Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby, a Royal Court Theatre and Lisa Dwan production in association with Cusack Projects Ltd, at The Lowry, Manchester, 23rd-27th September 2014
This trilogy of late plays by Beckett is organised around three striking images. Not I has its lips, teeth and tongue isolated by a narrow horizontal column of light. Footfalls has its white nightgown and the woman’s face in the half-light. Rockaby has its rocking chair, the clutching hands, and the face half in and half out of the darkness. There is total blackout in the auditorium throughout, and during this performance at the Lowry Theatre there were sharp intakes of breath when the lights came up to reveal each of the three figures on stage.
These are also three plays about women. Lisa Dwan plays four female characters across the evening, all of them compelled in one way or another: to speak, to rock, to pace, to be called mother, to keep “revolving it all” in the mind.
Not I has attracted the most attention during this run, which began at the Royal Court in January and has now been on tour since the middle of July. At the Lowry the physicality of the role was very apparent: Mouth strained at its restraints as it gabbled out the words; here and there the upper lip got pulled out of the light. Fast as it went, not everything that was said could be caught, but through the whole piece there were patterns and repetitions and shifts in the tone of voice that might snag and leave an impression: “God” was said with a sneer; “the brain” was gritted out; the catalogue of body parts was ticked off in a second; “no!…she!” was said more like a correction than a plea.
The paradox in Not I is the degree of control involved in producing a monologue which is, at bottom, about uncontrollable speech. The tension between them was part of what made this performance interesting. Control came out slightly on top. There was something defiant and even a little stubborn about Dwan’s voice as it corrected the silent thoughts (the “dull roar in the skull”) that seem, in the script, to want to take over the mouth.
At the Lowry, Not I provoked some giggling, whispers, and even its own moderately rebellious chuntering through part of the monologue. But Footfalls quieted everyone down. For me, this was the standout piece of the three, especially the second and third parts where the light became dimmer and colder and Dwan modulated between the voices of mother and daughter: tense, distressed, cruel, and momentarily furious.
In Footfalls a woman paces up and down a narrow strip of lit floor and speaks to her mother, a voice emerging from the dark further upstage. She offers mechanically to care for her. The mother and the daughter then tell stories in turn: this pacing up and down seems to have been going on since the daughter’s childhood; there is a kind of tussle between the two whenever they speak.
The tension was played out in Dwan’s voice and in her face. “Will you never have done… revolving it all?”, asks the mother. The daughter’s response was hissed back: “It?” Throughout the performance Dwan held her left arm across her chest, as though protectively, but with the fingers pinched lightly at the top of the night gown, rather than clutching tightly. There is a reference in the play to “his poor arm”, implicitly that of Christ on the cross; whether or not the allusion was intended, this arm across the chest also seemed “poor” or weak. More importantly, the face and the voice carried the strain.
The pacing to and fro was measured and composed to begin with, but as the play went on the hitches and hesitations became more apparent. The sense of distress became more pronounced, and what lingered most of all was the astonishing coldness and violence of the “Mrs W.” narrative in the final section. At the very end of the play, some imperceptible flicker in the lights as they faded out left Dwan’s character a ghost or a skull for a moment: a faint afterimage of May.
In fact, the dominant effect in all three plays was perhaps not so much images as afterimages—not only visual, but also auditory. The plays all carry this potential, and the production seemed to want to draw it out. As the lights went down on Mouth in Not I the lips looked to be reaching up for air as they made inarticulate, struggling sounds, as though being smothered. At the very end of Rockaby, the woman’s head fell abruptly to one side, so that the final image was of her neck and jaw, at rest, picked up by two narrow beams of light. But the more compelling afterimage was of the monologue itself, or rather of its incantatory repetitions: close of a long day; time she stopped; stop her eyes; rock her off. These phrases circle around in the course of the play, and they were lodged with me, at least, well after the house lights came up.
Rockaby begins with a woman sitting in a rocking chair, at rest. She opens her eyes and says: “More.” Dwan made this more tremulous and fearful than assertive, questioning rather than instructing. The chair rocks, and the woman’s own recorded voice emerges out of the darkness. The story, emerging out of those revolving fragments, is about an utter absence of relations. Whereas part of the power of Footfalls was in the inflections Dwan gave to a difficult and unbreakable relationship between mother and daughter, in Rockaby it was in the intimation of loneliness and profound weariness.
Beckett’s three plays offer a series of female roles in minimally contextualised situations where all are nonetheless made to inhabit a position in which they are bound or compelled. This is part of what is troubling about the plays, and was part of what was arresting about this production: the edges of defiance, fury and weariness in Dwan’s performance together with the gathering sense of distress meant that her characters didn’t just inhabit their roles in service of a striking image. They showed the strain.
Iain Bailey