Off to the Purcell Room last week for a bit of avant-garde, or at least what was avant-garde back in the seventies at the Royal Court. To wit, three Beckett shorts - Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby - more or less monologues all - at the Purcell Room, the first time I have seen any of them and the first time I have done drama in the Purcell Room: it seems a long time ago that it was a seven nights a week chamber music place. On this particular evening we had break dancing or some such in the QEH, with some of a diverse looking audience loitering just outside, just to make it clear that the South Bank Centre was not just for the arty types who might frequent Beckett.
The more or less sold out show only lasted an hour so we had the performer - the ballet trained (dancing, as a child, with no less than the great Rudolf) colleen called Lisa Dwan - and perhaps her producer doing a bit of chat and taking a few questions. One of which was from a rather emotional luvvie who had herself, at some point in the past, done nine exhausting performances of 'Not I' and who questioned the absence of the dark auditor called for in the text. She also recalled the waves of nausea which used to attack her before her performances of the work, something which I have heard of before in connection with concert piano players. (The absence of the auditor does not seem to sit well with the claim somewhere in Wikipedia, turned up after the event, that Beckett's nephew, his literary executor, is very fierce about people sticking to the stage directions of the master, of which the auditor is one).
We were sitting at the very back of the Purcell Room which meant that we found out that there was no aisle running along the back and no back exits. One could get a bit claustrophobic, luckily I did not on this occasion. The performance was conducted in complete darkness, which included turning off the emergency exit lights, which I wondered about. I also wondered, before the off, whether the sensory deprivation would send me to sleep, as it does in experiments on same, but it did not on this occasion.
The first piece involves strapping the actress into some sort of a scaffold with lights so arranged that all you see is the illuminated mouth - but in our case we were too far away for the mouth to look like anything other than a small spotlight, so the intended effect was rather lost on us. The performance was a tour de force of speed talking, but at such a speed that I could actually understand, consciously, anyway, very little of what was being said. Despite this, and for some reason, quite impressive and I was led to wonder whether Beckett had trained as a psycho-analyst, this being very much the thing during his formative years and he was in France where this was particularly very much the thing, but it turned out afterwards that he had been an analysand rather than an analyst, with no less an psycho-analytic eminence than Wilfred Bion, so perhaps that amounts to much the same thing for these purposes.
The second piece involves a lady walking up and down talking to her dying mother. On this occasion the actress doing the lady also did the voice of the mother.
The third piece had the lady in a rocking chair. I had wondered whether the first piece had been done by speeding up a recording (and decided that it had not) but the stage directions actually call for this piece to be a duet between the lady in the chair and her recorded voice. No idea whether it was or not.
All in all very arty. I would have done better had I done some preparation beforehand, but I am not sure that I am going to spend any more of my dwindling quality time on this sort of thing. Interesting to have seen and leave it at that. Stick with what I know.
On the way home I wondered about the monkey selfie (see 14th August) featured in an advertisement in the train. A selfie with bared teeth which looks like a grin and which is intended in this context to be a grin, but which was, as I understood it on the train, a very aggressive pose in a monkey. An understanding which turns out to be fairly wrong, having now taken a peek at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2555422/.
PS 1: until recently my only acquaintance with Beckett was knowing how to spell Godot, frightfully important during to have heard about during my adolescence, but more recently we have been to two different performances of 'Happy Days' (see, for example, February 23rd 2007 in the other place, http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/). And we have touched base with him regarding his internship with one J. Joyce and his daughter.
PS 2: the monkey paper referenced above is an example of a learned article which is not hiding behind a paywall. See 11th August.
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