Irish actress Lisa Dwan, like Billie Whitelaw before her, has made a career out of performing Samuel Beckett monologues. For eleven years now, she has toured the world with Beckett Trilogy, a bill of Beckett’s last works, Not I, Footfalls, and Rockaby. Now Dwan has brought the show to the Broad Stage for a brief run; it is not to be missed. Working in complete darkness (except for faint stage lights), Dwan brings Beckett’s sparse, reductive (but musical) prose to life in all three pieces, using her sometimes shrill, sometimes husky voice to catch up the audience in her hypnotic spell. Dwan’s carefully calibrated delivery — think of a singer going up and down the scales — helps bring out all the colors in Beckett’s text (first conceived for the radio). In Not I, the actress simulates the babbling voice of a child; she speaks so fast that the words come out as gibberish punctuated by sudden yelps for help. This represented life after the womb, I think, with the journey to the tomb (Rockaby) taking place after the mid-life misadventures of Footfalls. In the latter playlet, Dwan, wearing shabby clothes, paces back and forth like a metronome, on a tiny strip of stage, outside her dying mother’s hospital room, recalling bits and pieces of their life together. In Rockaby, May, now a prematurely old woman herself, sits in a rocking chair, fending off her own looming death with a torrent of words, a mixture of hope and despair, reminiscence and invention. This is typical and pure Beckett, an unsentimental portrait of a human being condemned to die alone in a void, yet clinging desperately to hope, a glimmer of joy. Dwan’s stunning performance in Beckett Trilogy is a thing of preternatural beauty and grace; it shines like the last spark of life in a dark, dying world.
