PLAY/CATASTROPHE. To 23 April.
London
PLAY/CATASTROPHE
by Samuel Beckett
Barbican Theatre (The Pit) To 23 April 2006
Thu 7pm, Fri 8pm, Sat-Sun 2.30pm & 8pm
Runs 55min One interval
TICKETS: 0845 120 7554
www.barbican.org.uk (reduced booking fee online)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 19 April
BITE-sized Beckett makes a meal.
This season of Beckett plays from Dublin’s Gate Theatre shows, at the writer’s centenary, his unreal world. Yet all human life, in a strange way, is here. The tersely-titled Play contains all the elements of an old-style West End, or boulevard, drama. There’s adultery, jealous rage and betrayal within a world of butlers, fingernail-filing and taking of tea.
Beckett presents these vanities of human life from the distance of death. The 3 characters are talking heads in burial vases, speaking rapidly as a spot of light bounces between them (fiendishly difficult: no time for a slip, hesitation or any piece of physical business to cover the naked words. These actors truly urn their money).
What’s more, the whole action, its implied fury, bathos and even a repeated burp, is performed twice, repeated like a play, deprived of life’s spontaneity. Like others in this season, these productions shows the Gate taking an individual line with Beckett. Here a halfway point of silence and simultaneous speech leads, each time, to a softening of the impersonal, rattling tones.
19 years later Beckett dedicated Catastrophe to Czech dissident writer Vaclav Havel (prisoner of one regime and subsequently president of another). Beckett ingeniously marries political dictatorship with that of the theatre where the director is god and the production commands its audience. The Protagonist, stood on a plinth, is a manipulated figure, greyed-out, concealed or revealed at the Director’s will. Until the end, when the complacency of authority is undermined and the protagonist takes the freedom an actor has in performance, raising his head during the crowd’s applause.
Under severe flaxen plaits, Olwen Fouere’s Assistant grotesquely mixes straightlaced, jacket-tightening severity with a sexual waddle. Perching her posterior in space as she leans to light the Director’s cigar, her movement slows even more grotesquely as obedience falters and she tries out the boss’s chair in a politico-theatrical world of ritual and opportunism.
This grim parade of oppression, the Pit stage for once opened full-width in the Beckett season, begins with an anonymous industrial roar. Yet, in the end, Catastrophe asserts the humanity underlying Beckett’s bleak world-pictures.
Play:
Man: Nick Dunning
Woman 1: Ingrid Craigie
Woman 2: Catherine Walker
Director: Michael Barker-Caven
Designer: Eileen Diss
Lighting: Rupert Murray
Costume: Leonore McDonagh
Lighting assistant: Sibnead McKenna
Catastrophe:
Director: owen Roe
Assistant: Olwen Fouere
Protagonist: Karl Sullivan
Director: Selina Cartmell
Designer: Eileen Diss
Lighting: Rupert Murray
Costume: Leonore McDonagh
Lighting assistant: Sinead McKenna
2006-04-20 12:58:04