here is a long preamble to Samuel Beckett's short play, performed in darkness by an unstoppably animated mouth. First, Luciano Berio's experimental Sequenza III, performed by soprano Claire Booth, which becomes a musical companion piece to Beckett in retrospect for its stuttering repetitions, gasps and throat-clearings. Then a trio of short films about the Irish playwright's relationship to Folkstone (where he got married in 1961). It is a three-part programme, part of the 2026 Beckett Biennale, culminating in the drama.
None of the buildup is required. The mouth, also played by Booth, is still arresting in its speed and urgency, reaching for a truth that rests just beyond its rapid articulations, even as syntax breaks down.
Under the direction of Rufus Norris, the setup is academic, the theatre part of Reading University's campus, but the production has nothing dusty or donnish about it. It is impressively delivered by Booth, who captures the racing brain, the split interior self and the speed of desperation to replay a life that seems to be flashing before a woman's eyes – or rather, her mouth – from her birth to this moment in a field, among the cowslips at the age of 70, which might be the moment of death. You glean, from the repetitions and verbal hiccups, that it has been hard, loveless and undermining, yet there is an insistence on speaking it aloud.
Booth brings added musicality, singing words, adding operatic cadence. These flecks make you feel as if this woman, what's left of her, could be a darker version of Winnie, the occasionally singing woman of Happy Days, not up to her waist or neck in earth now but reduced to just her mouth. And still speaking to herself, before the earth covers her completely, into silence.
Like many of Beckett's characters, this mouth seems to be asserting its survival through sounds and words. She doesn't stop talking, the play simply tunes out her voice. Her vulnerability amid the vast, pitch-black emptiness that swallows her up, startles you and wrings your heart. When the single spotlight fades to black, it almost brings tears to your eyes. A strangely, deeply moving 15 minutes.