You wouldn't think it could work. This, after all, is a Samuel Beckett piece, conceived for television in 1965, in which the camera focuses on the solitary Joe as he listens to an insistent female voice in his head. But Atom Egoyan's production from the Gate Theatre, Dublin - deploying Michael Gambon's loomingly expressive face and Penelope Wilton's calculatedly neutral voice - offers a riveting journey into the interior.
In form, the play resembles Krapp's Last Tape in that present and past are held in perfect counterpoint. Lonely, dressing-gowned Joe is seen in his room, sealing doors and windows and squatting on the edge of his bed. What he can't exclude, however, are his guilt-haunted memories. He hears the voice of a woman who recalls how he committed "mental thuggee" on his parents. The voice also evokes a life of selfish detachment and serial betrayal that led to the suicide of a young girl.
Egoyan has ingeniously rethought the piece for the stage, so we are confronted by an extraordinary dual image: of Gambon seated behind a scrim-curtain on to which every single movement of his massive features is simultaneously projected. At once you get the 3D image of a lonely man and a giant close-up in which the eyes become a window to the soul.
It helps, of course, that the face in question belongs to Gambon: the suggestion of leonine strength is belied by the seamed, sagging jowls and the mixture of fear, apprehension and remorse revealed by eyes and lips. At the end of each of the nine vocal sections, Gambon's lids firmly close as if he has achieved blissful respite. But each time the eyes open again in terror as the disembodied voice grinds on. And what Gambon brilliantly suggests is that each recollection is a stab to his conscience.
Beckett, said Cyril Connolly, is the poet of terminal stages; and what we are offered in this brief, 30-minute play is one more image of irreducible solitude. What makes the image so moving is the idea that, even in the dark, dead hours of the night, the past returns to haunt us: when Wilton, using a perfectly rhythmic, uninflected tone, recalls the suicidal female "clawing at the shingle now", Gambon's hands go to his face as if the moment is alive within him. Beckett's play may not reflect the whole of human experience; but Egoyan's bracing production makes the moral point that our actions have consequences and that we are all the prisoners of our deeds.
· Until July 15. Box office: 0870 060 6623.
