Samuel Beckett
Rockaby

I fear that aging is a rip-off.

And what is it that cheats us? Is it the realization of the gradual but inexorable shrinking of our possibilities in life? The possibilities of our body, the possibilities of the paths to take, the possibilities of the things to believe in.

The Great Faber used to say “…Time flies, you know it flies away, perhaps we don't realize it but more than time which is ageless, it is us who are going away…”. Where are we going? There, where everything is reshuffled. Where are we leaving from? From possibilities.

I believe that Beckett's works are the decisive experience in 20th-century theater. Absurd characters just like we are (no one excluded), grotesque situations like those we deal with every day in this bizarre Carnival we call life.

At the end of his career, Beckett composed increasingly bare and rarefied dramaturgies, the dramaticules: very short performances for a single actor (or even for a single part of an actor's body) in which the power of his poetry was restored to an almost mystical degree of concentration and precision, somehow reminiscent (for depth, laceration, and Truth) of those brief stories by the most "evangelical" Kafka.

“Rockaby” (“Dondolo”) is one of his dramaticules.

On stage, a weak light illuminates a prematurely aged woman rocking on a rocking chair, there is nothing else.

There will be four series of rocks interspersed with as many silences in which the woman, live, will say only “More”.

Her face, following the oscillation, will alternately pass from light to dark, and during the swings, her recorded voice, like a stream of consciousness of Joycean memory, will tell (in the third person) her story, or rather the story of her hopes and emotions.

My God, what does that voice say!

A faint, disconnected, wildly glassy voice. Yet perfectly clear, perfectly aware.

Time is over and Space has closed over her, nothing is left but to surrender to that chair that will soon rock her away. Alone and forgotten.

Beckett's Existentialism is fierce, stabbing, and his pessimism is unsustainable for many, but, upon closer inspection, it has the effect of an antidote, of a purge.

It speaks of certain aspects of life as they are and, confronting us with them, we feel that we are all part of this "thing" that none of us has chosen and from which none of us can escape.

Proust found in Dostoevsky “incredibly deep wells, but on some isolated points of the human soul” and “a primitive gloom that disciples will brighten”; I think that if he had seen a piece by Beckett, he would have thought the same thing.

I cannot forget that voice: “…rock her away, rock her away”.