Beckett Triptych
Directed by Geordie Brookman (Footfalls), Corey McMahon (Eh Joe), Nescha Jelk (Krapp's Last Tape). Set and Costume Design Ailsa Paterson. State Theatre Company Scenic Workshop and Rehearsal Room. Adelaide Festival Centre. Presented by the State Theatre Company of South Australia in association with the 2015 Adelaide Festival. February 20 - March 15.
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
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| Peter Carroll as Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape, Pamela Rabe as May in Footfalls and Paul Blackwell in Eh Joe in the State Theatre Company production of Beckett Triptych. Adelaide Festival 2015 |
While watching the State Theatre
Company’s outstanding production of the Beckett Triptych, I was reminded that Beckett
is indeed the actor’s playwright. The names of Billie Whitelaw, Jack McGowran
and Patrick Magee are inextricably linked with his works. Directors Geordie
Brookman (Footfalls), Corey Mcmahon (Eh Joe) and Nescha Jelk (Krapp’s Last
Tape) must count themselves blessed to have three of Australia’s finest to
interpret Beckett’s enigmatic pieces. In Footfalls, Pamela Rabe plays May,
tormented by her mother’s voice, spoken with frightening intimidation by Sandy
Gore. Paul Blackwell’s transfixed gaze attempts to blot out the unrelenting
jibe of the woman’s voice uttered with sinister accusation by Pamela Rabe in Eh
Joe. In Krapp’s Last Tape, Peter
Carroll is both the seventy year old Krapp, and the recorded voice of himself
at thirty nine, played on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, as he does
on every birthday. Directors and actors have created a feast of Beckett gems
that will whet the appetite for more and reveal not the absurdity of the text,
but rather the absurdity within the text and the characters, possessed by the
past, shackled by the present and condemned to a future.
State Theatre Company’s revealing
insight into the lives and minds of Beckett’s bewildered and bewildering
characters challenges an audience to listen, to consider and to witness the
poet’s musings. When asked whether Godot was God, Beckett replied curtly, “ If I had meant him to be God I would have
said so.” No wonder that he and Pinter held each other in such esteem. State
Theatre Company’s production of these three gems allows you, like Joe, to draw
back the curtains, but instead of the blank wall that shuts him off from an
outside world, you may see into the very heart and mind of May, Joe and Krapp.
But you must listen carefully and look closely, and you will find that it is
all quite simple really.
To begin, audiences are divided
in two. Half move into one space within the Adelaide Festival Centre to view Footfalls, while the other half move
into a different space to watch Eh Joe.
Both pieces are only twenty minutes in length. After an interval the entire
audience then moves into the larger space to watch the forty minute one act Krapp’s Last Tape. I move with the half
that will watch Footfalls first.
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| Pamela Rabe as May in Footflls |
One… Two….Three….. Four….. Five….
Six…. Seven…… Eight….. Nine…… Wheel. May repeats over and over the slow walk
along a narrow shaft of light. The foot falls softly, as though stirring the
dust of time and clouding the mind. The voice of a bed ridden mother rasps
through the air, taunting, deriding and belittling in its harshness. In a long
dark dress, which conjures recollection of Miss Havisham, May, trapped and
powerless bears the pain of her intimidation. Is it the solitary walk of the
victim of her life, or the tortured imaginings of a troubled mind? Rabe walks
ghostlike in her subservience to Sandy Gore’s intoning mother. Mesmerizing in
her inner pain, Rabe’s performance is hypnotic, doomed to everlasting
entrapment.
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| Paul Blackwell as Joe in Eh Joe |
Behind a scrim, a room reaches
back towards an upstage door. Joe (Paul Blackwell), moves from curtain to door
to the single bed to ensure that no one else inhabits the room. Completely
walled up, the room is his retreat, safe from the outside world enclosing him
within the prison of his tormented mind. As he sits at the end of the bed, his
projected face appears upon the scrim, gradually zooming in as if to peirce his
eyes to discover the truth behind the vacant stare. The woman’s voice ( Pamela
Rabe) is heard, insinuating, accusatory and threatening. Blackwell remains
immobile. Occasionally the eyes will blink, but the vacant stare persists as
the voice persists its journey through the recollections of a failed and
unfulfilled past. Nothing happens. Nobody comes. Nobody goes and yet everything
happens within Joe’s memory of experience. Of the three works, Eh Joe is
perhaps the least accessible in its static state. But listen carefully and a
life will emerge, without hope, without escape and without a voice of its own.
Blackwell’s immobility is the entry to his thoughts, and in the eyes Joe’s
powerlessness is palpable. That is the art of a great actor.
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| Peter Carroll as Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape |
Krapp’s Last Tape again pursues Beckett’s preoccupation with the
past. It is in a sense the most autobiographical account of memory, unfulfilled
dreams, an ironic obsession with the need to control his destiny, existential
ponderings. Aisla Paterson’s cluttered set of furniture and doors and narrow passageways
suggests the confused dilemma of Krapp’s existence. Carroll sits at a table,
spooling the tape of his thirty-ninth birthday. This is Beckett’s most
accessible piece, capturing his ironic wit and fascination for the silent movie
stars, with a joyful eye for the sight gag, as Carroll preoccupies himself with
the banana routine, or suddenly sweeps the objects from the table in spontaneous
petulance. Carroll’s performance is precise, controlled, eccentric and
magnetic. Beckett could not have wished for a better actor to capture the lean
physical discipline of Krapp’s obsession or the leapfrogging preoccupation of
his cluttered psyche.
Beckett
Triptych is a triumphant union of directors, whose understanding of Beckett,
evokes clarity and comprehension, and three performers who have interpreted the
characters with an appreciation of text, enormous empathy and the art to instill
the universality of the human experience in thought and deed.
The current resurgence of productions
of Beckett suggest that we live in a society searching for meaning, confronting questions
about ourselves and our place in society and the great existential conundrum of
the meaning of existence. State Theatre Company should be applauded for
mounting a production of three lesser
known works by a leading influential playwright of the twentieth century
which not only offers an immensely rewarding theatre experience
but through Beckett’s words and characters leads us some of the way towards the
answers.
Beckett Triptych is undoubtedly a theatrical tour de force of the
2015 Adelaide Festival.