Over the years, many installation artists have claimed Samuel Beckett as an influence, but it's only when you see his short works performed that you realise how much like installation they can be. Tonight's pieces in the Barbican's Beckett Festival transform their actors into tableaux that seem to operate autonomously before your eyes.
It requires a pretty ascetic self-denial for the actorly ego. The audience too has to show self-restraint, and I've never been as aware of the importance of silence as when watching Come and Go. Every creak, rustle and cough is like dynamite going off in the darkness.
This 1965 "dramaticule" is as much about silence as the 121 words that punctuate it. Three women sit in a row, their faces hidden under hats. As each one walks away, the others share a terrible secret about her, which we can't hear. It is less a play for three actresses (Ali White, Susan FitzGerald, Ingrid Craigie) than for three figures fused into a single living block of statuary.
Act Without Words II is Beckett's tragic-slapstick side - a grim mime about two sleepers prodded to life by a phallic pole. Each in turn wakes, dresses, drags his slumbering companion around the stage, then gets back in his sack. Sharing the same suit and hat, the two are complementary - axe-chinned Pat Kinevane is the sluggish, care-laden one, Conor Lovett the manic scurrier, consulting his watch like the White Rabbit.
The most commanding of the pieces is the 1963 piece Play. As the title suggests, it evokes rituals of theatrical performance gabbled out night after night. Three heads - two female, one male - protrude from urns set in a row, and narrate what seem to be the disjointed shards of a banal love-triangle melodrama, featuring Cowardesque characters who jaunt "to the Riviera or our darling Gran Canary". A second bout of dialogue offers more intimate, less tangible, thoughts. But the fragmentary dialogue is disrupted by hiccups, sudden gaps, words broken in two. Then the play repeats itself word for word.
Performed with machine-gun timing by Craigie, White and Gerard McSorley, Play feels like a verbal version of the hat routine from Waiting For Godot, the baton of language passed at lightning speed from one speaker to the next. The effect is of a drama smashed into bits, then reconstituted as a mechanised exhibit in some museum of human discourse. Director Bairbre Ní Chaoimh brilliantly mobilises the precision of these pieces - less like plays, more rhythmic infernal machines.
