Pas Moi / Not I – Toxteth Reservoir

Michael Cummins ensures Toxteth Reservoir is perfect as the pitch-black space illuminated only by a single beam of light which is focused on an actress’ (Clara Simpson) mouth with everything else blacked out around her in this production from Once Off Productions.

The mouth utters jumbled up sentences at a ferocious pace and which obliquely tell the story of a woman of about seventy who was abandoned by her family after a premature birth and has lived a loveless, mechanical existence, and who appears to have suffered an unspecified traumatic experience. Virtually mute since childhood, this is one of her occasional outbursts in which she relates four incidents from her life: lying face down in the grass; standing in a supermarket; sitting on a mound in Croker’s Acre, and ‘that time at court’, which each being preceded by a repeat of the repressed first scene which has acted as the trigger for her to start talking.

Her initial assumption is that she is being punished by God but since she is neither suffering or feeling any pain, and nor, as in life, felt no pleasure, she is left to wonder why she would be punished or whether there is something she should confess, causing her to go over the events again and again, although this is compounded by her repeated denials that anything actually happened at all.

It is a complex piece offering insight into the mind of a victim, real or perceived, and the consequences of trauma, made all too real by Simpson’s mesmerising performance which cuts through the surrounding darkness both vocally, through the frenzied words themselves, and through their formation by her blood red lips, which contrast further with the purity of her exposed white teeth: it literally took the audience’s breath away and we said nothing at all.

Actor Clara Simpson has over twenty years of experience interpreting Samuel Beckett in Ireland and France, and with Pas Moi / Not I, she performs this notorious monologue in both French and English back-to-back, reflecting Beckett’s bilingual journey as well as her own, in this production that was originally commissioned by Arts Over Borders Ireland Commencez! Paris 2016 Festival, based on an original concept by DoranBrowne (Seán Doran & Liam Browne).

Pas Moi/Not I performs in Liverpool and Paris as part of Unreal Cities’ Beckett: Unbound, Liverpool/Paris 2024, produced in association with the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool and the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, and with the support of The Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs.

Further details including booking available for Liverpool at https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/humanities-and-social-sciences/research/beckett/ and Paris at https://www.centreculturelirlandais.com/en/whats-on/exhibitions-events/festival-beckett-unbound

Reviewer: Mark Davoren

Reviewed: 31st May 2024

North West End UK Rating: