tbc

A short play by Samuel Beckett, performed by Billie Whitelaw, who plays MOUTH, spotlit on a dark stage. This mouth lets out a cascade of testimony (“mad stuff … half the vowels wrong”), pausing only for a few brief moments of disavowal: “what? … who? … no! … she!” Beckett hoped this would “work on the nerves of the audience, and not its intellect.” Unseen in this BBC filming: a silent character, AUDITOR, who stands upstage in a dark djellaba, making occasional gestures of helpless compassion. A visual inspiration for the play was Caravaggio’s The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist: Beckett notes the old woman who “observes the decapitation with horror, covering her ears rather than her eyes.”

• Programm Programme: Whole Body Like Gone (curated by Jamie Crewe)