Beckett Briefs is a great title for a program of short plays by Ireland’s most famously laconic writer. Those who take it literally can feel assured the evening won’t be a slog (the whole thing is 80 minutes), and those inclined to read underwear into it can laugh and look for eroticism. They’ll find it if they pay attention, because there’s plenty in all three plays in this Irish Repertory Theatre program directed by Ciarán O’Reilly: Not I, Play, and Krapp’s Last Tape. The sensual heat lurks—as always in Beckett—just beneath the ice of baffling metaphors of bodily impairment and seriocomic brooding on decrepitude, impotence, and death.
O’Reilly is a sharp, careful and sensitive Beckett director. His 2023 Endgame, starring John Douglas Thompson and Bill Irwin, was searing and drily hilarious. Most of this new program is excellent too, but there are a few wrinkles. The plays, from different periods of Beckett’s career, are performed in reverse compositional order, which may not have been the best choice. It frontloads the program with the harshest demands, on both actors and audience, and that rather shades the later works.
Beckett dramas from Play (1962-63) on, to remind you, don’t take place in fully dimensional worlds inhabited by personalized characters like the earlier Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, and Krapp. They’re built instead around precisely sculptured, starkly metaphorical, nearly still stage pictures from which enigmatic streams, and sometimes barely intelligible torrents, of words emanate. Their physical restrictions on actors are daunting. The actress of Not I (1972), for instance, must perform only with her mouth, with the rest of her head masked and strapped to a brace. The three actors in Play perform as disembodied heads, their bodies stuffed into funerary urns too short for them to stand in.
The plays written in this later vein are best grouped on their own. Following them with Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), Beckett’s most accessible and realistic drama and the one most welcoming to actor-personality, isn’t fair in a way. The audience is bound to be so relieved by the crowd-pleasing realism in Krapp that the other pieces look needlessly experimental and demanding in retrospect.
That said, F. Murray Abraham’s Krapp is phenomenal. This is a masterful actor with deep emotional and technical resources who was truly born to play this role. Abraham understands not only the regret, disappointment, and self-disgust of the character but also the compensatory conceits that make him chewy and fascinating, the pretentiousness, posturing, and clowning he uses as shields against despair.
Krapp is a writer of very modest success (“Getting known,” he says about the sale of 17 copies) who gave up all social relationships—including a crucial romantic attachment when young—to protect his precious artistic solitude. We see him coming to terms with his isolation on his 69th birthday, a pathetic, alcoholic loner about to make his habitual birthday recording reflecting on the past year. The most prominent object in his room—pointedly spare and tiny as designed by Charlie Corcoran—is his reel-to-reel recorder. Actors of Krapp almost always fondle this machine, embracing it seemingly unwittingly while listening to a tender description of that lost lover on an old tape. Abraham takes this gesture one step further. He kisses his machine passionately, hugging it so tight that he seems to believe it’s animate. This Krapp is as witting a lover of his machine-companion as a guy enjoying AI phone-sex.
The intimacy and vulnerability of this portrayal are remarkably powerful. Abraham’s performance is also singular because he commits so fully to making Krapp an actor as well as a writer. Krapp’s ego is so fragile that he is grandiose even when alone. That’s why he locks his bananas in a drawer, stroking and tonguing them as if performing for imaginary “only fans.” The comic timing of this obscene opening routine is dead-on with Abraham, and the theatricality of his performance intensifies from there.
His Krapp grows more and more madly obsessed as the play goes on, recalling Don Quixote or Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man with Abraham’s staring eyes and flare of tousled grey hair ringing his big bald head. His physical gestures get steadily broader and more expressive, including, by the end, grabbing his own cheeks, raising both arms in palms-up imprecations, and waving sideways like a pompous maître d’. At one point, when he hears himself on tape about to describe his pivotal creative “vision” 30 years earlier, he’s so pumped with self-loathing that he shakes his head convulsively and blurts out a string of exclamations not written by Beckett (“Oh hell!” “Jesus!”).
You may well wonder: whom is this performative behavior for? Most obviously, I suppose, it’s for the audience. But it’s also for him. And for his personified machine. And not to forget, also for the uncountable millions of others among us unhealthily attached to devices.
Abraham’s Krapp is unquestionably the pearl of Beckett Briefs, but O’Reilly’s production of Play is also splendid.
Performed by Sarah Street, Kate Forbes, and Roger Dominic Casey, Play is a work for two women and one man, apparently dead and in purgatory, who rehash the sordid details of a love triangle they played out in life. They don’t seem aware of one another even though their urns and heads are inches apart, and they don’t speak continuously but rather in snatches and bursts, staring straight ahead, prompted into speech by a diabolical spotlight switching willy-nilly between them. It’s almost impossible to catch their story at first, which may be why Beckett wanted the whole play repeated like a musical “da capo.” The second time around, you catch more, just enough to understand that the story’s triviality is mocking the trite content of conventional theater just as much as the urns are spoofing its practical conventions.
Play is a horrendously difficult technical challenge, because the actors are easily dazed and distracted and the choreography of the light is very tricky and fast. O’Reilly’s is one of the most fluid and confident stagings I’ve seen. It’s deliberate and vivid, all three actors find particularized humor in their roles without pushing too hard, and the light (operator uncredited in the program) is drilled to perfection. My one quibble is that the actors strike me as a tad too comfortable in their urns. The play packs a greater punch when its performers—as well as its characters—are noticeably discomfited.
Which brings me to Not I, the one section of Beckett Briefs that doesn’t quite gel. Not I is a monologue in which Mouth, hovering eight feet above the stage in a tight spotlight, emits a furious, fragmentary, logorrheic stream of words about a woman who was speechless for some 70 years and then suddenly afflicted (or invaded, or struck) with speech. One assumes that the speaker is describing herself, but five times she effusively denies this, saying “what? . . Who? . . no! . . she!” to an unheard interlocutor. (The play was conceived with a second character named Auditor who is often omitted and O’Reilly omits it.)
The piece is not linear or coherent, and describing it in even the vaguely coherent way I just have falsifies its intended theatrical effect. Beckett wrote to Alan Schneider, his original director, that he wanted it “breathless, urgent, feverish, rhythmic, [and] panting,” so that the audience feels a “bewilderment” parallel to Mouth’s.
At Irish Rep, Sarah Street performs it with anomalous equanimity. She doesn’t sound troubled, let alone panicked or disturbed, and speaks instead as if in a calm, trusting conversation with a close friend or therapist. Her words sound entirely sensible, elucidated with charming, girlish cadences and a wry, self-deprecating sense of humor. Only in the play’s final few minutes does she accelerate and convey urgency and agitation. At no point does her performance suggest disassociation from the self, which is what has made this play such a rich mine for critical theories involving gender anxiety, birth trauma, the patriarchal dominion of logos, and much more.
I have seen a few Not Is that aimed at intelligibility before, including the actor Jess Thom’s Tourettes version which invited us to read it through a lens of disability. With O’Reilly and Street, I can’t tell what the artistic intention is and therefore find the intelligibility deflating and disappointing.
No one should stay away from Beckett Briefs because of these last remarks, however. The bulk of this evening is fantastically strong and shouldn’t be missed.
Photos: Carol Rosegg
By Samuel Beckett
Directed by Ciarán O’Reilly
Irish Repertory Theatre
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