Review: A Beckett Evening

No one could accuse the Lace Market Theatre of playing it safe, or going for the soft option. You’re likely to come away from their current double offering puzzled, disturbed – changed even. And if you go with someone else you’ll be arguing about it all the way home.

Both plays, are about as far removed from your three-act drawing-room comedy as it’s possible to imagine. This applies especially to Not I, the sixteen-minute curtain raiser.

The set is simply a plain black flat with a hole some eight feet from the floor. All we can see through this hole is a mouth – vivid red lips and white teeth. It’s frightening.

And this mouth, a woman’s, speaks for the entire length of the play, in a beautifully clear and well-modulated Ulster accent. It also screams sometimes. This is Maeve Doggett in a remarkable performance. All the while, barely visible, a tall, cowled, nightmarish figure stands stage-left, occasionally raising his arms a little. We never see a face.

Locked-in syndrome? Is the woman dead? What it all means is up to the individual. There are all sorts of depths and possibilities.

Happy Days is set on what at initial glance is a holiday beach, but is actually a post-apocalyptic blasted wilderness of endless sand. A middle-aged woman, Winnie (Cynthia Marsh), buried up to her armpits but dressed for a happy day out, is awoken by an alarm. She cleans her teeth, spruces herself up and proceeds to talk.

She gives us ambiguous fragments about her (or it could be her daughter’s) infancy, her youth, her married life and much else. She’s joined at intervals by husband Willie (Daniel Bryant), who only occasionally grunts a response or reads a snippet from an old-fashioned paper. A gun is produced.

By the second half, Winnie is up to her neck in sand. Just before she expires Willie attempts either to touch her or shoot her – who knows? But he too dies.

It’s weirdly erotic, packed with sexual innuendo and half-concealed smut; and pathos. And it’s distinguished by a great performance from Marsh, who can add or subtract decades by a simple change of expression. And by the visually stunning and clever set design and painted backcloth.

Even after all these decades Not I (1972) and Happy Days (1962) are still way out on the frontiers of what we mean by the very term “theatre”.

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A BECKETT EVENING
Nottingham Lace Market Theatre

All this week there are two plays for the price of one again, and this time spotlighting Samuel Beckett's lesser known plays "Not I" and "Happy Days"/ the Lace Market Theatre are renown for producing slightly off the wall productions and these two avant garde plays certainly fall into that category.

"Not I" was my favourite of the two and was considerably shorter and the most interesting of the two, both visually and aurally. Set in pitch black with just a spotlight on a mouth (and a lovely set of teeth), owned by Maeve Doggett, about eight feet above the stage, This is a monologue about a woman of about 70 years old who was abandoned after birth and it seems suffered some trauma in her life which is not clarified, containing random sentences, some often repeated. In the darkness there is also "The Auditor" who is a shadowy figure who makes four movements only.

"Happy Days" is a two hander with the majority of the script being performed by Cynthia Marsh as Winnie, with just a few sentences from Daniel Bryant as Willie, and is one of Beckett's happy plays! Winnie is buried in the sand up to her chest, in the second half it rises to her neck, and is in the mode of a seaside postcard.

As in "Not I" there are lots of jumbled ramblings, although not as frantic, and again many terms and phrases are repeated,and also again quite difficult to get the gist of what the theme of the play was. Beckett though has stated that "strangeness was a necessary condition of the play". Maybe a little too strange to keep focused and I found my mind wandering at times. In the second act of the play it gets decidedly more depressing and the image of her disappearing further into the sand (well I assumed it was sand) could well be a visual image of her life, sinking ever deeper.

This I think is my first taste of Beckett, although I knew of his "Waiting For Godot", so didn't really know what to expect, but they are odd little plays and you have to applaud the Lace Market Theatre for daring to be different. The problem with "different" though is that theatre goers are always a little reserved with "different" and this showed with the amount of audience members in attendance.

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Gareth Morgan went to see the Lace Market Theatre's Beckett evening

Samuel Beckett, Nobel laureate and obfuscating poet of oblique macabre images, is not the standard fare of local amateur theatres who instead usually play variations upon the theme of bed hopping philanderers and someone losing their trousers. However, the Lace Market Theatre's courageous programming isn't the stuff of your standard amateur theatre. In staging Beckett's Not I and Happy Days they demonstrate their desire to stretch their members, and their skills, as much as their audience.

Not I, which opens proceedings, is a short 15 minute spiralling monologue delivered at pace by a solo mouth, about 8ft up, against a backdrop of sheer black. The stream of consciousness that spills from the lip-sticked mouth above the audience is a jumble of phrases and snatches, often repeated, to the point that as the audience you build narrative yourself. It's a haunting spectacle and tones of a woman's Northern Irish accentted voice become both a lullaby and ghost story in the minds of those listening. Director Richard Minkley retains the usually cut silent Auditor (one of the few deviations Beckett ever sanctioned), who stands cowled in a downstage corner. This hooded figure is a distracting presence and whilst he operates as a form for the voice to 'speak' to, his being there causes the eyes to natural drift away from the mouth which should be a totally captivating focal point.

The second piece of this double bill, Happy Days, also inhabits a space that is unclear: it is as much British holiday beach (think Skeggy on a scorcher) as arid salt-pan desert. In this we find Winnie, buried to her waist in sand. Her day pans out before her, endless until the bell and unchanging, much like the wasteland before her. She removes the items from her bag in an almost ritualistic manner - frantically cleaning her teeth, filing her nails, kissing her revolver. Winnie speaks but, like the voice in Not I, it is just fragments and in further comparison with the earlier play there is a semi-silent companion, here it's Willie, Winnie's husband, who on the rare occasions he does speak just grunts unintelligibly or reads personals from a faded newspaper. She is trapped in a scorched wasteland with her aloof husband trying to keep despair at bay with her ritual, snatches of song and a parasol. By act two Winnie is encased in sand up to her neck and her hopefulness wanes, no longer so strong is her denial of her ever-diminishing world.

Both plays have manful performances from good community actors: both Maeve Doggett, as voice in Not I, and Cynthia Marsh, as Winnie, give good accounts but the whole thing lacks the polish that fully realised Beckett could, would and should have. The direction is laboured and dry, although this is mitigated by the Beckett Estate's insistence of non deviation from the precise stage mechanics laid down by the author. It also lacks the rhythm that these plays' spoken text demands. It is through this lack of crisp, staccato rhythm that both the focus and the lightness and humour became lost. And, yes - Beckett is a very funny playwright! These may be harsh criticisms and there were other elements of the productions that I enjoyed, not least the beautifully painted backcloth for Happy Days. However, if this sort of play is going to be staged it needs the rigours of direction and flow that makes it totally work.

This a full marks for effort production and I love that the Lace Market takes these out-there programming decisions. Equally, with Brecht, Lorca, Strindberg, Shaw, Chekhov and the brutally brilliant The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh (writer-director of In Bruges/Seven Psychopaths) coming up in the next season of work, I'm looking forward to my next visit already.

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