STILL

‘Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood,’ wrote T S Eliot.  Whether these ‘late works’ by Samuel Beckett are ‘poetry’ or not, in this show his texts communicate emotionally – even viscerally - before we understand them rationally.  They leave behind an emotional residue; there is no narrative thread (until perhaps the last piece), there is no context. They take us into the memories – bidden or unbidden – of isolates, but we experience them here via an individual before us on stage in a subtle, detailed performance from Robert Meldrum. 

Richard Murphet’s mise en scène and Meldrum’s clear speech, movements, facial expressions, clothing, and the intrusion of a second voice (Murphet himself) all these things necessarily interpret Beckett’s words.  But they also enhance the words so that they create an irresistible empathy for this man on stage - even if our empathy might be difficult to explain.  But Beckett, Murphet and Meldrum don’t want to explain; they want us to experience experience in all its inarticulate groping and failure to explain.  Beckett’s texts may be bleak as bleak, but only a writer of great sympathy could have written them.

Following their disturbing but so delicately and intuitively realised collaboration on Beckett’s Worstward Ho (Explosives Factory, May 2023) Meldrum and Murphet went on to explore the last twenty years of the writer’s work and selected the six short pieces that make up STILL.  They were not intended by their author to make up a whole, but the collaborators found links and here they do.

In fact, we only know there are six pieces because the program note tells us.  Without prior knowledge – or even with it – it would be difficult to say where one piece ends and the next begins – except for one wardrobe change that signals a change of persona and a change of point of view. 

But first, we see a middle-aged man almost on the edge of panic as he tries to recover the past, clinging to what is real in his present – the arms of a wicker chair, the light from one window and then from another.  He’s afraid.  He’s in psychic pain.  And then, perhaps worse, memory has a voice, an objective, judgemental voice from which our man cannot escape...

Jenny Kemp’s and Gary Willis’s set is deliberately rudimentary – grey enclosing walls with a door and two windows outlined in chalk, like a child’s drawing.  The simplicity of the design encourages our collaborative imaginations.  After that wardrobe change (which comes almost as a relief - or an escape - for the performer and for us) the stage is suddenly a vast, desolate expanse on which another man walks and counts his steps.  Eighteen hundred or two thousand steps - every day.  That is sure, that, at least is a known fact.  But then our man narrates the experience of another – someone as shocked as we are at the being that was there but is now an absence outlined in chalk – a crime scene.  That last touch isn’t specified in the text and yet it is the inspired clincher, the rounding end of these shared emotions, in which the will to go on living goes under to despair.  We stare at this image and say ‘no’.

What Meldrum and Murphet have achieved here is something magical and very theatrical.  They don’t tell us a story (we can make one up if we wish).  Instead, they throw up images; they take us into the paradox of ever-inchoate attempts to understand our lives, albeit with great precision.  At the end, we feel a strange kind of exhaustion coupled with gratitude through the intensity of having shared these characters’ inner lives.    

Michael Brindley

P.S. The six short pieces, as listed in the program are: Fizzle Still 1; Variations on a Still Point – Still Point 3 and Sounds; Stirrings Still; Heard in the Dark; and One Evening.

Photographer: Darren Gill