Brief Response to Metafour: Four Samuel Beckett Shorts in Sydney 2015: A Glorious Thing Theatre Company production

The 'Metafour' became a touch too metaphorical for me! I liked the way they invited us to their time; "Beckett's time" by deferring the beginning of performance by 15 minutes and using a gigantic clock on the wall to do the time-keeping for us as the actors came up to each and every waiting audience member and requested them to switch off the phone and remove the watch, not to keep time in any way whatsoever. As the intimate theatre space opened, we were welcomed with a de-familiarising glare from all the actors. I also liked the fact that they 'played' the transitions between one play and another as actors with seemingly befuddled expressions ran around the stage to remove one prop and foreground another.

1. Quad: An interesting move not to mark the square and the diagonals on stage and play the whole movement in relation to two intercutting horizontal and vertical bars of light that make a cross-like structure. The square existed only in the performers' walks. What played spoilsport for me was the choreography which was artificial and lacked the haunting tension of the original TV production. The stamping of feet to mark the inviolable "centre" wasn't a good idea and it created a break between that step and the rest of the movements. All four walkers exiting the square before the final blackout didn't do justice to the import of no-exit-for-one , which is crucial to Beckett's play.

2. Rockaby: For me, this was the worst of the four performances, not so much because of the actress on stage who was decent, though a bit on the melodramatic side with her 'more's but because of the awful delivery of the recorded voice. I have seen much better performances of this play in both English and Gaelic before. And though I didn't understand a syllable of Galelic, the cadence and delivery was quite mesmeric. In this case, it was too hurried and there was no affect in the monotone at all. My understanding is that when Beckett insists on 'no colour', the flatness of delivery is an effect of affect and not an exclusion of affect. For the last ten years, I have read this play again and again in full-on vocalised reading. Its ebb and flow has unmistakably moved me to the tears of "liquefied brains". This production didn't move a limb!

3. Come and Go: This was the best of the lot because there was no effort to out-Beckett Beckett which is quite a stiff proposition! The slow moves and the arrested body language wove the piece into great visual poetry and yet some of the deliveries (naively profound lines such as "one sees little in this light") could've been more poignant.

4. Catastrophe: Another interesting performance about which I had divided feelings. The efforts to make it 'funny' fell flat on their face though to turn the "light" from stage light to a lighter and the ensuing vaudeville routine was striking. I have not seen this play live on stage before this and for me the iconic performance is Mamet's film version in Beckett on Film. And I must say that this performance opened up a different way of seeing this play, especially seeing the part of the tyrannical director. Harold Pinter had played it with an absolute phallic aplomb but the actor in this performance brought out the always already menaced and disturbed aspect of the master. I liked that part of the story and not the forced and overdone comedy.