ROCKABY/OHIO IMPROMPTU. To 28 March.
London
ROCKABY/OHIO IMPROMPTU
by Samuel Beckett
Barbican (The Pit) To 28 March 2006
Mon-Fri 7pm & 9pm Sat 4pm & 8pm
Runs 35min No interval (short pause between plays)
TICKETS: 0845 121 6833 (booking fee)
www.barbican.org.uk (reduced booking fee)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 22 March
The drama of darkness visible, yet exhilaratingly beautiful.
This is the opening of the ‘Beckett Centenary Festival 2006’ with productions from Dublin’s Gate Theatre filling London’s Barbican and Pit Theatres for the period around Samuel Beckett’s birthday (on, wouldn’t you know it? Good Friday, 13 April 1906).
A Beckett Festival sounds a contradiction. But Beckett, in all his black-and-white terseness, never wastes a word or image. Perfection of form and fineness of detail make his dark material paradoxically life-affirming.
At a discussion during the 1984 Edinburgh Festival’s Beckett season, someone said this playwright was essentially a sculptor. And these pieces each present a searing image. Movement is like a kinetic display; words are like the moulded lines of a sculpture, helping define this image.
“More” is Rockaby’s first word, but spoken in agony and out of necessity, summoning the recorded words that set the play’s old woman rocking in her chair, recalling ever-deeper isolation (the self-effacing retreat of the figure in Beckett’s Film is a parallel), until the dreamily remembering voice reaches a stark obscenity.
Loveday Ingram’s production doesn’t quite hit the bulls-eye. The rocking has a forced pace, out-of-kilter with the voice-tone. Yet Sian Phillips makes the eye-closed tiredness between sections seem like a longing for extinction, which instead leads back to accursed memory and ever-repeated rocking.
Ohio Impromptu is splendid. Two old men sit at adjacent sides of a table. One reads, the other indicates by knocks and occasional other, gentler gestures when his companion is to stop, repeat or continue. There’s a contrast between the events of story being told and the stasis of the characters, their long hair the sole sign of virility.
Peter Cadden’s Listener seems initially a firm-set rock-slab. Yet, without overt emotion, Cadden progressively suggests the regret that motivates his interventions. Harry Towb’s quiet, careful Reader, employing carefully-gradated cadences, is a masterly performance in Nick Dunning’s production, with its subtle variations in voice and sounds. The deep image of loss is silently summed up in a hat sitting on the table. Here again, an image tells a story; what these pieces lack in length they make up for in depth.
Rockaby
Woman: Sian Phillips
Director: Loveday Ingram
Designer: Eileen Diss
Lighting: Davy Cunningham
Costume: Leonore McDonagh
Ohio Impromptu
Reader: Harry Towb
Listener: Peter Cadden
Director: Nick Dunning
Designer: Eileen Diss
Lighting: Davy Cunningham
Costume: Leonore McDonagh
2006-03-23 01:21:08