A dark night with Beckett and some super Sondheim
Royal Court, London SW1
THREE PLAYS, three images. A mouth suspended i n pitchest black above the stage, a ghostly woman in her night clothes pacing up and down a landing and, finally, a woman in a rocking chair, gently swaying towards death. I cannot remember a more intense evening at the theatre. For all the spectaculars mounted by “immersive” theatre companies, none that I’ve seen transport the audience more completely than these three late works by Samuel Beckett.
Though never intended to be performed together, German director Walter Asmus binds them with one terrific actor, Lisa Dwan, but also with total darkness out of which each short play emerges and ultimately fades. The effect is like being transported to a corner of the universe haunted by human purgatory. There is something of the ancient Greeks in the monumental suffering. Except that gods here are only explicitly present when the first play’s main character, Mouth, breaks into cackles of laughter at the notion of a supreme being — not over God’s existence but the idea that he is merciful.
Concessions must have been won from Health and Safety for the staging of this trilogy, which transfers to the West End next month. Every light in the theatre, including toilet and exit signs, is extinguished, just as it was when Billie Whitelaw first performed Not I in 1973. The resulting darkness is total. So when Dwan’s disembodied, jabbering Mouth appears, the eye has no option but to anchor itself to the only visible thing in the auditorium. And Dwan is mesmerising as a woman for whom memory and anxiety are only tolerable if they are recalled in the third person.
You will get more out of this racing monologue if you read it first. But Beckett’s intention was to simply experience the thing — all 15 minutes of it when Whitelaw first performed it here, though Dwan has whittled it down to eight-and-a-half. The playlets that follow are measured by metronomic pacing in the case of Footfalls, and the motions of a rocking chair in Rockaby, which whispers of approaching death. It’s a view of the human condition that offers more humour than you would expect, but no consolation. Here in the darkness, not even theatre’s greatest comfort — that we are not alone -— is allowed.
St James Theatre, London SW1
NO COMPOSER and lyricist writes so insightfully about his audience as Sondheim. The characters are often an urbane, sophisticated lot, many of whomhavedevelopedajaundicedview of life, marriage and relationships.
For this revue of songs drawn from Sondheim shows of the past, director Alastair Knights has assembled a classy cast of five, including the excellent Damian Humbley. Since his terrific turn as Charles Kringas in Maria Friedman’s revival of Merrily We Roll Along, Humbley is destined to be a Sondheim regular. And nobody can act a song better than Janie Dee, who simultaneously delivers cynicism and vulnerability, two qualities that so often exist side by side in compositions by musical theatre’s only living genius. The dinner suited band lends an unnecessary stiffness to the evening. Aside from that, there is nothing not to like.