Lisa Dwan’s Beckett triptych is a harrowing masterclass in dramatic minimalism.

Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre of WA, Perth
February 14, 2015

An hour in a black box delving inside the minds of three traumatised women is perhaps not how I might have envisaged spending my Valentine’s Day, but Lisa Dwan’s harrowing, haunting trilogy of Samuel Beckett shorts is one of the most powerful pieces of drama I think I’ve ever come across.

Written between 1973 and 1981, and all either premiered, or made her own, by the late Billie Whitelaw, Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby make perfect bedfellows, the latter pair a particularly apposite segue. For this immaculately authentic production from London’s Royal Court Theatre, directed by Walter Asmus – a long-time friend and collaborator of Beckett – Irish actor Lisa Dwan was mentored by Whitelaw itself. But all of that would be as nothing if Dwan didn’t take these three searingly painful works and make them entirely her own.

The first, Not I, is perhaps technically the most difficult. A ten-minute stream of consciousness poured forth from a pin-spotted, disembodied mouth, the monologue is essentially the jumbled recollections of a 70-year-old woman recalling her birth, abandonment and subsequent traumatic...