A couple of weeks ago, Samuel Beckett’s dramatic monologue ‘Not I’ ran at The Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. Having written my dissertation on the one-woman spectacular, I decided to put pretension before reason and invest in a £20 ticket to the 9-minute play. So, at a cheeky £2.20 per-minute of drama – was it worth it?
The play takes the form of a dense monologue spoken in a female voice; the speaker’s mouth (zanily named ‘Mouth’) floats eight feet above the stage and delivers, at break-neck speed, an outpouring of words described by critics as ‘logorrhea’.
The principal role requires astounding physical and mental dedication from the actress. In order to achieve the suspended orifice look, Lisa Dwan stands on a raised platform, a balaclava-èd head stuck through a hole and arms strapped in to the support around; a position which – she informed us in the after-show Q & A – meant she couldn’t see and could hardly hear during the performance. In addition, the actress is required to learn and recite to perfection pages of semantically muddled babble. It is not surprising, then, that Billie Whitelaw, the original Mouth, had a breakdown playing the role.
As the play begins , the audience is plunged in to complete darkness (The Royal Court actually broke the law and turned off the Fire Exit signs – luckily no pyromaniacs were present). We see only a tiny pink and white, iridescent Mouth which, depending on your position in the audience, seems to shine, bob or float.
Lisa Dwan’s Irish lilt hurtles through the text, jolting to a stop intermittently with the cries and screams that punctuate the ‘movements’ of the play. With the performance being the fastest yet of the role (the first ever took 24 minutes), the words are a little hard to decipher at times. Reproached by an audience member on this point, Dwan cites Beckett’s original note that the speech should run at the ‘speed of thought’.
Dwan’s performance was informed by the playwright’s wish that the play should “work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect.” On these terms, it succeeds magnificently. No amount of time spent poring over the play with my Stabilo highlighter could have prepared me for the actual experience of sitting in a pitch black space faced only with Mouth and her words. It was like being strapped in to a rollercoaster; an existential X No Way Out.
In the Q & A Dwan said that the hardest part of the role was not, in fact, the Fifty Shades-style shackling – but rather having to deliver the speech whilst battling with her own internal ‘Not I’; in listening, the audience is forced to do the same. The result is electrifying.
Worth the £2.20-a-minute– just.
Lisa Dwan talks about the role (and the balaclava)
Watch Billie Whitelaw’s 1973 performance of ‘Not I’
Type Righter 