Rockaby is a short one-woman play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in English in 1980, at the request of Daniel Labeille, who produced it on behalf of Programs in the Arts, State University of New York, for a festival and symposium in commemoration of Beckett's 75th birthday. The play premiered on April 8, 1981, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, starring Billie Whitelaw and directed by Alan Schneider. A documentary film, Rockaby, by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus records the rehearsal process and the first performance. This production went on to be performed at the Annex at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club,La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club official web site and, in December 1982, at the Cottesloe, Royal National Theatre, London. The production was performed Off-Broadway at The Samuel Beckett Theater on Theatre Row in New York City, from February 16, 1984 through April 22, 1984. Puerto Rican actress and director Victoria Espinosa took a role in the play when she was in her 90s.
Synopsis A woman dressed in an evening gown is sitting in a wooden rocking chair; no other props or scenery are called for. She sits totally still until the very end of the play. The chair apparently starts and stops "rocking of its own accord, since her feet are visible on its footrest. The motion creates a ghostly atmosphere."Ackerley, C. J. and Gontarski, S. E., (Eds.) The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), pp 484,485 The woman (W) is described in the notes as "Prematurely old. Unkempt grey hair. Huge eyes in white expressionless face."Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 273 Beckett is equally specific when it comes to the gown: "Black lacy high-necked … Long sleeves. Jet sequins … Incongruous headdress set with extravagant trimming to catch the light."
As she rocks she hears a "dull, expressionless"Specified only in the later French version. Referenced in Hale, J. A., ‘Perspective in Rockaby’ in Davis, R. J. and Butler, L. St J., (Eds.) ‘Make Sense Who May’: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p 160 n 8 pre-recorded voice (V) – her own – recount details from her own life, and that of her dead mother's, in what Enoch Brater describes as "a performance poem in the shape of a play."Brater, E., ‘Light, Sound, Movement and Action in Beckett’s Rockaby’ in Modern Drama 25 (Sept 1982), p 345
"The French title, Berceuse, means both ‘rocking chair’ and ‘lullaby’, while the English Rockaby refers to a traditional lullaby in which a baby's cradle falls from a treetop, thus bring together in one song the images of birth and death which are so often juxtaposed in Beckett."Hale, J. A., ‘Perspective in Rockaby’ in Davis, R. J. and Butler, L. St J., (Eds.) ‘Make Sense Who May’: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p 66 Both a traditional cradle and a rocking chair have rockers. "[T]he synchrony of the rocking motion and the dimeter verse line – one back-and-forth per line – plays against the recorded narrative."Cohn, R., Back to Beckett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p 360 To achieve this effect Billie Whitelaw was encouraged by Beckett to "‘think of it as a lullaby’ which she interpreted as ‘soft, monotonous, no colour, soothing, rhythmic … [a] drive toward death."Gussow, M., Conversations with and about Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1996) p 88
The play can be broken down into four sections. All begin with the childlike demand, "More" (consider Oliver Twist’s request for more gruel). Billie Whitelaw pronounced it more like ‘maw’ – a pun – "to suggest a need for nourishment"Doll, M. A., ‘Walking and Rocking: Ritual Acts in Footfalls and Rockaby’ in Davis, R. J. and Butler, L. St J., (Eds.) ‘Make Sense Who May’: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p 46 or even "Ma".Doll, M. A., ‘The Demeter Myth in Beckett’ in Journal of Beckett Studies Nos 11 and 12
Intermittently, she joins in three of the lines: ‘time she stopped’, ‘living soul’ and ‘rock her off’"Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p 662 at which point the rocking stops and only starts again when she demands "More," each time a little softer than the time before. The fact that time play begins with this word indicates that this scene has been being played out for some time before this. At the end of the final section the woman fails to join in with the voice, the rocking ceases and the woman's head slowly inclines; "she has apparently died."
Section 1 "The first section details W’s decision to stop going ‘to and fro’ in the outside world in search of ‘another like herself’"Lyons, C. R., Samuel Beckett, MacMillan Modern Dramatists (London: MacMillan Education, 1983), p 177 evocative of Molloy’s quest to find his mother. The voice’s speech is fragmented and simple "creating an affinity between the language of the child and that of senescence and dying."Laughlin, K. L., ‘Seeing is Perceiving: Beckett’s Later Plays and the Theory of Audience Response’ in Davis, R. J. and Butler, L. St J., (Eds.) ‘Make Sense Who May’: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p 34 This could also be a reason for the "huge eyes".The University of Illinois Eye Center and other sources say a baby is born with eyes that are about 75% the size they eventually will reach by adulthood. But still other sources, including Prevent Blindness America, say a baby's eye size is about two-thirds the size of an adult eye by the age of six months.
As with Not I, the voice speaks in the third person.
Section 2 The second section reprises and therefore emphasizes the decision taken in Section 1. It also marks the "beginning of her next phase of activity – sitting at her upstairs window, searching the windows oppositeThe composer Charles Dodge, met with Beckett in Paris to discuss preparing a performance version of Cascando. Beckett used the occasion to gush about a new apartment he had just taken. He was particularly excited because its window overlooked the yard of an adjacent prison. Charles asked what Beckett could see out his window. Beckett replied: "A face, sometimes part of one." - Schell, M., Beckett, Openness and Experimental Cinema, 1990/1998 to see another ‘one living soul … like herself.’"Lyons, C. R., Samuel Beckett, MacMillan Modern Dramatists (London: MacMillan Education, 1983), p 178
"Life is nothing more nor less than the act of perception or the state of being perceived, or, in the words of Bishop Berkeley which find echoes throughout Beckett’s work, ‘esse est percipi’Hale, J. A., ‘Perspective in Rockaby’ in Davis, R. J. and Butler, L. St J., (Eds.) ‘Make Sense Who May’: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p 74 (‘to be is to be perceived’). She sees no one however and is seen by no one. "Voice has become the woman’s own Berkeleyan observer, without whose surveillance any claim to existence would be invalidated."Brown, V., Yesterday’s Deformities: A Discussion of the Role of Memory and Discourse in the Plays of Samuel Beckett , (doctoral thesis) p 206
Section 3 In the third section the woman has lowered her standards again. She would be content now to simply see a raised blind as evidence of life. At the end of this section she realises it is "time she stopped"Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 280 even this activity.
"A drawn blind [is] and old custom signifying death"O’Brien, E., The Beckett Country (Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1986), pp 197,198 and the last thing she does herself before sitting down in the old rocker is "let down the blind"Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 281 before closing her own eyelids. This decision [is] first announced in part three by the lines ‘till the day came/in the end came/close of a long day’ reiterated at the opening of part four.Hale, J. A., ‘Perspective in Rockaby’ in Davis, R. J. and Butler, L. St J., (Eds.) ‘Make Sense Who May’: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p 73
"The objects surrounding [the] ‘window’ endow it with layers of feeling. ‘Pane’ and ‘blind’ imply more than the things of windows, and ironically comment on the classical metaphor of ‘window’ as ‘eyes of the soul.’"
Section 4 In the final "section V describes W’s relocation downstairs to sit in her mother’s rocking chair where she will wait for death" in exactly the same manner as her mother before her.
The action on stage becomes concurrent with the narration which becomes a "little softer each time"Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 274 until the rocking stops completely. She has stopped actively searching for another and given up watching for proof of the existence of another, but through all of this she has always had the voice for company; now she is "done with that"Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 282 too and has concluded that it is time she herself "was her own other ... living soul."
The fact that "the word ‘down’ is repeated six times in the first seven lines of this final section, while it is used only once in the preceding sections (‘all blinds down’) ... coupled with the play's first mention of the ‘steep stair’, gives verbal shape to the internal descent that is about to be recounted. The woman is descending into the depths of her self."Hale, J. A., ‘Perspective in Rockaby’ in Davis, R. J. and Butler, L. St J., (Eds.) ‘Make Sense Who May’: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p 70 Billie Whitelaw has said: "[The voice of the woman in Rockaby] gets softer because she's getting weaker, and the rock of the chair should be lessening, and the light is lessening. ... In fact, the woman in Rockaby is actually going further and further down that steep stair. So with the last ‘More’ she knows she's on the way out, and as long as that rocker keeps rocking she's all right. Once it stops she's gone... I do find it very frightening to do. And I find it desperately lonely to do. I feel very, very lonely in that chair."Kalb, J., Beckett in Performance, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p 240
"In French, ‘chair’ means flesh, especially naked flesh, so that the combined image of ‘rocking chair,’ ‘mother rocker,’ and ‘rocking flesh’ bring together inside a single word two realities of subject and object, the object being endowed with subjective realism."
The woman selects what initially appears like an unusual outfit for this final scene, an elaborate evening gown. Whether this was the one her mother used when she went through the same steps is unclear; it does however "marks both the uniqueness of the occasion of her retreat to the rocking chair and, as well, her re-enactment of her mother’s action. Whatever her motive in wearing this dress, it constitutes a remnant of an earlier life."Lyons, C. R., Samuel Beckett, MacMillan Modern Dramatists (London: MacMillan Education, 1983), p 180