Not I

Lisa Dwan in Not I

Do you cry out "ka'ana" when a wave is coming at you. Beckett's, Not I is composed of words whose only punctuation are other words. It was auditorily impossible to understand what Billy Whitelaw was saying in her classic rendition. The mouth, in specific teeth that look like dentures, were all you saw then, or in the current production brilliantly rendered by Sarah Street at the Irish Rep's Beckett Briefs, directed by Ciaran O' Reilly. Interestingly Beckett said the image of the mouth, was inspired by the Caravaggio's "The Beheading of St. John the Baptist" in Valetta Cathedral. Go to Wikipedia to get the plot about the outburst from a character who has been mute her whole life, but the words are really sounds that come by the bushel. Leitmotifs, islands of meaning, are what make the music. The title says it all, Not I. What is I, ego, prime mover? Is this voice I or is the fact that I has been attacked, the point? I and Thou in this case is I and Not I. Not I is the condition of no longer being perceived. "Esse est percipi," to be is to be perceived was the epigraph for Beckett's one movie, Film. Not I may connote not being, the opposite of Heidegger's dasein, or it might be tantamount to the primordial ether, in which nothingness itself sought expression, non-existent characters in search of an author. Did Beckett ever see the Odessa Steps of Eisenstein's Potemkin in which the mouth of the nurse is held open in horror? Quiz in anticipation of the next selection on the bill, Play, what does "viduity" mean? Spoiler Alert: F. Murray Abraham eats two bananas in the third piece on the bill, Krapp's Last Tape.

Billie Whitelaw's rendering of Samuel Beckett's Not I