I decided on one blog for the Barbican’s International Beckett Season after I’d written about Sydney Theatre Company’s Waiting for Godot (https://garethjames.wordpress.com/2015/06/10/waiting-for-godot) so here’s the rest…..
Rough for Theatre I & Act Without Words II
I’d seen both of these short plays before, but their pairing, and the outdoor location, made this a very different and somehow more intense experience. In the first a blind man is playing, well scratching, his fiddle on the street when he is befriended by a one-legged man in a wheelchair. They seem to be exploring the possibility and potential mutual benefit of hanging out together.
The second piece starts with two men in sleeping bags. One is prodded by a rod from the side and proceeds to get out of the sleeping bag and dress, an agonising process which takes an age. After he undresses again and returns to his bag, the second man does the same, except he’s quicker and the process is easier, with more than a touch of OCD. When he returns to his bag, the first man starts again as the play ends. Both characters are mute.
They took place in the Barbican Estate, the first outside St. Giles Cripplegate and the second by a small lake nearby. The evening sounds – planes, a helicopter, birds, passers-by, children playing, a distant choir – all seemed part of it. It was a lovely evening and rather a unique experience and the performances by Trevor Knight in the first, Bryan Burroughs in the second and Raymond Keane in both were superb.
All That Fall
When I saw this radio play on stage 2.5 years ago, I wondered what it would be like on the radio (https://garethjames.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/all-that-fall). Well, this was the next best thing – listening to it siting in a rocking chair in a carpeted Pit Theatre, with gentle orange light emanating from lots of light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. We’re all facing the same direction, a wall of orange spotlights, and that’s it. The spotlights sometimes shine, in differing configurations, and the overhead bulbs come on and off, bright and dim, but it’s also pitch black at times.
The experience didn’t really live up to the excellence of the idea, I’m afraid, adding too little value to what I would imagine it’s like listening at home. The answer to my earlier question appears to be that it’s better staged after all, even if that wasn’t Beckett’s intention.
Krapp’s Last Tape
This sits alongside Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days as one of only a quartet of Beckett’s ‘fully formed’ pieces and actors are understandably attracted to the monologue of a 69-year-old man looking back and listening to his annual recordings as he begins the final one. American avant-garde artist Robert Wilson has lengthened it by 20 minutes. It begins with a long period of very loud rain and thunderstorms with a mute Krapp in clown-like make-up on stage eating two bananas. He eventually sits at his desk, though it then didn’t feel like any other performance of this piece. I can’t be sure, but there seemed to be a lot less dialogue, both live and recorded. The vast Barbican stage had high level windows on three sides, what looked like cages at the rear and tables with boxes and papers on both sides. Everything is monochrome, except Wilson’s red socks. It’s a very different playing space to any other I’ve seen this piece in.
He had a lot to live up to as I’ve seen Max Wall, Harold Pinter, John Hurt and Michael Gambon as Krapp, and he didn’t. I was surprised that someone as precious about his work as Wilson would take such liberties with someone else’s, especially as he knew Beckett. I was also surprised the Beckett estate didn’t intervene as they have in the past (Deborah Warner’s Footfalls, to name but one). This is Wilson’s Krapp, not Beckett’s.
I missed the brief visit of Lessness and had seen Lisa Dwan’s Not I/Footfalls/Rockaby at the Royal Court (https://garethjames.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/not-i-footfalls-rockaby), so that’s it!
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