Beckett Briefs – 22 February 2025

A fascinating dive into the purpose of the human life cycle, Beckett Briefs at Irish Repertory Theatre takes three short plays written by Samuel Beckett, ”Not I”, “Play”, and “Krapp’s Last Tape”, and runs them together as one 75 minute journey into beginnings, endings, and human connection featuring impressive lighting design (Michael Gottlieb) and evocative sound and music interplay (Ryan Rumery and M. Florian Staab). The performers are pawns in the playwright’s and the production’s game, showing us a dark, morbidly fascinating interpretation of the passive futility of the human condition and what it means to exist.

The first selection, “Not I”, was written about a mute woman experiencing the ability to speak for the first time. Production design kept the audience and stage dark, except for a talking mouth (Sarah Street). This repetitive word salad of a monologue was performed at a rapidfire pace with Street’s impressive vocal inflection guiding the audience to the important bits— the injustice of the inability to speak and how it creates invisibility and helplessness, with the tail end evoking the physical sensations of speaking and the excitement of being able to do so with no hint of what might be done with such a power. Performing this entire short play essentially in the dark with one small pinpoint of light felt at times like a womb, at others a tunnel, a prison, or countless other spaces in which one might experience sensory deprivation. As an audience, we were put through this deprivation at the beginning, setting the tone for Beckett Briefs as an experience requiring concentration, focus, and active listening beyond what a typical theatrical production asks for.

The next selection, “Play”, featured three dead characters (two women with a man who loved them both in the middle) bickering from their urns pist cremation. They are still fixated on his inability to choose one of them and the limbo it sent them into in life seamlessly carried over into their deaths, begging the question: what did it mean to have lived or died if you’re still preserved, as the person you are/were? The characters carried on telling us a repetitive story of the same things happening in life – smelling the other woman, expecting something to change, being disappointed, paralyzing indecisiveness, etc. It’s a vicious cycle – literally never ending. In death, the man’s urn of ashes is between the two women’s, and nobody has any illusions about it. There’s nothing after death— just more of the same as in life.

Except that, in Beckett Briefs, there was something after. “Krapp’s Last Tape.” Evocative of dementia, this final scene showed an old man (F. Murray Abraham) listening to audio reels of his former self narrating a routine that was a bit in the absurdist tradition. As he mechanically reenacts and tries to recall the moments on the tapes, he goes through the motions for the most part without much emotion. Recalling “Play” before it, this selection asked an opposite question: can you die inside before your body actually stops and what kind of existence is that? Are you living?

The show as a whole was thought provokingly crafted in ways that moved me, and also inspired a certain reflective stillness for me to sit with. More than anything. I appreciated the deep deliberateness of Ciaran O’Reilly’s direction and how all of these genuinely separate moments, coalesced into a meaningful whole. The journey was gripping. I was riveted.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Print Shop PR.