable treadmill of life. In her middle years, she has the oppression of memory and the burden of decades more to come. Yet the chime which summons each scene into being, like a new day forcibly coming to life, grows fainter each time; finally the bare space is seen, without May. No play more clearly examines the Beckett paradox: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
Justine Mitchell’s probably isn’t the performance Beckett, with his directorial demands to reduce everything to blankness, would have produced. The side-to-side trudge is characterful, and when in the 3rd scene May takes over the narration from her voiceover mother, Mitchell reaches a moment of agonised expressiveness. Both work beautifully, if they’re not the purest Beckett style. His plays are now launched into the wider theatre and a production such as this, which still respects the playwright’s meticulous directions, makes a fine addition to this London season.
Come and Go
Vi: Susan Fitzgerald
Flo: Bernadette McKenna
Ru: Barbara Brennan
Director: Annie Ryan
Designer: Eileen Diss
Lighting: Rupert Murray
Costume: Leonore McDonagh
Assistant lighting: Sinead McKenna
Footfalls:
May: Justine Mitchell
Voice: Susan Fitzgerald
Director: Alan Gilsenan
Designer: Eileen Diss
Lighting: Rupert Murray
Costume: Leonore McDonagh
Assistant lighting: Sinead McKenna
2006-04-03 02:24:00