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by Samuel Beckett, directed by Jennifer Tarver

Necessary Angel and Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

October 13-November 6, 2016

M: “When will all this have been . . . just play?”

In 2012 Necessary Angel and Canadian Stage teamed up to produce Beckett: Feck It!, a successful combination of four of Samuel Beckett’s short plays and contemporary music for voice.  This year the companies team up again to present All But Gone, an evening of theatre that seems like a revision of the earlier programme.  Three of the four plays are the same, while the music is quite different.  The result, however, is an utterly fascination evening of theatre.  Not only do the four Beckett plays work better as a sequence, but the music enhances qualities present in the works while all the elements of the production combine to produce a unified experience.

The atmosphere of the evening is that of ritual and mystery.  As a spotlight plays crazily over the audience, Shannon Mercer and Krisztina Szabó descend the stairs of the two aisles of the Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs while singing an excerpt from Organum on Viderunt Omnes by Irish composer Garrett Sholdice.  An organum is one of the earliest forms of medieval music where one singer sustains a note while the other embellishes the individual syllables of a sacred text.  In this case Viderunt omnes are the first two words of a text meaning “All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God”.  The most famous organum on these words is by the French composer Léonin from 1160.  If one did not know it, one would assume Mercer and Szabó were singing a medieval composition since Sholdice’s form of Pärtian minimalism has taken him in that direction.    

At a motion from Mercer and Szabó curtains open on the first of the Beckett pieces, Act Without Words 1 (1957).  As the title suggests this work is a mime.  In the context of the music that has preceded it, the work feels like a medieval morality play, although, as one might expect, since this is Beckett, this is a morality whose moral is not one the medieval church would ever inculcate.   

Paul Fauteux, who performed Act Without Words I and II for Tarver in 2004, is discovered on stage looking like an old man defeated by life.  A whistle calls his attention to changes in his environment.  In the central sequence a bottle of water descends from the proscenium.  Boxes of ever smaller sizes also descend.  The Man uses the largest to reach the bottle but it rises just out of his reach.  When the slightly dim-witted Man learns how best to piles the boxes on top of each other the bottle still rises.  The Man considers hanging himself from a tree that descends, but the one puny branch collapses.  Eventually the Man ceases to respond to the whistles that initiate each action and simply sits looking at his hands.

Act Without Words I sets the theme for the evening of people being prodded into action.  The questions in the first three works is who or what is doing the prodding and why.  Act Without Words I replaces the play Come and Go (1966) that featured in Beckett: Feck It!  That play combined with the other three emphasized how characters are tied to each other not necessarily in a pleasant way – in twos in Act Without Words II (1959) and Ohio Impromptu (1981) and in threes in Come and Go and Play (1963).  It is fascinating how one substitution can affect the impact of the whole evening, but that is what happens.  Act Without Words I, a stage version of various tropes of silent movie comedy, really sums up in the most compact way possible one of the most essential questions in Beckett, namely “What causes us to act when there seems to be no point in acting?”

After another musical interlude, is the second amoral morality play, Act Without Words II.  In this the goad to action is literally a goad.  There are two sacks on stage.  A large stick, rather like a huge billiard cue, appears stage left and after a test run jabs A (Fauteux again) until he wakes up and gets out of the sack.  He again looks and acts like the already defeated Man of the previous play.  He prays briefly and dresses himself in the neatly folded clothes next to the other bag as if every small action exhausted him.  Eventually, he drags the bag a few feet stage left of were it was, messily undresses himself and climbs back into his sack stage right of the second sack. 

After a pause the goad appears again again prods B (Jonathon Young), the man in the second sack into action.  The complete opposite of A, B is energetic, does exercises and keeps checking his watch as if timing the progress of his actions.  Whereas A was messy, B is precise.  He pulls A’s sack a few feet stage left and enthusiastically undresses, carefully folds and arranges the clothes and climbs back in his sack.  The actions repeat.  The comedy, of course, is the extreme contrast between the view toward life of A and B – one religious, one scientific, one pessimistic, one optimistic – especially when life itself is shown as a kind of movement in one direction without any purpose. 

The music between this and the next play is from From the Grammar of Dreams (1988) by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho.  Some viewers will remember that the Canadian Opera performed her opera L’Amour de loin (2000) in 2012.  Whereas the music for L’Amour de loin could be thought of as lush and neo-medieval, her music here, to words by Sylvia Plath, is harsh and modern.  Saariaho deconstructs song so that Mercer and Szabó begin with competing breaths and interjections before words and song emerge.  All this is quite appropriate for making the transition from mime to spoken drama. 

What we discover in fragments in Play, the most complex work of the evening, is that a man M (Young) who is married to W1 (Szabó) has been having an affair with W2 (Mercer).  The suspicious W1 has set a private investigator on M and eventually was able to surprise M and W2 together.  Rather than silent movies, Beckett here hilariously turns to tawdry romance fiction for his inspiration.  The three characters are unaware of each other and apparently do not hear each other speak.  The set-up is a kind of parody of Sartre’s three-person play No Exit (1944) where a man and two women are trapped in a room for eternity as their infernal punishment.  Here the punishment is not that the three are together but that that they are compelled to speak when the light shines on them, or one could say, when its “plays” on their faces.  We now know why the evening began with a spotlight playing over the entire audience.  Being compelled to act to no purpose as for M in the first play or A in the second, is torture.  That is why W1 exclaims to the light “Get off me!” and “Hellish half-light”.  But, as in Act Without Words II, the reactions of M and W2 are quite different.  W2 hopes she may go insane and M has fantasies of W1 and W2 becoming good friends and neither mentions the pain of being goaded to speak. 

The technical aspects of this play are daunting.  The utmost precision is needed both from the manipulator of the spotlight and from the three actors who must speak as rapidly as possible yet stop then second the light slips off them.  And this the admirable cast of four supply, Mercer especially proving herself a fine actor as well as singer. 

The main problem with Tarver’s staging of Play is that we know the identity of the the manipulator of the spotlight.  Ideally, we should not.  We should not know its source or what causes its movements.  The light here is like the dazzling light in Happy Days (1961) that causes Winnie to awake and speak.  Showing us that Fauteux is manipulating the light has the negative effect of humanizing the prime aspect of Play that should seem inhuman.

After a return to the neo-medieval sound world of the Sholdice’s Organum, we see the final work of the programme, Ohio Impromptu.  Here we have two hooded men seated at a corner of a table.  One is the Reader (Young), the other a silent Listener (Fauteux).  The Reader reads from a book that sounds like a medieval romance that involves someone reading from a book.  Periodically, the Listener interrupts this meta-narrative with a knock, fist to stop the Reader, then to have him recommence by repeating the last line he had spoken.  The play continues in this way until “There is nothing left to tell” both in the book and in the play itself.   

Here the goad to action for the first time is another character.  In this the play resembles Rockaby (1981), first performed earlier the same year as Ohio Impromptu, in which a woman says the word “More” to hear more about her life story as she rocks herself from the cradle to the grave.  Here the Listener seems to knock just so that the air will be filled with sound, with a story to occupy his mind so that he will not have think about his situation.  The play thus comments on the function of art itself as a kind of pacifier, a theme that occurs in most of Beckett’s longer plays.  In Happy Days, we feel that Winnie thinks that to speak is to exist.  Here we feel that merely to listen is to exist.  

With Teresa Pzybylski’s costumes that evoke both the medieval and the modern for the women and in last play for the men, Kimberly Purtell’s precise lighting, with the well-chosen music directed by Dáirine Ní Mheadhra and so beautifully sung by Mercer and Szabó, All But Gone an intellectually intriguing evening that is both humorous and contemplative at once.  It may last only about an hour and a quarter but it will resonate in your thoughts long after the final lights come up.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Shannon Mercer as W2, Jonthon Young as M and Kriszinta Szabó as W1 in Play; Jonathon Young as B in Act Without Words II.  ©2016.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.