The Llanarth Group’s second Samuel Beckett offering for the Malta Arts Festival was Four Short Plays, all very short in fact, performed indoors at the Palazzo de Piro, Mdina. They are not exactly bubbly pieces, overflowing with the joy of life, so I suspect that the audience which had paid to have drinks and nibbles between one play and another, truly enjoyed the convivial atmosphere of the intervals.

Beckett’s text calls for all the man’s misadventures to be engineered automatically, whereas Zarrilli... has invented an Assistant- Paul Xuereb

The pieces, all of them directed by Philip Zarrilli, were performed in different parts of the palazzo, ranging from a couple of very hot rooms in which everyone perspired, to a cool cellar and a pleasant courtyard. The piece performed in the courtyard, Act Without Words I is the only piece that, despite its gloomy implication, is on the light side. It presents a man (Andy Crook) whom life literally buffets from side to side, whose desire to seek shelter from the sun glaring down on the desert where he finds himself is thwarted, who is tantalised when a carafe of water is offered to him but left just beyond his reach. By the end, when the man is so demoralised that he will not even grab the carafe when for once it is within his reach, the piece stops being funny.

Beckett’s text calls for all the man’s misadventures to be engineered automatically, whereas Zarrilli, presumably because Palazzo de Piro does not provide flies and proper wings, has invented an Assistant, played by himself, who is the visible torturer of the man.

The trouble is that the Assistant makes use of a ladder for some of his important acts, a ladder that the man, one thinks, could have used to reach what is dangling above him. Clearly the audience is meant to regard the ladder as invisible to the man, a suspension of disbelief that does not come easily. Zarrilli also ignored the direction for ‘dazzling light’ and ‘desert’ and in fact when the man first came in he was actually wearing a tie.

The fact that this piece is one of Beckett’s very minor works makes Zarrilli’s departures quite understandable in view of the limited technical facilities at the palazzo.

Zarrilli also played in Ohio Impromptu, another short piece, this time however depending very largely on what is said and involving practically no action. The setting is as usual minimalist: a table at which a man with long white hair, wearing a long black robe, is reading to another man having exactly the same white hair and black robe. The second man, the Listener, occasionally knocks on the table for the Reader to pause and sometimes repeat what he has just read. The text is about the flight of the Listener from the place where he enjoyed and lost his love and the Reader, we find out, is a ghostly emissary sent by his dead love to comfort the Listener.

The readings have been repeated for some time, but this, we learn at the end, is now the last reading. Reader and Listener find spiritual conjunction in the same way as the two branches of the river Seine come together below the Listener’s house.

Patricia Boyette turns out two fine performances in Not I and Rockaby. The former is the play made famous by the fact that all we see of the only speaker is a spot lit mouth seen eight feet above the acting area, all the rest of the woman’s body being hidden from the audience. The play was one of the works by Beckett that made the British actress Billie Whitelaw famous and it was this actress who passed on to Boyette the detailed advice Beckett himself had given Whitelaw about the playing of the part. The monologue has to be spoken at speed, and only a skilful performer can do this without making what she says less than lucid.

The speaker is a woman now 70 who has had a lonely and wretched life until at one moment she lost her consciousness and on recovering it, found she has become immobile but at one point was possessed by a voice that spoke ceaselessly. She does not recognise the voice as being hers, and she knows she has something to tell but never finds out what. What we do learn, however, is that Mouth has experienced a universe in which God the merciful seems to her to be a joke, but despite this her last words in the play are “God is love …tender mercies”, evidence that her childhood religious indoctrination is still working in her.

The other character in the play is a speechless Auditor, a cloaked figure, who tries unsuccessfully to remonstrate four times as Mouth continues to speak of herself in the third person. This figure is thought to have been inspired by the female figure who looks down appalled at the dead Baptist in Caravaggio’s work Beheading of St John the Baptist, a painting that apparently much impressed Beckett on a visit to Malta.

In Rockaby, the sole character is an elderly woman seated in a rocking chair, listening to a voice – hers, her dead mother’s? – describing a vain search over many years for a kin spirit, and later, when her quest becomes hopeless, a search through her window for another window where the blind is drawn up and a face is behind it.

The monologue is spoken softly but clearly and melodiously by Patricia Boyette. This and the repetitions in the monologue produce a lulling, near-hypnotic, effect. No wonder, Beckett’s own French translation of this work is entitled Berceuse.

Towards the end, the woman is clearly sinking, like her mother before her, into death, but right at the end we learn that she is not resigned to her death when she softly utters the words, “F*** life.”