Footfalls and Rockaby, review: a chilling double drama that distorts all sense of time

Siân Phillips has a voice that can worm its way into your bones. It’s an instrument of rare power, one that Samuel Beckett used to spine-tingling effect in 1966 for his TV play Eh Joe, where her voiceover seemed to bypass the ears and bore directly into the soul.

That instrument has only grown richer with her 88 years. Just months after channelling her Welsh roots in the Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood at the National, now Phillips returns to Beckett, with two of his most unsettling late plays, Footfalls and Rockaby. That her voice is mostly pre-recorded (as required by the script) doesn’t make it any less enveloping. Piped through the speakers of the tiny, tomblike, subterranean Jermyn Street Theatre, it’s skin-pricklingly intimate.

In director Richard Beecham’s hands, Footfalls and Rockaby is less a theatrical double-bill than a séance. It is staged in near-darkness, bar a few white striplights to demark two playing-spaces – a narrow strip of black wooden floorboards for Footfalls; for Rockaby, a rocking chair in a cage-like cube of lights. Adrienne Quartly’s Lynchian sound design conjures distant wind, faint chimes, and an ominous hum on the very edge of hearing.

Bleak and oblique, each play offers only the trace of a narrative to cling to, but the echoes between them create an impression of women haunted by their mothers, of obsessive rituals dominating their lives, rituals that might somehow even outlive them.

Footfalls begins with a woman called May – Beckett’s mother’s name – pacing the same nine steps, back and forth, back and forth. She speaks with her unseen, elderly mother, a character identified in the script only as “Voice” (Phillips). Or does she? The mother is, ostensibly, on her deathbed, but Phillips’s Voice sounds indomitable, faintly taunting. Is she there at all?

Is May re-living a scene that took place years ago, or one that existed only in her imagination? As the play progresses, it becomes harder to tell one from the other; they walk in each other’s footsteps.

The script calls for May’s feet to be hidden by a shroud-like worn grey wrap, but here we see solid shoes. It’s a choice that suits the characterisation. As May, Charlotte Emmerson doesn’t aim for the metronomic precision or ghostly insubstantiality the figure is sometimes given. Her May is earthly and human; not haunting but haunted, trembling with half-buried trauma, her unblinking stare never far from tears. It is a superb performance.

Rather than disappear into darkness at the end of the play, she sings a duet with Phillips, the lullaby “Rockabye Baby” – the kind of directorial flourish that the notoriously controlling Beckett would surely balk at, but one that creates an effective bridge between plays. It’s a moment of passing the baton; one could see Phillips’s character in the second play as a version of Emmerson’s in the first.

Throughout Rockaby, Phillips rocks on the chair, listening to (and occasionally joining in with) her own recorded voice. Her face is a defiantly, almost fiercely impassive mask. Incanting in time with the rocking, she describes a woman who long hopes in vain to see “another living soul”, before bitterly denouncing life itself. After the past year of lockdowns, it would be easy but misleading to call this portrait of isolation “timely”. Phillips’s character isn’t trapped inside her home, but inside her mind.

In both these minor-key dramatic poems, time stretches out almost unendurably. Leaving the theatre as if awaking from a bad dream, I could hardly believe the whole thing had lasted only 40 minutes. I felt like I’d been trapped in there for one lifetime – or perhaps two.

Footfalls and Rockaby is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until November 20: jermynstreettheatre.co.uk