[THEATRE AND PHYSICAL THEATRE/Drama ~ Victoria]

Star Theatre 2 at Star Theatres,  Mon 6 Mar, 2023.

Beckett is well known for his minimalist, bleak literary works, Waiting for Godot the most famous of them. Footfalls is in the same vein, but perhaps even more so. The fact that there is just the one character strips things back even more – just one hapless character shuffling back and forth across the stage. The hapless character is called May. She is in her forties, and dressed in rags.

There is nothing to be seen other than a beam of light across the stage that this woman in rags follows with a stilted rickety gait punctuating her seemingly pointless existence. The little she says would appear to be for her mother who is listening somewhere and answers in ghostly cryptic tones. Or perhaps it is May’s own subconscious she is taking to?

May appears cold. She is scared – terrified even. She has difficulty walking and talking. She is in a state of permanent anxiety. She sometimes makes no sense. Long pauses in the dialogue allow your own mind to wander and I started to see figures from my past. My own consciousness started to fill in the gaps.

Taking on this production was extremely daring of Lisa Angove. She does a fine job of being a quivering wreck, but this is theatre for aficionados. Unrelenting in its desolation. One is left to ponder the point of it all, or indeed whether there is any point. To Footfalls, or life itself.