a day ago
Beckett's vision is given a haunting and evocative twist
Beckett sa Chreig: Guth na mBan
An Taibhdhearc, Galway
★★★★☆
'I'm not unduly concerned with intelligibility. I want the piece to work on the nerves of the audience.'
Samuel Beckett
's reply to Jessica Tandy, as she was preparing for the first performance of Not I in New York in 1972, concerned the instruction that it should be performed at speed.
What did concern Beckett was the image created and the sensation it evoked. The striking images created and deep sensations evoked by Sarah Jane Scaife's vision in Beckett sa Chreig: Guth na mBan build on the work that Company SJ started in 2021 with Bríd Ní Neachtain as Winnie and Mícheál Ó Conghaile as translator of Laethanta Sona/Happy Days, set on Creig an Staic, Inis Oírr.
There we had one long play, now three shorts; there we had one woman, now three; there we had the sky for a background, here not only are we indoors, but it's very dark, the light becoming even less as we progress from the wonderfully flowing ghostly robe worn by Fiona Lucia McGarry as May/Amy in Coiscéimeanna/Footfalls, Nuala Hayes's face in Luascaire/Rockaby and Caitríona Ní Mhurchú's mouth in Ní Mise/Not I.
This time the island is represented on three vertical screens spanning the stage, the middle one set back, leaving a space for the reading of Siosarnach 4/Fizzle 4. Kilian Waters's visually compelling film alternate with the plays and are a relief from the words and unresolved questions and darkness working on the nerves of the audience.
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The images have their own progression from the white of water swirling and breaking on the shore, to the vivid green of the landscape and the grey of the walls. There is the recurring motif of the two women in billowing red petticoats, an appearance of calm as they walk and work. Then there isthe jarring effect of the same figures still moving but transposed to the dreary corridors of institutions where women were put away against their will, having, like the women so convincingly portrayed in the three plays, nowhere to go but inside their head, going over and over events.
These later plays, for which Beckett came to prefer the term 'short', are described by Gontarski as 'striking imagist pieces in and of themselves ... resonating with each other to build a greater whole when grouped ... with directors exercising their vision as much by the combination of shorts as by any individual directorial style'.
With Ó Conghaile, whose latest work of fiction, An Bhlaosc sa mBois, is a poignant response to the horror of mother and baby homes, again as translator (and opening on the same day as excavation began on the mother and baby home in Tuam), Company SJ's chosen pieces, with images exquisitely blended, has built a greater whole; made something new and realised an evocative and haunting vision.
Beckett sa Chreig: Guth na mBan is at An Taibhdhearc, as part of
Galway International Arts Festival
, until Saturday, July 19th, and in the Project Arts Centre
on
October 1st-5th as part of Dublin Theatre Festival
. English language audio will be available
