PLAY/FOOTFALLS/NOT I. To 4 October.
Glasgow
PLAY/FOOTFALLS/NOT I
by Samuel Beckett
Arches Theatre To 4 October 2003
Tue-Sat 8pm
Runs 1hr No interval
TICKETS: 0141 565 1023
www.thearches.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 September
A short, sharp evening: three minimal masterpieces, two of them finely revived.Anniversary Beckett underneath the arches - Waiting for Godot's 50th comes later in October (8-25). Meanwhile here's Play (3 heads sticking out of urns), 40 years on from its British premiere, plus Not I first seen in 1973 at the Royal Court with Billy Whitelaw. And Whitelaw's later piece Footfalls.
Startling as these Beckett plays are in their unreal images, they are far from empty exercises. All - most, anyway - of human life is there. Even if Beckett might not think that added up to much.
Andy Arnold's Play is very clear. And unstylish enough to have Beckett revolving in his urn. The playwright seems always to have encouraged as flat - and in this play, rapid - a delivery as possible. The dead remembering life without colour or emotion.
Arnold's production gives the three characters plummy English accents and makes the recounting of their eternal triangle love and jealousy saga laden with feeling and realistic cadences. Shut your eyes and forget the (rather unconvincing) urns and you could be listening to a real story of home counties canoodling, recalled through intercutting monologues.
This style itself was unfamiliar enough for early 1960s National Theatre audiences, but a decade on came Robert Patrick and Kennedy's Children, which began the format's road to familiarity.
It could, then, largely be a standard Radio 4 afternoon play, if not for the linguistic precision, the framing moments where all three speak at once, and the joke of the Man's recurring burp.
A pity the urns don't look more encompassing - it's hard not to imagine the actors standing behind them. And the performers are really too young for the experiences they describe as in their past.
But though strains show at times - Stephen Clyde's man particularly making a vocal effort to age - the production's well worth seeing. These recalls of life and failed happiness from urn-buried, dead-faced creatures - particularly shocking when they stare silently out, or try and burble their experiences at once - are comic, and unbearably moving.
The most recent slice is Footfalls. And, here, it's a disappointment. Muireann Kelly's movement seems dutiful acting rather than the compulsive, compulsory pacing of a life where time hangs heavy. If only, characters imply, we were older and nearer the end of this tedious task of existence.
Kelly's movement also seems sloppy, lacking the precise sense of weariness. There is, though, a sharpness in the maternal voice interrogating her.
It belongs to Pauline Goldsmith, who ends the short, intense evening with a blistering account of Not I. Here, we see only a sharply illuminated mouth, gabbling away. Its owner, who's sent a life not able to speak, suddenly finds herself pouring forth memory and experience. If ever a play needs repeated hearings, or study of the written script to seek out its detail, it's this.
But noticeable at one seeing is the repeated denial of self: 'What? Who? No. She.' - the phrase builds in Goldsmith's performance to a horrified shriek, followed by suppressed force and horrified denial as it recurs.
Stephen Clyde's cowled Auditor, across the stage from the Mouth, needs some light. It's almost impossible to notice - even if you're looking for them - his shrugging responses to this phrase in the gloom of Steven Rowe's (non-)lighting for the character.
Never mind; this is a thrillingly compulsive account, worthy to be set by the memory of Whitelaw's and a fine climax to a short, sharp evening - one well worth searching out during the remaining week.
PLAY:
W2: Muireann Kelly
W1: Pauline Goldsmith
M: Stephen Clyde
FOOTFALLS:
May: Muireann Kelly
Voice: Pauline Goldsmith
NOT I:
Mouth: Pauline Goldsmith
Auditor: Stephen Clyde
Director: Andy Arnold
Designer: Sarah Paulley
Lighting: Steven Rowe
2003-09-28 20:25:33