BWW Reviews: ADELAIDE FESTIVAL 2015: BECKETT TRIPTYCH Brings Together Three Of Beckett's Short Plays

Reviewed by Barry Lenny, Tuesday 24th February 2015

The State Theatre Company of South Australia is presenting Beckett Triptych, a collection of three of Samuel Beckett's one-act plays, is this year's entry into the Adelaide Festival. The three plays Footfalls, Eh Joe and Krapp's Last Tape, are being performed in the State Theatre Company's two spaces, the Scenic Workshop and the Rehearsal Room, the audience being divided in half, each group seeing either Footfalls or Eh Joe, then changing venues for the other of these two. All come together for the third play.

The set and costume designer for all three plays, Ailsa Paterson, has created extremely different settings for each play, beginning with a narrow strip of timber flooring for Footfalls, on which the actor paces to and fro, a bare room with boarded window and door, a simple iron bedstead, but with added perspective to make it look deeper than it actually is, for Eh Joe and, finally, a small raised timbered platform with a desk and chair, surrounded claustrophobically by furniture and other odds and ends, the things collected over a lifetime, for Krapp's Last Tape.

Ben Flett designed the lighting for Footfalls and Krapp's Last Tape. For the former, overhead lighting dimly illuminated the strip of flooring, representing the hallway with occasional added dim lighting on the actor's face This gave an eeriness to the setting, almost a sinister feel. The latter has one lamp above the desk, lighting the plinth, with all around very dimly lit, leaving us with an impression of what is there, rather than any great detail. Chris Petridis designed the lighting for Eh Joe, overhead down-lights in the 'ceiling' following Joe as he walks about the room at the start, then a constant wash of low level lighting thereafter.

Directors, set designers, and lighting designers are always hampered a little in working with a Beckett play. In life he was what we might today term a 'control freak'. This continues through his estate, where performances are monitored by his family to ensure that all of his stage directions are followed explicitly, as stated in the performance agreement, or contract. To a very large degree, any performance that an audience will see tends to be a close copy, almost a clone, of the original performance. There is little, if any, space left for new input or creativity. The sound design for all three plays is by Jason Sweeney.

Footfalls is directed by Geordie Brookman and features Pamela Rabe as May, a woman in her 40s, with Sandy Gore providing the voice of May's 90 year old mother, with whom she converses. The mother is dying, or might already be dead and her voice only being heard in May's head. May herself may already be a ghost, telling a story of a girl named Amy and her mother, the anagram of May's name suggesting to us that, perhaps, she is telling her own tale.

May takes nine very audible shuffling steps and turns around, time and time again, in silence. Her dress is tattered, the hem worn to shreds from the constant dragging over a timber floor. One instantly thinks of Miss Haversham in Great Expectations, that tragic creation of Charles Dickens, who stopped time when she was jilted on her wedding day, wearing her wedding dress until her death, surrounded by the decaying reception feast and wedding cake. Paterson's costuming evokes a similar feeling of a character who is existing, but not living.

Pamela Rabe presents us with bleakness, remoteness, a study of somebody drained of life, and only going through the motions. She does a wonderful job of creating that ambiguous atmosphere that leaves us wondering whether she is real or a ghost. Her performance is wonderfully sombre and as carefully measured as her steps.

Eh Joe is directed by Corey McMahon, with Paul Blackwell as a lonely man in his 50s, haunted by his past. This was originally written for television, and later adapted for the stage.

Blackwell does not speak a word. After looking out of the window and the door, then in the cupboard and under the bed to ensure that nobody is watching him, he then sits for the entire performance, motionless, on the foot of his bed, the only piece of furniture in the room. He is dressed in slippers and a dressing gown suggesting that this is now his entire existence. A woman's voice speaks to him, a past lover who retells the tragic story of another of his past lovers. Pamela Rabe supplies the voice in his mind that forces him to face his past.

This is a master class in great acting. Blackwell conveys an amazing range of thoughts, reactions and emotions in the tiniest of changes of expression. He seems to have total control of every individual muscle in his face, the tiniest change conveying so much, while sitting completely still, with unblinking eyes.

We see all this because Paterson's room has a scrim across the front through which we see Joe. A video camera is aimed at his face and that image is projected onto this screen, so that we see Joe sitting on the bed through the semitransparent close-up image of his face. At specific times the camera zooms in a little tighter so that, by the end, his eyes fill the huge screen. His hollow eyes alone tell a story of loss and regret.

Krapp's Last Tape is directed by Nescha Jelk, with Peter Carroll in the role of Krapp, a 69 year old man whose most important possession is his antiquated reel to reel tape recorder on which, each year on his birthday, he records his memories of the year and reviews tapes from his past. This birthday he listens to the tape that he made when he was 30, in which he recalls ridiculing himself as he was in his twenties and, among other things, remembers a girl that he took out in a punt. Like Ebenezer Scrooge and his desire to be rich, Krapp abandoned love to pursue his career as a writer, a failed endeavour.

The play usually opens with him getting a banana from a drawer and dropping the skin on the floor. He walks away, a vacant expression on his face, pauses, walks back and slips on it with one foot, catching himself before he falls, then picks it up and throws it off into the darkness. He gets another but, as he goes to drop the skin he recalls his slip, and throws it well away into the dark. Jelk has turned this into a full blown bit of Commedia dell'Arte, a well-worn sketch of walking to and fro, stepping over the skin, stopping at the skin and walking away and, eventually, rather clumsily and clearly deliberately, slipping on it. This effectively gives the audience permission to laugh, which they do, with Carroll, playing it for laughs from then on, emphasising lines, words, and expressions to turn the work into a broad comedy in the early stages. Although the gag has been used on stage and in film for over a century, Charlie Chaplin in The Tramp being its first cinematic appearance, a fresh banana peel is not actually that slippery, it is rotted peels that cause people to slip.

As time passes the mood changes as Carroll shows us Krapp's reactions to the early tape, initially making fun of his younger self, and laughing along, until arriving at his recorded memories of the girl in the punt, breaking off to insert a new on tape and begin recording his thoughts for the year. He again tries to lighten his mood, but removes the new tape and goes back to the girl in the punt, his mood deepening until the tape ends, all slips into silence, and a fade out of the light ends the play. Carroll nicely balances the comic with the poignant in this somewhat absurdist piece, finally revealing the depth of Krapp's despair at a life of poor decisions and missed opportunities.

This is an excellent start to State Theatre's year, and to the Adelaide Festival, so put in on your list.

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