NOT I - Samuel Beckett, Royal Festival Hall
Copy of immediate notes made during performance.
There was the play performed and the a talk afterwards.
Stream of consciousness,
My eyes getting adjusted to the dark.
The mouth is so small – yet so detailed.
She means “I”
Really fast – untheatrical speed.
“tell” I remember feeling just a mouth – feeling like a mouth.
Then it is over.
It was a physical blur, it was camera shake. My head was whirring – a real blur – A PHYSICAL BLUR
Billy Whitelaw – video interview as she’s in hospital.
“Beckett so accurate and obsessed that he would cross out details like the third full stop… he said it had to “go at the speed of thought” NO ACTING, NO EXPRESSION – he hates acting.
This is the most difficult piece ever.
Not I - stays with the actress, it becomes part of you”
Fiona Shaw – video interview
“The world has got more used to fragmented sentences – Not I does not sound as strange anymore.
He allows women to be the voice of tragedy – but it is HIS voice. (the video of Fiona Shaw was out of synch, made me very aware of video and sound and was the opposite of the performance which was the very epitome of synchronization – the red small mouth, a weird shape with the sound of the voice that was so amazing – I couldn’t believe it was happening.
Live Panel Discussion
Check Happy Days
Beckett puts massive pressure on a director to consider what “performance “ means.
He creates something domestic but breathes out poetry.
A Beckett Style can be a trap.
You think it is about you – its not you think, you are the character but you think that the character is you.
(They think it is all about them)
NOT I – the piece talks about the experience of being the actor doing it .
“There is a narrative – an old women reminiscing - yet he didn’t want acting but he did want emotion – wants it to play on nerves – the actress doesn’t curate it, just commits raw emotion to it.”
The actress is strapped in, she can’t move, only her mouth moves. (A physical manifestation of a playwrights role?)
“Reading it out doesn’t work, Edward says not true about “don’t act” it’s that Beckett doesn’t want a spurious style of acting – it must be pure (?) it can’t be decorated with emotion – yet people decorate life with emotion?”
The actress bases her performance on speed
Billy Whitelaw took 14mins on the performance and Liza takes 10 mins, to her that means better.
Beckett insists on things being done as he wanted.
It is mesmirising, it is light and image.
“Beckett’s characters have a sense of being watched (by the audience” – it is the light coming onto the mough that starts the talking and she is talking to us.
My thoughts a week later
Becketts work – is so prescriptive, no ways of reinterpreting or restaging (his family’s estate are very strict and will close down productions that are not “correct”)
The works are hermetically sealed, they cannot be changed now they are made – they are like video, it is nopt the medium of the theatre – a script to be interpreted. This co-incides with my thinking about NOT I – not sure it addressed me as live, as theatre) the mouth was so small, - Katie Mitchell says “the theatre is always in wide angle.
It was a physical blur? It had attributes of a blur – undefinable, speed, Check Raymond Bellour on blur and film.
