Karen and I saw *Beckett Briefs* at the Irish Repertory Theatre on Feb 20, 2025. We're both huge Beckett fans and try to see every production that happens in town. I bet we've seen about 10 to 15 Beckett shows in the 22 years I've lived in New York.
This was a program of three short plays: *Not I,* *Play,* and *Krapp's Last Tape.* *Not I* is a one-woman play - - the character is billed as Mouth because that's all we see of her. In a typical production the actor sits in a chair with a tight spotlight on just her mouth. The words come fast and furious, it's an assault.
The play was premiered by (would you believe) Jessica Tandy, who did not enjoy the experience. Beckett's favorite interpreter of the role was Billie Whitelaw, who also found it rather harrowing but came to feel at peace with the play, she even felt a kind of kinship with the character. Here's a video of Whitelaw introducing the play and then performing it.
The Irish Rep production was performed by Sarah Street. I should also mention that all three plays were directed by the co-founder of the Irish Rep, Ciarán O'Reilly. Karen and I were both unnerved by the staging. The actor moved around the stage and the spotlight on her mouth seemed to flicker. It was hard to focus - - part of the problem was that we were in the balcony, far from the stage, and my eyes literally had a hard time seeing what was there. Sometimes her mouth would split into two mouths or would go completely out of focus. My brain couldn't quite take in what was there. Karen had similar issues and we both (completely independent of each other) decided at one point to shut our eyes and listen to the play, that made it much easier to experience.
Street gave a strong performance, she had a solid sense of the pacing and varied her vocal registers in a satisfying way.
The second play was *Play,* performed by Street, Roger Dominic Casey, and Kate Forbes. I'd heard about this play but had never read it or seen it. The three actors sit in enormous jars with just their heads visible. The text, as is often the case with Beckett, is relatively abstract, but after a little while I realized that the underlying story is one of the most overdone tropes ever, a love triangle - - the man is married to one woman and having an affair with the other.
The characters speak in fragments - - Beckett wrote each part in full and then cut them and spliced them together to create a rhythm. He also repeats much of the play in the second half, something I found a little unsettling. In a good way.
Beckett added a pseudo fourth character in the lighting: a spotlight goes from actor to actor, not just giving prominence to the person talking but in a sense compelling the character to speak. The Irish Rep production used this device but added a sound element, a sort of WHOOSH each time the light shifted from one actor to another (Beckett insisted that the light be a single light moving around, not three separate lights). I found the WHOOSH distracting and irrelevant.
The actors seemed to be having a good time, always a delight to see. They played it straight which seemed to bring out the comedy in the piece. I imagine performing Beckett is enormously gratifying for an actor - - the language is such a gift, plus I imagine the abstract nature of the text makes it more difficult to learn and memorize, which gives you more of a sense of achievement when you've cracked the code.
The third and final play on the bill was *Krapp's Last Tape* starring the marquee name on the bill, F. Murray Abraham. Karen and I saw this play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music way back in 2011 in a production starring John Hurt. It has a touching, gentle quality that's largely absent in the other two plays and Abraham embodied that beautifully. The play is about a somewhat elderly man who spends his days making tapes and listening to tapes he's made. Also drinking booze and eating bananas.
Here's a television production of the play starring Patrick Magee, the man for whom Beckett wrote the play. You might recognize Magee from *A Clockwork Orange.*
The play has an underlying theme familiar to fans of Beckett: an examination of our cold cruel modern world and the struggle to find meaning, beauty, and some kind of human connection in it. The character is drawn to a tape he made talking about a love in his past. He expresses disdain for his fixation on this, even for the man who's speaking on the tape (a younger version of himself), yet he can't draw himself away from revisiting this meaningful yet heartbreaking episode from his past.
I told Karen that seeing Beckett is like seeing or listening to my favorite Sondheim musical, "Follies*: it becomes more meaningful the older you get. The central characters in *Krapp* and *Follies* (I'm thinking of Sally in *Follies*) are people stuck in the past, wanting to spend their lives in a remembered moment in the past rather than in the dreary reality of their present. It seems like a cautionary tale.
Abraham was profoundly touching. The most rewarding element of the play, from my point of view, is watching the interaction between the character onstage and the voice on the tape. The voice on the tape is warm, sturdy, and confident while the man onstage is befuddled, lonely, and a little desperate. Abraham effortlessly embodied all of the depth and poignancy in the play.
Karen added this observation: "I was struck by how well-behaved the audience was. Other than the loud enjoyment of the young man behind us during Krapp, [he was guffawfest] the first two pieces transpired with almost no audience sounds at all. Also, I was pleased there was not a round of applause for Abraham when the lights went up on him. I guess Beckett downtown draws a more sophisticated audience than Broadway does."
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