ONE of Samuel Beckett’s most demanding works is to receive an unusual new interpretation when acclaimed soprano Claire Booth swaps singing for acting to perform Not I at the University of Reading next month.
Booth, a Royal Philharmonic Society Singer of the Year, will take on the role of Mouth in Beckett’s extraordinary 1972 monologue on September 19 and 20 as part of the inaugural Samuel Beckett Biennale.
The production will be directed by Sir Rufus Norris, the former artistic director of the National Theatre, in his first UK theatre project since leaving the organisation.
It will also mark Booth’s first venture into straight theatre — although the choice of Not I, with its rapid-fire language and intensely musical qualities, makes the casting of a singer particularly intriguing.
Claire Booth (Pic: Sven Arnstein)Beckett’s short play is performed in almost complete darkness, with only the actor’s mouth illuminated as a torrent of fragmented words pours forth. The role became particularly associated with Billie Whitelaw, Beckett’s longtime collaborator, who famously performed it at London’s Royal Court.
Booth said approaching the work through its musical qualities had been “a revelation”, adding that she and Norris had discovered “something truly operatic” in its emotional scope.
Norris admitted that he had previously found Beckett intimidating.
“I have always been terrified of Beckett,” he said, describing the playwright’s writing as both open and “unforgivingly precise”.
He said Booth’s musical training, and the “rigour and precision” it required, had helped them negotiate what he called the “sensory assault” of the piece.
The performances will take place at the Minghella Studios at the University of Reading, appropriately enough the home of the Samuel Beckett archive. The university also holds the archive of Billie Whitelaw.
Sean Doran (Pic: Bobbie Hanvey)The production forms part of an ambitious new celebration of the Irish writer which is taking Beckett’s work to places associated with his life across Ireland and Britain.
The Samuel Beckett Biennale is curated by Seán Doran, creative and general director of Arts Over Borders and former artistic director and chief executive of English National Opera.
Doran previously led the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival, which ran from 2012 to 2022. The new biennale ranges from Beckett’s native Dublin to Enniskillen, where he attended Portora Royal School, as well as Belfast, the Wicklow hills and England.
The Reading event itself has been devised as more than a conventional theatre performance.
It will begin with Booth performing Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III, a pioneering 1966 work for solo female voice which, like Not I, explores the territory between language, sound and music.
That will be followed by a conversation between Booth and Norris, a selected text reading and finally the performance of Beckett’s play. Material from the Beckett and Whitelaw archives will also be displayed.
Doran said bringing Not I to Reading was particularly significant because the late film director Anthony Minghella, after whom the studios are named, had agreed to become the original patron of the Happy Days festival before his death in 2008.
The biennale will also return to Ireland in September with an unusual version of another of Beckett’s best-known works.
Rufus NorrisA performed reading of Waiting for Godot, in a new Ulster-Scots translation by Frank Ferguson of Ulster University, is due to be staged on the Antrim Plateau on September 19 and in the Wicklow Hills the following day. Both performances will take place around sculptor Antony Gormley’s Tree for Waiting for Godot.
And the organisers are already looking considerably further ahead.
Plans have been made for productions of Krapp’s Last Tape in 2036 and 2038 in which actors Samuel West and Richard Dormer will appear alongside recordings they made of themselves three decades earlier.
The experiment takes Beckett’s fascination with memory and ageing unusually literally: the older actors will effectively perform opposite their younger selves.
Not I will be performed at the Minghella Studios, University of Reading, on September 19 at 7pm and September 20 at 5pm. Tickets cost £25.
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