Two Nights of Beckett at the Bike Shed

Last week I enjoyed two nights of Samuel Beckett plays at the Bike Shed Theatre in Exeter, part of a Beckett-centric season entitled, presumably with a certain amount of irony, Winter Warmed. The first evening brought together four works, two from the latter part of the 50s and one each from the 60s and 70s. Connections and common currents became readily apparent, and it was evident that the programme had been chosen with great care and well-informed consideration. The first half consisted of readings of or from two plays written for radio: All That Fall (first broadcast on 13th January 1957) and Embers (broadcast 24th June 1959). They were both performed by members of local company The Uncommon Players, who have brought their productions to all corners of Devon (and beyond) both inside and out for many years now.



The actors dressed in character but read from their scripts, so this fell somewhere between a stage performance and a recreation of the conditions of a radio recording. It was a rare opportunity to see these works on stage, and would have been all the more unusual (and unlikely) in Beckett’s lifetime. Always particular about the way in which his plays were interpreted (to the letter being his preference), he even turned down a request by Ingmar Bergman to produce theatrical versions of All That Fall and Embers in 1963. Bergman’s interest in them points to an intriguing connection between their work, and makes you wonder at the extent to which Beckett’s plays informed Bergman’s films at this time (Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence came out in 1961, 62 and 63), and influenced his progression towards a pared down, internally focussed modernism towards the end of the decade (Persona, Hour of the Wolf and especially The Rite).

Desmond Briscoe at the controls

The sound mixer played a most important part from his little corner, hunched over in the steely glow of his laptop. He produced the soundworld which is so central to these works. All That Fall in particular was instrumental in providing the impetus behind the formation of the Radiophonic Workshop in 1958, the establishment of which Daphne Oram and others had been working so hard to achieve. Having been asked by BBC drama producer Donald McWhinnie to write a piece for radio, Beckett became enthusiastic about the possibilities of sound carefully and consciously employed as an integral part of the overall texture and meaning of the drama. Studio engineer Desmond Briscoe was brought in to realise the sonic directions in Beckett’s script. He was familiar with the work of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry at the RTF (the French national radio) studios in Paris, and their creation of what they termed musique concrète from the recorded sounds of the world (be they train whistles, human breaths, saucepan lids, spinning tops or any other of the sounds they used in early pieces). McWhinnie had even gone over to the studios to meet the two pioneering engineer/composers in preparation for the recording of Beckett’s play, and Douglas Cleverdon, another drama producer, had a particular interest in concrète sounds, having broadcast one of the earliest concerts of the new music, recorded at RTF, on the Third Programme in 1955. Briscoe’s subtle manipulation of the sound sources in All That Fall give them a slight unreal quality, giving them a sense of being at a remove from objective reality, sounds perceived through (or perhaps generated from) the mind of the play’s protagonist Mrs Rooney. All That Fall proved a big critical success, and the evident delight displayed by an artist of Beckett’s stature at the potential of the studio to bring new dimensions to his drama significantly furthered the case for an electronic music and sound effects department being established within the BBC. The Radiophonic Workshop would open a year later in 1958, with Desmond Briscoe soon becoming its head.



In the short extract of All That Fall performed at the Bike Shed, we didn’t get to hear some of the more startling effects, such as the long anticipated arrival of the train at Boghill Station. In the original broadcast, its hissing exhalations of steam and screeching of brakes were amplified and sculpted with echo, delay and feedback until it sounded like some great beast heralding approaching disaster. We did get to hear the establishing rural sounds of chickens and other farm animals. However, actual recordings were used in this case rather than the Percy Thrower-style human impersonations which began the original broadcast, again setting our perception of the world slightly askew. There was also a snatch of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet, one of Beckett’s favourite pieces of music, which emanates from a run-down house which Mrs Rooney passes. She also cues the sound of a dove (‘leave me, listening to the sound of the ring doves’) which have previously gone unheard, once more suggesting that we are perceiving the world through the filter of her sensorium, and her mind, which occasionally retracts to experience a more inward reality. Gillie Stoneham, the actress playing Mrs Rooney, provides the heavy shuffling of feet which marks out her weary via dolorosa towards the station to meet her blind husband. The sound of effortful steps, measuring out distance and steady progress, recur in Embers and become the rhythmic focus of his late piece Footfalls.

Mrs Rooney is one of Beckett’s reflexive chatterers or self-dramatisers, like the half-buried Winnie in Happy Days, the similarly immobile Hamm in Endgame, and Henry in Embers. The latter is told that his daughter once asked ‘why does daddy keep on talking all the time?’ Unlike the relentlessly, defiantly cheerful optimism of Winnie, however, Mrs Rooney emphasises the negative to the point of positively relishing it. Her voluble suffering takes on a comical aspect, brought out particularly well in Stoneham’s performance, through its repeated and emphatic articulation, and later on (beyond the span of this extract) through her loud declarations of wounded dignity as she is manhandled like a piece of baggage or believes herself ignored. The physicality of existence is brought to the fore, as is its ongoing processes of erosion and decay. Christy’s cart piled high with dung which Mrs Rooney passes at the start of the play presents pungently earthy evidence of the trail of waste mounded up in the course of a life. She suggests he perch on top, mount his own dung throne from which he can be king of his own shitheap and survey the surrounding territory. Mrs Rooney’s struggle with her declining and ungainly physical form is both comic and tragic. It resembles a slowed down version of the battles with the intransigent matter of the everyday world which the great silent film comedians (Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy) would intently engage in at every turn. Indeed, there’s something Oliver Hardyesque about her, albeit in a female Irish incarnation. Beckett would go on to a rather uneasy collaboration with Buster Keaton in his 1965 film, reductively entitled Film, which made clear his debt at the same time as it demonstrated the unlikelihood of Keaton ever comprehending it. Mr Tylor’s bike, with its flat back tyre, and Christy’s stubbornly stationary hinny (the offspring between a female donkey and a male horse) are the first examples of the slowing down and disintegration of the substance of the world. Mrs Rooney encounters along them along her way to the station, and they can all be regarded as an extension of her own state. In the end, she joins with her blind, austere and miserly husband to retrace her steps back home. They become another of Beckett’s complementary pairings, abrasive but interdependent. They seem destined to retreat further inward, shutting out the world beyond their narrow twin orbit (‘we shall draw the blinds’, Mr Rooney says at the end) like Clov and Hamm in Endgame.

Buster Keaton in Film

Having had a mere morsel of All That Fall as a starter, we got to enjoy Embers in its entirety. This was another piece written for radio, once more produced by Donald McWhinnie for the BBC Third Programme and first broadcast on 24th June 1959, with Jack Macgowran in the principal role of Henry, and Patrick Magee providing the voice of the abusive music teacher. Macgowran and Magee were two of Beckett’s favourite actors and interpreters of his work. They appeared together in a 1964 production of Endgame, with Macgowran playing the servile Clov and Magee the dictatorial Hamm. Macgowran also played something of a Hamm-type character in Roman Polanski’s Cul de Sac, in itself a film greatly influenced by Beckett, Pinter and the theatre of the absurd, as the title makes clear. Macgowran’s 1966 LP of Beckett readings, which includes extracts from Embers and Endgame (and which I bought from the Exeter Oxfam music and art shop a couple of months ago) can be found on ubuweb. You can also hear his extraordinary performance in the original Embers there. It’s wrongly ascribed to Magee, and it’s true that Macgowran’s voice does indeed have the dolorous intonations of the Northern Irish actor here. Macgowran’s Henry speaks with an enervated whine, which makes it all the more shocking when he launches into a raw and full throated holler worthy of Captain Beefheart. The Uncommon Players’ Martin Reeve (who also directed both Embers and All That Fall) voiced Henry with a rather more forceful and bitter tone, his changes in register coming across as an amplification of his simmering resentment.



The sound in the original broadcast was again created by Desmond Briscoe, now as part of the Radiophonic Workshop a year after its opening. He gives the constant background susurration of the sea a burnished electronic aura. It sounds like the rising and falling hum and drone of electricity substations or pylon cables in the wind, producing an analogue imitation of human respiration. It gives an impression of a haunted half-world, a shore on the dividing line between life and somewhere beyond, the conscious and the unconscious mind. Henry feels compelled to tell the imagined shade of his dead father ‘that sound you hear is the sea’, going on to add ‘I mention it because the sound is so strange’. The Bike Shed engineer restricted himself to a more straightforward, unprocessed (unradiophonicised?) recording of waves breaking and receding along a pebbled shore. This continued throughout, occasionally asserting itself with a rise in volume before dying down into the background once more.

Footsteps here are lent a brittle reverb by crunch of shingle on the beach. In this production the sound was created live by Reeve, who shuffled his feet in a trayful of cat litter, or some such aggregate. This had the effect of pulling back the magician’s curtain and allowing us to see how the illusion was made. This literal disillusionment did offer an insight into the world of the foley artist, but, having noted it, it proved more effective to close one’s eyes after a while and recreate the original conditions of the radio (sounds coming out of the dark, as Beckett put it). Reeves’ Henry also followed his own barked out stage directions and stood or sat as ordered (‘down’ or ‘on’). The dramatic element was largely extraneous, although unavoidable in such a context.

The steady continuum of the waves’ inhalation and exhalation was contrasted by the odd intrusion of clattering hooves. These were cued by Henry, who raised his voice in a commanding, directorial manner. As with Mrs Rooney and her doves, this suggested a reality constructed within the mind as much as externally perceived. They sharply and unforgivingly delineated the passing moments with a succession of short, non-resonant sounds, Henry at one point wondering of a horse if it would be possible to ‘train it to mark time. Time and mortality is thus set against the eternal, the unceasing waves from which voices of the past emerge. From this ocean, both internal and external (the circulating tides of sea and blood) emerges Ada, Henry’s dead wife. She is voiced with distanced frailty by Gillie Stoneham, much palpably present than she was as Mrs Rooney in All That Fall. She sat at the back to the left, far apart from Henry, who was positioned slightly to the right of stage front centre, and the two never met each other’s abstracted gaze. Her voice was drained of all colour and tonal variation, sounding as if it were weakly tuned in from the aether, the signal likely to fade out at any moment. Beckett’s script specifies that she is to speak in a ‘low remote voice throughout’. She is one of the earlisst of a series of ghosts which inhabit Beckett’s twilight worlds. They are locked into repetitive actions and circumscribed orbits, raking over old memories indelibly stained with guilt. We were to encounter another such spectral figure, dressed in a nightshirt winding sheet, in A Piece of Monologue, and they also manifest themselves in late works like Footfall and Ghost Trio. The idea of souls trapped in purgatories or hells, inhabiting moments from the past in looped repetition is also found in Play (in which they are encased in large urns), which reflects Beckett’s lifelong love of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Breath, from 1969, was originally written as ironic introit to Kenneth Tynan’s revue Oh Calcutta, his celebration of the decade’s sexual liberations which loudly promised plenty of onstage nudity. Beckett fell out with Tynan over what he saw as a failure to respect the integrity of his stage instructions. Since then, it has been seen (if at all) extracted from the specific context for which it was created. It bears some relation to the contemporaneous conceptual pranks of the Fluxus artists, or indeed of the Dadaists in the early decades of the century. In its paring down of the elements of theatre to their absolute bare essence, it is the most extreme of his works, and bears comparison with John Cage’s 4’33, the ‘silent’ piece which in fact comprises the sounds which fill silence and demonstrate its impossibility. It probably takes longer to read on the page than it does to witness. It begins with what Beckett describes as ‘an instant of recorded vagitus’. This means the cry of a newborn baby. The word derives from the Roman deity Vagitanus, the protector of the newborn who brings forth their first cry as they enter the world. The baby’s cry is immediately conjoined with a long indrawn breath and subsequent exhalation. It’s a concise encapsulation of the span of a life, a brief arc of birth, growth, decline and finally silence, and acts as a reductio ad absurdum of Beckett’s themes and preoccupations. Language is erased, completing the processes of editing and simplification to which he’d subjected in previous work, and expanding the pauses and silences which were a regular punctuation until they engulf everything else. The ‘miscellaneous rubbish’ scattered across the stage is a further instance of the material detritus which litters Beckett’s plays (and which Hamm discards at the conclusion of Endgame). The fading up and back down again of the theatre light (a naked bulb suspended above the audience in this case) reflects the importance of light and darkness in the plays. This is carried through into the next work, A Piece of Monologue, with its fading down of the light moments before the end, and also takes us back to the dying firelight of the dimly glowing coals in Embers. The birth cry morphing into the ascending inhalation of life and the declining exhalation leading to death also finds expression in the fist line of the Monologue, ‘birth was the death of him’.



The stage set up for this Breath followed Beckett’s instructions that there should be ‘no verticals’. This is the randomly accumulated junk of an unplanned life and should be inherently disordered (even the appearance of disorder requires conscious ordering). It looked like the kind of art installation which gets accidentally cleared away by the cleaners. Brown ribbons of magnetic tape were strewn around like drab or time-stained bunting. This was presumably a reference to Krapp’s Last Tape (which has been performed previously at the Bike Shed) and the medium through which its protagonist listens to his filed and indexed memories, recorded on spools which have here been unravelled and effectively erased. The silence following Breath was punctuated by a few disbelieving titters and tentative applause, which goes to show that it still has the power to provoke both ridicule and surprise. Its very brevity, and the greater amount of time which went into the preparation of its short span on the stage and its subsequent clearing away, made this a pointed and soberingly poignant 40 seconds or so.

A perhaps mildly disgruntled audience was obliged to file out after Breath had expired, having only just come into to hear its initial amplified filling of the lungs. When they returned (I’d sneakily remained lurking in the shadows at the back) the clutter was gone, replaced by a single dim globe of light in the centre of the stage. A man stood to the front left corner of the stage and began uttering the tattered sentences of his monologue. This was Les Read, a retired drama lecturer from Exeter University who was here putting his academic expertise to practical use. He took on the not inconsiderable challenge of performing the solo Piece of Monologue, which Beckett had first written for the English actor David Warrilow in 1979. The isolated narrator remains stock still throughout, the audience’s attention focussed directly upon him and away from the central globe of light which dimly casts its glow over him. He is a man who has retreated to the shadows at the margins, and that is the territory into which we are led.

The Monologue finds another spectral figure marking out the boundaries of a confined space, going through repetitive rituals involving the lighting and extinguishing of a wick-burning lamp. This unnamed character is a ghost fixed upon its unvarying track, and it’s possible that the grave he repeatedly recalls seeing is his own. The clearing away of Breath’s detritus can almost be seen as a thematic preparation for this piece. Our narrator talks of facing a blank wall from which pictures have gradually been torn to be left strewn over the floor in a shredded drift. They are memories stripped away to reveal the underlying blankness, and the complete isolation of the narrator’s ghostly half-life. As in Endgame, there is a window which looks out from the confined space of the room onto a world beyond. But it is an inaccessible world, mysterious and dark, ‘that black beyond’. The world has itself become immaterial, ghostly, and all is now compressed into this small room, life reduced to the habitual movements which are enacted within it. The concentration on the details of daily (or nightly) observances has a compulsive aspect to it which seems to be an attempt to block out painful recollection. Hence the repeated phrase ‘he all but said of his loved ones’, a drawing back from emotional articulation or specific memory. An intriguing extra element inadvertently introduced on this night was the intrusion of the prompter on the odd occasion when Reed came to a halt (and aside from these few instances, his performance was exemplary). This was understandable, given the dense, repetitive nature of the language, composed of short phrases with few definite articles and laid out on the page in a solid block of text. Whilst his presence was obviously a matter of practicality, the prompter became a voice from the outer darkness penetrating the narrator’s isolation, prodding him on to continue when he showed signs of fading. A semi-divine force or perhaps just an attempt at human contact, its gentle Devonian accent suggested a benevolent attempt to break through. This definitely positioned it as an invasive presence in Beckett’s universe, a sentimental element which he would never have allowed. With the dying of the light at the end, the evening came to a close.

Endgame with Patrick Magee

The following night, the Uncommon Players returned under the directorship of Anthony Richards to perform Beckett’s 1957 play Endgame, one of the two works (alongside Waiting for Godot) for which he is best known. This takes place within another confined and circumscribed world, a featureless room with two windows at the back which might be a bunker sheltering its inhabitants from a post-apocalyptic world, or might be the cavern of a skull, with twin sockets gaping outwards. The attachment of specific meaning in terms of character, place or metaphorical meaning is not encouraged. At one point Hamm, one of the characters, tentatively enquires ‘we’re not beginning to…to…mean something?’, which raises a brief laugh from his companion (other half?) Clov, and a dismissive ‘ah that’s a good one’. Hamm also offers a few pieces of pre-emptive auto-criticism throughout, remarking that ‘this is deadly’, and later hopefully observing that ‘things are livening up’.

The main two characters, Clov and Hamm, are another of Beckett’s double acts, complementary foil who are also inseperable halves of a symbiotic whole. Clov is ostensibly the servile, active aspect, although his mobility is pained and effortful in the standard Beckett manner. His derivation from the old silent comedians is to be found in the repeated comic business which requires him constantly to shuffle back and forth, reaching his destination before having to return and retrieve forgotten stepladders or spyglasses. He was played by Philip Robinson with an end of tether edginess. But there was also an underlying pitifulness, a broken quality which suggested that his resentment at his servility would never be translated into actual rebellion, no matter how many times he might say ‘I’ll leave you’. Hamm is the intellectual aspect of this dual character, blind and immobile in his moveable chair (not moveable by him, however, as several attempts demonstrate). His is a dictatorial mentality (his chair a director’s seat) given to endless questioning and speculation. As played by David Watkins, he was curt and rude (often amusingly so) with an aristocratic assumption of superiority. But he also had a wheedling side which acknowledged his total dependency on Clov. His manner reminded me a little of Jim Broadbent in the films of Mike Leigh. In this production, he sat in an armchair mounted on a pallet, like a makeshift dais, which gives him an air of wasteland regality. Clov and Hamm are both stained with filth. Clov wears an extremely grubby white vest, and Hamm begins with blood and god knows what else stained handkerchief shrouding his face. Both have the look of decay about them.

Taking physical and mental decrepitude to an even greater extreme are the two other characters, initially hidden, Nag and Nell, Hamm’s ‘accursed progenitors’. They appear, faces dusted a deathly white, from two cylindrical rubbish bins (battered oil drums in this production) in which they mostly remain sedately ‘bottled’, resting on their stumps. Nag appears most often, and is reduced to a creature of simple appetite, calling for his ‘pap’. Their vagueness (reminiscent of Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister in The Goon Show) resolves into sharper focus only when familiar memories or oft told stories are rehearsed once again. As played by Jan Hookway and Eddie Holden, they were touchingly frail and half-present, more ghosts living in reiterated fragments of the past. Nell and Nagg’s confinement, stuffed into their bins with the lids screwed down, is similar to the fates suffered by other Beckett characters: Winnie buried up to her waste (and in the second half, her neck) in Happy Days, and the three protagonists of Play, stored in large urns from which only their heads protrude. Beckett’s love of Dante once more comes through in such purgatorial images of entrapment.



Nell and Nagg’s bins shrink the boundaries of the world to an even narrower circumference. The idea of confining cylinders or other hollow, imprisoning forms, is a recurrent one in Beckett’s work, and was evidently one which played on his imagination. Similar set ups can be found in his stories The Lost Ones, in which 200 people live in a cylindrical silo, Ping, in which one person lives a monadic existence in a small white cube, and All Strange Away, which features a white rotunda in which two people lie back to back. Rod Serling used a similar idea in the Twilight Zone episode Five Characters in Search of an Exit, whose title clearly alludes to the theatre of the absurd and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Here, five archetypal characters – a ballerina, an army major, a clown, a tramp and a highland piper – awake to find themselves inside a towering cylinder with no doors. They have no memory of who they are or why they might be here. A fantasy rationale is provided in the end (not a very comforting one, however), but the atmosphere throughout is redolent of Beckett and the theatre of the absurd (as indeed are a good many other Twilight Zone episodes). Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 science fiction film Cube, in which 6 characters wake up to find themselves in a structure comprising interlocked cube-shaped rooms primed with a variety of deadly traps, is similarly Beckettian in its premise, and remains true to such influences by refusing to offer any concrete rationale which would place this netherworld within a fixed moral or political framework.

The room in Endgame is thoroughly explored, and the world beyond observed at regular intervals. Hamm insists that Clov takes him on a tour ‘right round the world’, and he is heaved from one wall to the other on his portable pallet before being parked back in exactly the same central spot from which they had set out. The windows look out onto a wider universe, one affording a view of the earth, and one of the ocean; one the realm of waking life, the other the depths of the unconscious. Such a clear division is open to any number of symbolic interpretations – or none at all. As Clov repeatedly explains, both are equally devoid of life or motion (no waves rippling the surface or winds blowing the dust), the world having sunk into an entropic flattening out of form in preparation for its final fading away. The Bike Shed proved the perfect place to stage Endgame. Its vaulted, underground space needed little adaptation to give it the feel of Hamm’s bunker, and a back wall with windows was there ready to use. Bright lights shone directly through them gave an impression of arid lifelessness beyond with the simplest of means. The fact that the small theatre was tightly packed with a capacity audience added to the sense of airless claustrophobia generated by the play – rather too effectively, in fact – I was glad to get out into the cold night air afterwards. It was a fine production by the Common Players, and it was great to see it attracting such a wide and appreciative audience. The Bike Shed continues to go from strength to strength. Long may it continue.

The Secret Garden at the Bike Shed Theatre

The Bikeshed Theatre (named after the sizeable bicycle shop beneath which it lies – more of a bike hangar, in fact) in Exeter staged a richly imagined adaptation of The Secret Garden earlier this week. It was performed by the Dorset-based troupe Angel Exit Theatre, and it marks the centenary of the publication of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s well-loved novel, which has steadily grown in reputation over recent decades to achieve recognition as one of the major twentieth century works of children’s literature. I had vague memories of the mid-70s BBC TV adaptation, but was entirely unfamiliar with the book, and thus came to the story largely without any preconceptions; The ideal blank state in which to approach any story.

Burnett’s tale has a harsh underlying lack of sentimentality, centring around two children who are both, at least initially, intensely unlikeable. Mary Lennox grows up in Imperial India, the neglected child of parents who show her little love and leave her lonely and brittlely introverted. When they both die during a cholera outbreak, she is left for alone in the house for a while before being discovered and shipped off to England in the cold company of the fearsomely dragonish Mrs Medlock. She begins life again in a rambling old Yorkshire mansion on the edge of the moors, the home of Mr Craven, a remote uncle whom she has never met before, and who has no interest in making her acquaintance now that she has come to stay. He is merely doing his duty as an Edwardian gentleman in agreeing to look after her. Left largely to her own devices, and wishing to escape from the stultifying atmosphere of the neglected, labyrinthine house, she explores the grounds and becomes fascinated by a walled garden which seems to have no entrance, and whose existence nobody seems willing to acknowledge. A robin leads her to a buried key, and she uncovers a door when she disturbs a sweep of ivy. The wild garden she discovers within becomes her sacred space of imaginative play, and draws her out of the stubbornly inward, arrogant insularity which has led her to be so dismissively rude towards Martha, the maid, and Ben Weatherstaff, the gardener. These two take on the role of surrogate parents, but her closest companion becomes Martha’s son Dickon, a gentle-spirited local nature boy, who has a tamed fox as a familiar. She lets him into her secret world (and was Kate Bush’s song Under the Ivy maybe drawing out the potential underlying symbolism of this scenario, in an Angela Carter fashion?) and together they set about nurturing the garden back into life.

Back in the house, Mary is disturbed by pained wails winding through the night corridors. Conquering her fear, and dismissing Martha’s denials, she traces their source to a room in which a sickly boy is confined to his bed. He is Colin, the son of Mr Craven, who is apparently afflicted with a deformity of the spine, and believes that he is withering towards an early death. He is a pitiable creature, and no-one pities him more than himself. Sealed in his bedroom universe, he gleans all that he knows of the world from his books. Mary joins him in his bookish explorations, and in turn tries to coax him out into her secret world. She and Dickon entice him with tales of the garden, and when they finally manage to trundle him out to it in a wheelbarrow, he is entranced by the enclosed, magical world. As time and the seasons progress, he begins to regain some of his strength, filled with new vigour as the garden springs into life, as if, under careful tending, he has himself become a part of its perennial growth and renewal. It had been a place beloved of his mother, who had grown roses there. But she had fallen from a favourite perch in a bower and died from resulting complications. The garden subsequently became a dark space, associated with death as well as with a life whose absence was still rawly felt. It was closed off and declared a no-place, erased from the garden’s map; painful memories sealed and buried. Ben Weatherstaff, the archetypally surly, no-nonsense Yorkshire gardener (akin to Geoffrey Smith, a regular on BBC radio 4’s Gardener’s Question Time, which my parents regularly tuned in to) had honoured her last requests and returned to surreptitiously prune the bushes and keep it alive in the form in which he had helped her to create it. But the creeping spread of his rheumatism eventually made of the wall an unscaleable barrier, and the interior grew wild and untamed, more briar than bloom.

Mr Craven spends much of the story travelling hard across the world, attempting to diminish the continuing pain at the death of his wife through physical distance. But as Colin’s health improves and the garden blossoms, he begins to hear an insistent voice urging him to return home. When he does, he finds the children in the garden, and Colin now able to walk again. His spirit is also transformed by the sight of the garden, his wife’s space which is once more full of the life she sowed in it (her son included), and the crippling melancholia which has for so long weighed heavily upon him begins to lift.

It was immediately clear (through the haze) upon entering the small, vaulted cellar auditorium of the Bike Shed Theatre that Angel Exit intended to engage all the spectator’s senses. The Indian environment in which the story starts was conjured with tamboura drones and billowing clouds of incense smoke. Already, outside in the bar area, we had come across scattered paper flowers and leaves and draped and entwined stretches of cloth patterned with floral designs which had led us to the theatre doors and prepared us for entering a different world. The incense created a heady, intoxicating fug (not a word you get to use so much these days) which immediately transported you elsewhere. Its lingering miasma in the opening scenes also served to suggest the sickly sweet pall of disease hanging in the air as the outbreak of cholera spread. Incense was pumped out again to usher us back into the story after the interval, taking us away from the smells of the bar and café. This time it evoked the rich, somnambulant scents of a hazy summer day, with the secret garden in full flower. The recurrence of scents drew the two worlds together, Mary having discovered the particular beauty and fascination inherent in the new world which she had at first utterly rejected. The exotic and the miraculous are everpresent, and can be revealed in the seemingly everyday and ordinary.

Observant statues - Cocteau's La Belle et La Bete

Angel Exit created a magical space upon the stage with minimal means, the parsimony with props necessary for a travelling company balanced by the imagination and ingenuity with which they were put to use. The illusion of depth and distance was given by the movements and gestures of the cast, who drafted architectural and garden plans in the wake of their regard. Poles (which would later become garden implements) were held up and shifted over and across to suggest the maze of corridors through which Mary was guided when she first arrived at the Craven house. Pictures and empty picture frames were lined up at head height to give the impression of the walls from which they hung. The faces of the actors positioned within the frames provided instant portraits. Their heads turned to follow Mary’s progress as she passed them by in a manner which immediately brought to mind the living statues and caryatids in the castle of Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bete. Such a comparison was further struck by the chorus’ formation of living furniture, of bedposts, washing line poles or even railway carriage luggage racks; static and rooted yet still observant.

Interior domestic appurtenances were swiftly re-arranged and recast to become aspects of the tamed natural world of the garden. A carpet’s dark weave, patterned with gloomy, dull colours representing the airless, lifeless world of the house was flipped over to reveal a strip of greengrocer’s grass on the obverse side, which served as the emerald baize of a well-tended lawn. Chests of drawers drawn out became bushes and vine covered walls, and the interiors of cupboards, doors spread wide open, became shady bowers under which characters sat. Long bolts of cloth were unrolled and hung and draped in undulating, criss-crossing banners, their floral designs appropriate to the season: spring blossoms and summer roses. Soft, stuffed props of a semi-abstract nature resembling the knots of thorn which appear in Graham Sutherland paintings were scattered throughout, inside and out, taking on forms appropriate to their context. They suggested objects on dressers or cupboards (brushes and hangars), mounted antlers (or antlers placed upon the crown of a head), roots, branches and rose thorns.

The members of the small cast each took on a variety of roles, Mary excepted, her presence on stage being continuous. The Lady Bracknell-like Mrs Medlock, loosely draped in a dour, floor-length black dress topped by a floppy black hat and veil, was a natural for a drag act, in the manner of Alec Guiness playing Lady Agatha D’Ascoyne in Kind Hearts and Coronets. The actor later became the puny child Colin, a role at the opposite extreme from Mrs M’s formidable and forbidding aloofness. He played him in a broad, clowning style, initially communicating in a series of breathless, animalistic whoops, and warding off potential contact with wheeling and wholly ineffectual karate chop gestures. Mary herself conveyed fierce and scornful self-containment by remaining for the greater part of the play with shoulders tensely hunched and arms held firmly and petulantly, fists clenched, by her side. This stance was only temporarily dropped when she exploded into motion in sudden foot-stamping tantrums. Eventually, this wearying rigidity began to relax as she opened herself to her surroundings and responded to the kindness and patience of those who inhabited them, discovering beauty in the world and allowing it in.

All of the cast also took their turn (Mary once more excepted) in a lively chorus, which served several purposes. They told us of the characters’ actions, motivations and feelings; bridged gaps in the narrative; noted the passage of time; commented on the action in classical dramatic style; and moved and transformed props. They also acted as living props themselves, holding up the blossom-speckled material or giving shape to the bed with suspended curtains, or striking acrobatic poses to combine into a garden hedge. In Angel Exit’s very Pagan reading of the book, they were like nature spirits, arms veined with rooty brown tendrils, leaves and feathers crowning their heads, woven into wild hair. Their eyes were made up to appear in the almond-shaped style of Victorian and Edwardian fairy paintings, as depicted by the likes of Richard Dadd, Arthur Rackham and Richard Doyle. They creep out of and return to the backstage shadows, creatures caught in the periphery of vision. They are not sympathetic or compassionate observers (this is not what the characters need at first, anyway), seeming largely indifferent to the plight of those the edges of whose story they haunt. Occasionally their comments take on a mocking tone, but they are never malevolent. They are not active participants, maintaining the distanced, coolly measured perspective of the wholly other.

Simple puppets were used for the lightly anthropomorphised birds, animals and reptiles with which the characters commune, and which seem to guide them at key moments (the Robin indeed leading Mary to the key to the garden gate). The snake in the opening Indian section circles Mary as she lies in what appears to be a fever dream (an opening which allows for the possibility that all that follows is indeed but a dream within a dream). It rattles and hisses as if it is trying to tell her something. She sees it and tells it that she does not fear it. It’s a dialogue which anticipates her later communications with the robin in England, and once more links the two worlds; the standard Kipling exoticism of India with the mystery found within the commonplace in a Yorkshire garden. The snake, in its fearful, poison-tongued aspect, seems to be a harbinger of the death of her parents. But it is also a creature which has represented change and rebirth throughout the ages and across cultures, and thus presages the transformation of her life.
The robin is manipulated by the actress who plays Martha, who makes it flitter from branch to rake head with convincing birdlike skittishness. She also shifts from Martha’s Yorkshire accent to an avian trilling which contains auditory hints of human language. The fox is a sinuous wind of bristly material with a vulpine snout at its head, which is made to glide and weave across the stage in Dickon’s wake. There is also a miniscule puppet of Mr Craven, which stands in for the actor playing the role during part of his endless journeying. It slowly ascends the Alpine slope of an upward sweep of curtain, whose creases are crevasses and folds escarpments. Its tiny form symbolises the insignificance of man in the face of the spectacle of the Romantic sublime in all its terrifying grandiosity. It also represents Mr Craven’s own diminished and desolate spiritual state. His self-punishing journeys and his confrontation with immensity and the void is a dead end. He needs to return home to discover that nature can also reveal itself on a human scale, against which a sense of meaning can more appreciably be measured.

This was a performance which also incorporated much choreographed physical movement, which often approached the condition of dance. On her trip over to England, Mary was handled like a piece of baggage, her body remaining rigidly straight as she was lifted, spun around and deposited, a passive and unyielding ballerina. The motion of the train in which Mary and Mrs Medlock travelled was conveyed by a rhythmic bounce, ending with a tilting forward sway as it came to a juddering halt. There was a certain amount of miming involved in the opening of invisible doors and the negotiating of phantom garden walkways. The chorus also prowled and leapt in a very balletic manner, sprites treading lightly upon the ground, creatures of the air as much as of the earth.

This was a thoroughly engaging, charming and heartwarming piece of storytelling. Angel Exit Theatre brought the world of the book to life with great imagination and invention, bringing their own particular perspective to the story. They drew out its Pagan aspects, its English nature mysticism (I don’t know to what extent these are apparent in the novel). It is a rewarding and worthy way of celebrating the centenary of The Secret Garden’s publication, marking the continuing fascination exerted by an enduring classic of children’s literature. The company continue on their tour through January, February and March, ending up in Poole in Dorset in April.

Krapp's Last Tape at the Bike Shed Theatre

Krapp’s Last Tape took place in the intimate surrounds of the Bike Shed Theatre bar in Exeter. The theatre proper is still awaiting clearance from the fire regulation inspectors, I believe. The close proximity thus afforded proved perfect for this one man play, however. It’s a story of an old man nearing the end of his days who reviews times gone by with the aid of an old reel to reel tape recorder. It should be stressed that, when the play was written in 1958, this would have been modern technology. Now it appears lumbering and obsolete, a cumbersome chunk of moulded plastic which in itself is a part of the obsolescent shards of the past which it preserves. Tom Owen’s portrayal of Krapp, the ‘wearish old man’, is very physical. He grunts, snorts and wetly chomps onstage, and slurps his drink and belches off. These are the basic, animalistic functions to which his existence has been pared down, and to which even his name seems to point. Our closeness to Owen allows us to experience this unselfconscious physicality of an old man alone in all its awkward detail. These are the sounds of a life lived too long in solitude, grown used to its mutterings and occasional curses. Everything about Krapp is grubby and worn. He is a walking embodiment of entropy. His clothes are stained and torn, and he wipes his hands on his waistcoat having gobbled his beloved bananas, something he has evidently done many times before, leaving an encrusted sedimentary record of his unvarying diet. Owen unpeels the bananas which he eats during the first half of the play with a sensual delight at the sound of skin splitting and tearing. He scoffs them after letting them linger teasingly in his mouth, hanging out obscenely, like a swollen tongue. When he does eat them it is with a sudden frenzy, a frantically consumed moment of ecstasy.

This wordless opening part of the play takes up some time. The published version is only 11 pages long, but this performance lasted about an hour. The play approaches slapstick at various points. Krapp drops his banana skin on the floor and inevitably happens upon in the course of his shambling circumambulation of his big, battered desk. In Beckett’s play, Krapp does slip up on the banana skin, whilst avoiding taking the complete pratfall. Tom Owen, in one of a number of slight personal variations which he introduces, spots the banana skin just in time and gives it an ‘oh no you don’t’ wag of the finger before picking it up and tossing it into the shadows (and hopefully not into someone’s drink). There is also something clownish in the way he carries his precious boxes of tape reels, piled into a precarious pile and inviting a clattering, clangourous tumble (which does indeed happen, albeit offstage). Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting For Godot are also clownish, with Estragon suffering the comic humiliation of having his trousers fall down. He has removed his belt so that he can use it to hang himself. The extreme opposites of bleak tragedy and broad farce are united, here and in Krapp. Beckett even got to work with a confused Buster Keaton in his short film Film, which affirmed his love of the world of the old silent clowns, even if the two ultimately failed to connect on any but a distant, professional level.

Krapp’s boxes of tapes are his carefully compartmentalised and annotated memories. His life analysed, recorded and filed. They are the collected components of a man who has always been an observer of his own experiences, cautious and distant. His 39 year old self is much more voluble and wordy. Beckett describes his voice as being ‘strong’ and ‘rather pompous, clearly Krapp’s at a much earlier time’. Owen manages to capture the lighter tone of a younger and more self-assured man on the tape. These recordings were the thoughts of someone with literary pretensions, and an occasionally showy vocabulary. He has to refer to a dictionary at one point to look up the meaning of viduity, which his younger self casually introduces into a sentence. The earlier self contrast starkly with the wordless figure we see before us. He seems to have become unaccustomed to language, either written or spoken. His reading of the notes from his book which accompany the tape boxes is as painstaking and effortful as his movements about his desk, and he shapes the word spool with the relish of someone discovering a new sound. The word spool does have a pleasing, onomatopoeic roundness, and Owen conveys Krapp’s childlike delight in stretching it out in a sound analogue to the unwinding of the tape from its reel. Krapp’s notes for the tape which he chooses note a ‘slight improvement in bowel condition’, and his recorded self confesses to having ‘just eaten I regret to say three bananas and only with difficulty refrained from eating a fourth’. His self-absorbtion in such narrow physical preoccupations (in one end and out the other – the basic functions of life) is evidently long-standing.

Krapp’s manipulation of the tape machine, punching the stop button, rewinding and fast forwarding means that we hear only fragments of his memories. These edits are a glimpse into the complex, non-linear nature of consciousness and memory, half-completed thoughts subject to sudden jump cuts to interceding associations. The tapes are a solidified version of Krapp’s memories, a technologised record of the self trapped in magnetised iron oxide, like fossils impressed in shale. The play is in some senses a primitive precursor to the idea of downloadable personalities prevalent in the science fiction literature known as cyberpunk, and found in stories such as William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic. These tapes are both blessing and curse for Krapp. They awaken old feelings and bright moments which were never acted upon. When reading his notes, he comes across a reference to a ‘memorable equinox’, which causes him to pause and repeat the phrase with a tone (and look) of utter puzzlement. Retrospectively, it can be seen as the pivotal point when he allowed his life to begin its slow shift towards the penumbral shadows in which he now surround his small circle of light (and whose opacity are enhanced in this production by a light application of the smoke machine). His old self speaks to his contemporary auditor’s condition when he says ‘past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited’. Krapp responds with a mixture of curtly dismissive grunts and rapt, silent attention to the replaying of his memory. His mother’s death passes whilst he seems to be distracted, elsewhere, so that he now (drawing on his recollection of the moment then) associates it with the feel of a dog he was throwing to a dog. The part of the tape which causes him the most pain is a memory of a halcyon afternoon of love, which is vividly drawn in a few brief strokes of detail (a scratch on the thigh from gooseberry picking, eyes narrowed against the sun). It’s a cruel memory of another moment left to drift away. Meanwhile, he is mocked by his subsequent self-important assertion of grand romantic artistic purpose, of a burning vision with which he felt himself to be imbued. Krapp loudly curses these pompous pronouncements and tries to wind past them as quickly as possible.

Finally he works himself up to recording his last tape, a mixture of angry bitterness (at ‘everything on this old muckball, all the light and the dark and famine and feasting’). sentimental self-pity and weary resignation (‘leave it at that’). This tape is tossed aside in favour of a return to ‘box three, spool five’ and the memory of love in the afternoon on a boat drifting down the stream, when ‘we lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side’. The light above the desk dims, and in this production, Krapp lays his head down and cradles the tape recorder, its reel end now flapping silently around. The light from the ‘on’ button casts a red glow across his face. The tape recorder is a physical comforter as well as a psychic tormentor. We leave him in his cold embrace (one from which he may never wake), the tiny flicker of red the only refuge against darkness, and a much diminished echo of the fire which he once claimed to feel burning within. He is trapped in his own personally furnished antechamber of hell.