For twelve years, Lisa Dwan was known only as an illuminated mouth on an otherwise blacked-out stage, attempting the land speed record for Samuel Beckett’s glossolalic monologue Not I. With the passing of Billie Whitelaw, she has become probably these islands’ foremost dedicated female interpreter of Beckett. Now she turns her attention to a selection from his 1950-52 prose pieces Texts For Nothing.

A massive closed eye projected on a front cloth opens; the pupil expands until we seem to fall into it, to see blurred shots of Dwan underwater, with vague suggestions of the womb. The four scenes themselves, however, are more characteristic of Beckett’s assorted afterlife scenarios, or other kinds of un-life. Dwan, clad in a dark shift and leather leggings with bloody grazes, perches in a fissure on a rock face, strides through a wasteland or sits above it in a cage, giving accounts of... what? Of the Beckett usuals: existence, isolation, relationships which aren’t at all, choices, compulsions and coercions... the various ways we construct an identity from shards and wisps. “A story is not compulsory, just a life,” observes Dwan’s character (character?) at one point.

It’s an odd concept, but these early prose pieces – written around the same time as his novel trilogy and before the 1953 French première of En Attendant Godot – seem a little overwritten compared to his theatre work, as if the absence of an actual speaker meant that the language had to labour harder. But it gives Dwan more scope to stretch herself: she interrupts herself with parenthetical lines trumpeted, chirruped and growled, and in one scene with her own recorded voice. In the end she even breaks the fourth wall, stepping on to the apron to deliver the final phase of the fourth scene.

This makes explicit an undercurrent throughout the 70-minute evening, which is that of introducing gender as a consideration. These pieces were by and large written with a male figure in mind, but the mild subversion of earlier scenes comes into stark focus with the final narrative of a tortured non-relationship. Beckett famously wrote “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Lisa Dwan fails bloody brilliantly.

Written for the Financial Times.