Review: Traces – an evening of Beckett one-acts

From start to finish this production was shrouded in mystery. It began by gathering outside Younger Hall waiting to be picked up rather anonymously by a bus with no introduction and ended sitting in silence at the end of the last act in Kinkell Byre waiting for a cast to applaud that never reappeared. As is to be expected in an evening of one-acts, some were better-received than others. The mystery was mystical in some, and exhausting in others.   

The first act, Play, is a confessional retelling of an affair told by a man, his mistress and his wife whilst kneeling in urns (here replaced by barrels), with only their heads visible. It was set in pitch-blackness, a torch-light shone on each frighteningly made-up face in turn of speech, mimicking an interrogation. The torch-light was held shakily, reinforcing the interpretation that the light represents a fourth presence – a fourth, inquisitive character. They spoke at lightning speed, each character relishing their chance to offload their individual version of events. Because of this tempo, Play requires a cast with extremely good diction. This was a minor problem for Clara Engelhardt who could have been slightly more articulate, but whose facial expressions were unnervingly good. Having seen Adelaide Waldrop playing ‘unhinged’ women in two other more naturalistic productions in St Andrews, I was interested to see how she would deal with this stranger, more detached format.  She handled it well, with a stern distant expression on her face throughout. Brendan Macdonald however was exquisite at communicating Play’s dark humour, instigating nervous laughter from the audience at his hiccups and at his lines “I always preferred Lipton’s” and “We had fun trying to work it out” which appeared crudely incongruous alongside the women’s talk of misery and suicide. This act was in my opinion the most riveting to watch, and the best of the three in terms of acting, writing and direction.

Footfalls came next and consisted of a dialogue between a ghostly woman pacing up and down in a lone strip of light and her mother. The mother’s physical presence in the scene is ambiguous as she is never seen but only heard from an eerie point in the back-stage darkness. The story is debatable (as is most Beckett) but it’s clear that these two women have been living together an uncomfortable amount of time with various ailments and painful memories that they ‘revolve’ in much the same way that the daughter revolves around the stage, pacing, turning, and pacing back again. Waldrop’s drone was terrifying, and Engelhardt’s vulnerable responses aptly complemented the obscurity of the dialogue. This act benefited most from the atmosphere of the barn. The rain which had begun in Play reached its stormy peak in Footfalls, adding an extra external source of cruelty to the scene’s already present helplessness. And the image of a moth flickering in and out of the lone strip of light was a very beautiful coincidence.  

Rockaby consisted of Clara Engelhardt rocking methodically in a rocking-chair in and out of a line of light to a voice-over which repeated the phrase “Time she stopped”, among others, very repetitively and very slowly, documenting the last few minutes of an old woman’s life. While the previous two acts worked well on stage, Rockaby made me think that much of Beckett’s writing is better-suited to film, where the disjointed parts can become more disjointed and the static dullness can be less static and dull. Although some people really enjoyed the trance-like lulling of this piece, I found it crossed the line into self-indulgence and tried its audience’s patience to intolerable levels. Some people resorted to laughter in suppressing their maddening boredom, one audience member even confessed that he wanted to get up and “finish her off” himself. This was no fault of the acting or of the director, and it’s difficult to even say whether it was a fault of the writer, as Beckett would probably have enjoyed the audience discomfort present in Kinkell Byre that night. But I did feel that it was an unfortunate way to end an otherwise gripping production.

The bus journey back gave me the time to reflect on links between the acts. A raw and relentless determination to quash suffering and go on living pervaded each act with the frantic confessions of Play, the compulsive pacing of Footfalls and the repetitive pleading request for “More!” in Rockaby. But then each piece also constantly reminded us of the ultimate fragility of human existence – the ghostly makeup of Play, the talk of injections and old age in Footfalls and the death in Rockaby. Human interactions cleverly diminished as the actor count on-stage decreased, and each act brought the subject matter to a less intimate and a more distant level. We began with a heated account of a desperate, passionate love affair and we ended with an old woman alone in her room dying very slowly.

This production flaunted an impressive cast and innovative direction. I just wish Beckett had written more one-acts like Play. And perhaps fewer like Rockaby.

Performed on April 25, 2012 at Kinkell Byre.

Photo by Samuel McCulloch, design by Adelaide Waldrop.