Lessness turns out to be oddly moreish. Samuel Beckett’s brief 1969 prose poem, known as the more elegant Sans in its original French, is staged with a haunting simplicity as part of the Barbican’s International Beckett season. The performer, Olwen Fouéré, an actor who would be compelling if she sat doing absolutely nothing at all, previously attempted this piece – never intended to be staged – at the National Theatre over a decade ago. But this pared-down version is very different.
Fouéré simply sits at a table, an anglepoise lamp providing illumination, speaking the text while behind her a screen – suggesting something charred around the edges – flickers as ash-grey as the landscape evoked by Beckett.
His is a ruined world where a figure stands petrified like a living sandstone or rock. Fouéré both skewers us with her gaze and seems to be looking into her own soul. The effect is of something both external and also entirely internal, without and within.
Just as Vladimir and Estragon have their own repeated rituals in Waiting for Godot, there is a ritualistic element to this text, possibly a message from the past to the future, maybe a talisman, certainly a reminder of something lost and a catastrophe beyond all comprehension. It is 35 minutes of intensity in which the words flood over you, wearing away at your psyche just as water carves through rock over millennia.
It’s a reminder that while the draconian policing of the Beckett estate too often leads to the petrification of the stage works, the pieces never intended for performance can be reimagined and reinvented in compelling ways. The key is the utter simplicity, as if Fouéré and her collaborators – Kellie Hughes and Sarah Jane Shiels – understand that less is always more. The great Ken Campbell once asked if nothing plus nothing was more nothing or less nothing. Here, it is an entire universe.
• At the Barbican until tonight. Box office: 0845 120 7511.
