Bewitched by the brilliance of Beckett

One of the most challenging pieces of theatre for an actor is how Ger Fitzgibbon describes Samuel Beckett’s Not I, which he is directing for GaitKrash at the Crawford Art Gallery from May 8-10. The production is back by popular demand having been performed there two months ago. Fitzgibbon, retired head of drama and theatre studies at UCC, has been a Beckett fan ever since he was given a copy of Waiting for Godot when he was 16.

“I was a theatre nerd at that stage and I just found Godot completely magical,” says Fitzgibbon. “It defied all of the normal logic of theatre. Apart from Not I, the last piece of Beckett I directed was Krapp’s Last Tape. I’ve taught Beckett for donkey’s years.”

Not I takes place in a darkened space illuminated only by a single light which focuses on an actress’s mouth. Regina Crowley plays a woman who has been virtually mute since childhood apart from occasional outpourings in which she alludes to an unspecified trauma.

“You can’t come to this piece with a big high concept. There’s the content of the play itself, which is quite enigmatic and strange. But the more you read it, you begin to understand who this person is and what her life is. You also see the compulsion that’s driving her. It is something that she has to tell. There’s a sense of somebody who is unable to be in normal society but wants to articulate her own life. I find that compelling.”

While some commentators have suggested the woman has been raped, Fitzgibbon says there is no evidence of that in the text. “That interpretation became a kind of fashionable reading of the piece. I see it as having enigmatic corners which can’t be quite fitted all together. It’s like a Rembrandt or a Caravaggio painting where there are these big corners and you can see figures emerging from the light.”

There are references to the woman having been abandoned soon after birth and brought up with what she calls a whole lot of other waifs which may suggest some sort of institution. “I’m very reluctant to pin the play down to one explanation because I don’t think there is one,” says Fitzgibbon. “I was interested that one of our young ushers, helping us with our first production of the play, asked if the woman was one of the Magdalenes. I thought it was an insightful observation. But I don’t think Beckett meant something like that in any literal sense.”

What the playwright is presenting is “the sense of someone who has been robbed of something through abandonment, deprivation and being in some sort of institution. It’s obvious that this woman is locked inside her own head. There’s an explosion of words. It’s like a vomiting up of something inside herself. You get glimpses and little fragments into her biography.”

Not I has become “a sort of Olympic sport” for actors, says Fitzgibbon. “It has become like a contest to see how quickly it can be performed. Frankly, I find that uninteresting. We’re not going for speed. We’re playing it at a comparatively languid and thoughtful pace.”

The play runs to about 15 minutes, played to an audience of just 15 in the video room of the Crawford. But the production is 45 minutes, as it is framed by “a sonic journey” by Gaitkrash sound artist, Mick O’Shea.

As to theories that the woman is actually dead, Fitzgibbon says: “I don’t think that’s a very useful idea to work with. She’s not like the ghostly figures in some of Beckett’s other works. There’s a huge energy in this piece.”

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