Rockaby
By Samuel Beckett
Billie Whitelaw
Union Theatre

“This,” Billie Whitelaw announced pointing to the bright blue cover of her script folder, “is the most cheerful thing you’ll see all evening.” Maybe it was meant to be disarming to the audience but it momentarily short-circuited the possibilities of the evening by reinforcing Beckett’s popular reputation, or rather his notoriety, as a joyless nihilist who wrote those now rather old hat plays about loitering tramps and people in rubbish bins.

The remarkable fact is that Beckett’s spare, almost Wittgensteinian writing can be wryly humorous and, despite an abiding sense of despair, it never fails to acknowledge that we poor, forked unaccommodated things hang on by our toenails regardless of how hopeless we may think it all is.

Billie Whitelaw is no newcomer to Beckett’s work. She appeared in the first production of Play in 1964 and worked with the author at the Royal Court in London. Beckett once said that just as he heard Patrick Magee’s voice in his mind’s ear when he wrote a part for a man, so he heard Billie Whitelaw’s as the woman’s voice – particularly for the woman’s part in Not I first performed in New York by Jessica Tandy and then again in London in 1973 when Whitelaw herself played under Beckett’s direction which was so exacting and demanding that it nearly drove her to distraction. Although, finally, Beckett was totally satisfied with Whitelaw’s performance, such stories remind us how fastidiously considered his work is, and how special it is to see such a distinguished interpreter as this.

The evening began uncertainly with Whitelaw reading a short prose piece entitled Enough. As she stood chatting self consciously at the lectern she disconcertingly noted that Beckett disliked his prose being read aloud. Maybe it was knowing that old Sam was disapproving but I couldn’t help thinking that Whitelaw was unequal to the piece – over-animated and rather hurried, she didn’t give it time to seep into our consciousness as Beckett needs to do. Enough is a woman’s memoir of her husband, unironically admiring, bearing witness to a kind of contentment in his dominance:

“We lived on flowers. So much for sustenance … We were on the whole calm. More and more. All was. This notion of calm comes from him. Without him I would not have had it. Now I’ll wipe out everything but the flowers. No more rain. No more mounds. Nothing but the two of us dragging through the flowers. Enough my old breasts feel his hand.”

The second piece Footfalls (1975) is a play also about habitual relationship – this time between a woman in her forties, May, also referred to as Amy, and her ailing mother in her nineties. May traipses the stage dishevelled, like a hag designed by Arthur Rackham – she wears a flowing dress all in rags like long strips of tree bark. Her mother listens in the dark, her morphine wearing off, calling May to heel – “seven, eight, nine, wheel” – and recalling:

“One night, while still little more than a child, she called her mother and said, Mother, this is not enough … The mother: what do you mean, May, not enough, what can you possibly mean, May not enough? May: I mean, Mother, that I must hear the feet, however faint’ they fall. The Mother: The motion alone is not enough? May: No, Mother, the motion alone is not enough, I must hear the feet, however faint they fall.”

As Whitelaw paces the floor we listen as her feet scuff and return their worn path like those of a creature demented by insufficient territory. She is the – captive life of her withered mother who asks: “Will you never have done revolving it all? It … it all … in your poor mind?”

Rockaby, written by Beckett in 1975 is a splendid instance of the poetic richness and infinite variation in his work. It is as pure as rain drops, so deceptively simple we are lulled by it. Whitelaw rocks in her chair while her voice is heard from upstage in rhythm with her movement. Whitelaw’s recorded voice enunciates the lines with mantric clarity – “till in the end /the day came / in the end came /when she said I to herself I /whom else / time she stopped/ time she stopped”. But the crone with heavy black wrinkles seated in the chair cries out “More”. Time she stopped says the voice, more cries the woman.

Billie Whitelaw’s performance is beautifully expressive of cantankerous, wistful, impeturbable senescence: “let down the blind and down / right down/ into the old rocker / and rocked / rocked / saying to herself / no /done with that.”

Rocky Greenberg who restaged these pieces based on original direction by the late Alan Schneider, also designed the lighting which has been creditably created by stage manager Chris Bain and Kym Newell who also ensure that the taped voices are refreshingly free of the aural goo to which we have become dismally accustomed whenever tapes are used on stage.

The technical precision of Whitelaw’s performance and the high production values generally, make Rockaby a rare theatrical experience. As the chair rocks between life and nothingness – “rock her off / stop her eyes / fuck life /stop her eyes / rock her off / rock her off” we watch her expire.

But the written text is ambiguous. Beckett, honoured on his 80th birthday would surely be calling more, being far from off his rocker himself and knowing, as he does, that although we suffer, we nevertheless persist.

“Billie Rocks” The Adelaide Review, March 1986, p.11.