The Sharp Side

I was sufficiently inspired by Julie Myerson’s piercing critique to dig out my VCR copy of Rockaby, watch it, and then re-read the play.

What is the meaning of Rockaby?

My interpretation is that it’s about the winding down of a life. The first word of the play, spoken by the elderly woman in the rocking chair, is ‘More’. Which is the human condition, young or old. Every day, every night, is more. More time. More doing. More waking up. More urination. More brushing of the teeth. More eating of breakfast. More going to work, perhaps. More solitude, perhaps. More conversation, perhaps. More silence, perhaps. More lunch. More dinner. More whatever: loneliness, company, entertainment, depression, happiness, music, reading, movies, sex, alcohol, drugs, telly, whatever. For all of us more sleep, more waking up. Breakfast. More.

But it is also an artful opening remark. Because the condition of any play is more. A first word. And then a second word. And then more.

Othello begins with one word: “Tush!”

Hamlet begins with two: “Who’s there?”

And then there’s more. A third word, a fourth. More. More and more words and human actions until we get to the end.

In Rockaby ‘more’ is the word that triggers each of the four parts of the play. And this four-times spoken word is the only one the woman speaks alone on the stage during the entire course of the drama. The other words, four monologues, are pre-recorded. These monologues presumably express what she is thinking. Her lips remain closed throughout most of the monologues. Only very occasionally does the old woman open her mouth and echo key phrases: ‘time she stopped’, ‘living soul’, ‘rock her off’.

The second and third lines of Rockaby (from the recorded voice of the old woman in the rocking chair) are:

Till in the end
The day came

And what day was that? The lines refer to an unidentified 'she'. In the course of the play it becomes clear that 'she' is the mother of the woman in the rocking chair. The day, then, is the day of the mother's death. But the identities of the two women, I think, merge during the drama.

This is a play about the human condition and about death. And as the end approaches, life is stripped down to certain essentials: solitude, isolation, scraps of remembered things, the certainty of death. Which the play deals with in minimalist terms, which might be thought apt to the subject matter. A single individual. A single prop. A light. Very simple language. A single, jolting expletive at the end.

Static dead theatre? A waxwork? Yet the condition of the play is motion. The old woman is in almost perpetual motion. Rocking. To and fro. No waxwork she. And the recurring theme is “time she stopped”. So although the theme is stasis, it is enacted. In motion. A teeming, restless, reiterating consciousness. The play is only lifeless if by life you mean people shouting at each other, or waving guns, or fighting, or running across the stage. And what Beckett does is challenge our expectations, our easy assumptions about what theatre is. Familiarity is always comforting. Beckett is not in the business of making us feel comfortable.

Time she stopped. A double edged, maybe even triple edged, remark. Or twice all that. It could mean the mother, or the daughter. It could mean ‘time she stopped living’. She alluding both to the mother and the daughter. She has had enough. She’s all alone. She has ‘famished eyes’. She looks through them in search of other famished eyes. She dreams of ‘another creature there’. But no one else appears. Her condition is one of absolute solitude, absolute isolation. And I think it’s important to remember that the stage direction states that the woman is ‘prematurely old’. Older than her years. Broken down by life, as some people are, and looking much older than she really is. Perhaps also prematurely old in spirit. This is how some elderly people are. They outlive everyone – their partner, their friends. And when everyone who has been closest to you in your life is gone, you lose the will to live. What are you living for? This is the condition which I think Rockaby addresses.

But ‘time she stopped’ could also mean that the old woman has brought time to a halt. She lives entirely in the past. The future holds no meaning. Memories of the past freeze time. And this, too, is a condition of old age. At some point in your life you reach the point at which all your adventures, all your great experiences, are behind you. This, I think, is the point of the precise directions about the old woman’s costume: Black lacy high-necked evening gown. Long sleeves. Jet sequins to glitter when rocking. Incongruous frivolous head-dress set askew with extravagant trimmings to catch light when rocking.

As she rocks, the old woman should glitter, and her rocking chair should gleam. The sparseness of the setting and the language should contrast with the radiance of the woman’s costume, catching fire as she rocks forwards and backwards. (This aspect of Beckett’s intention is, I think, lost in the TV dramatisation I watched.)

And isn’t a rocking chair a perfect metaphor for a life? We move forwards in time but are drawn back into memory and the past?

This costume evokes the unarticulated past: dances, romance, frivolity. A frivolity which evaporates as decrepitude kicks in and you begin to face your own mortality.

The old woman is also a daughter, reliving the experience of her mother. The rocking chair is ‘where mother sat / all the years / all in black / best black’. So ‘time she stopped’ might mean ‘since my mother died time has stopped for me’. The rocking woman remembers her mother’s end, ‘dead one night / in the rocker / in her best black.’

The language of the play is repetitious and incantatory. This suggests to me a dimension hinted at by the title. There is a traditional lullaby which begins ‘Rockaby baby’. And the old woman in the chair was once her mother’s baby. And so in our beginning is our end: born to die. The mother says ‘no / done with that’ meaning both life and her rocking chair. The rocking chair rocks her not to sleep but, finally, to death. Death is the play’s end; the moment in memory when it was time to ‘stop her eyes’. But it is also by implication the moment when the daughter does too, perhaps. When the rocking chair ceases its motion the old woman either sleeps or dies.

And the play ends.

The version I watched was directed for television by Richard Eyre. He was also on last week’s Newsnight Review panel with Julie Myerson. He said Beckett’s stage directions were very prescriptive (I think it was a complaint). He also said the play was about Beckett’s mother – a very reductive and, I think, false intepretation. I didn’t feel Eyre understood Beckett any better than Myerson did, though his misunderstandings were less explicitly philistine. His TV version of the play is a restless one. It begins with a view of the old woman at a window. Then it cuts to her in her rocking chair. Then the perspective kept changing, with different points of view of the rocking chair, medium shots, close ups of the face and knuckles. At the end there was even a zoom. I think Eyre did this out of an anxiety that the viewer would get bored. But the essence of Rockaby is surely to deny and resist that kind of film grammar. The entire play should have been filmed as a single shot.

The play takes less than a quarter of an hour to stage. What Beckett requires of us is our unwavering concentration for a relatively short space of time. Is that too much to ask?