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Pressgang Productions Oxford's contemporary theatre specialists |
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it all - directors notes |
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"Am I as much as being seen" -Play |
Each of these pieces, small as they are, contains a complete world . Each of these worlds is also in some way post-apolcayptic. Some apparently definitive event has occurred, but not proved terminal. In Play, what once were humans are now inurned. In Roughs for Theatre I, there once were women, there once were trees, day & night in regular progression, but these have all left, leaving a half-lighted landscape scattered with occasional tins of baked beans. In Footfalls, the girl once able to walk around freely now walks only along the bare strip where we watch her pacing, revolving “it all” interminably. In Roughs for Theatre II two spiritual accountants tally the life of Mr C, reduced to a catatonic manikin silhouetted on the window-ledge and waiting to jump. Our final piece, Catastrophe, introduces the figure of the artist tampering with the heaps of broken images that inhabit a landscape at once psychic and political in the post-atomic age.
The challenge Beckett offers to both actors and director is the challenge to concentrate solely on truth and completeness of each of these worlds, without interpretation or theatrical adornment. His pieces are in so many ways so anti-theatrical! So lacking in plot, or precise story, or specific character and interaction. Yet Beckett’s instructions are very strict. It is our business as performers to bring to life exactly the rhythms that his inner ear has picked out, within exactly the limitations that he has set. These limitations often infuriate – like the characters in Beckett’s head, we experience a special kind of confinement. And that is where the miracle of working with Beckett happens. The miracle of a theatre that exists only in the precise moment in which it is happening, yet within that moment, touches on the eternal.
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