Footfalls/Come and Go

Justine Mitchell as May in Footfalls. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

There are many ghosts in this double bill of late Beckett pieces, but it is the ghost of TS Eliot and The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock that haunts them most. In Footfalls, a woman measures out her life and death in footfalls, each step taking her closer to the extinguishing darkness. The three women in Come and Go call to mind those famous Eliot lines: "In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo." Beckett's 1965 "dramaticule" is an inversion of the Eliot. "Let us not speak," says one of the women. Polite social chatter is unnecessary for these three women who sit like elegant, beady birds on a bench under wide-brimmed hats and an empty sky. They are intimates with their long shared history and shared doomed futures. The nature of that doom is whispered by one to another as - in turn - a third discreetly departs and then returns. It is girlish gossip, but gossip without malice. Like these women's friendship, the play happens almost entirely in the silences between the 121 words of text. It is like dropping a pebble into a well and hearing a distant splash that reverberates for eternity.

At the end, the women clasp hands, a tiny gesture of solidarity and exquisite tenderness. It is such a fruitless defence against a merciless world that it makes you want to weep. That moment is worth every penny of the ticket price.

Footfalls is the better known piece and it may be that its familiarity robs it of impact. Perhaps it also fails to entirely stir because production and performance are too stagey.

At times, too, the dialogue between daughter and mother is more reminiscent of the "Oirish" pastiche of Martin McDonagh than Beckett. Justine Mitchell's May hints of Miss Havisham abandoned, rather than a woman staging her own vanishing act, pacing the same narrow strip until she disappears into the void. None the less, the piece invokes its own mysterious, phantasmic power, and in each laboured tread we hear the echoing footfalls of all the ghosts who have walked before us and with whom we shall eventually take our place.

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