![]() ‘The abject torture of the play’s second act, with Winnie buried up to her neck as the sun beats mercilessly down on her, is quietly devastating.’ Photograph: Pia Johnsonīeckett was a dramatist of uncanny precision, meticulous about every movement of the actor’s body, tyrannical about set and lighting design, and his estate has kept a watchful eye on productions around the world since his death. Everything else is powerfully articulated. There is no interval, which is a mistake – Beckett conceives the two acts as discrete depictions of time arrested, the tortures of accretion (of sand, of cares, of pain) and attrition (of life force, of hope, of vision) magnified by the audience’s exiting and re-entering of the space. The stewardship of Lucy’s performance is masterful: it makes what is ostensibly casting against type feel like a natural fit. Petra Kalive directs with a potent control of tone and mood. J David Franzke’s sound and composition is suitably discordant and menacing. Paul Kim’s lighting is moody and versatile, although that scorching heat could broil more. Winnie wears a rather sensual leather bodice – while we can see it – and Willie ends the play decked out in tails and a ludicrous top hat that make him look like an undertaker from Dr Seuss. His costumes, however, are wonderfully idiosyncratic. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morningĮugyeene Teh’s set design is effectively monolithic, and although it’s better than Malthouse Theatre’s mechanistic design for the play from 2009, it still feels oddly inorganic. ![]() The abject torture of the play’s second act, with Winnie buried up to her neck as the sun beats mercilessly down on her, is quietly devastating. The character’s effortful conviviality, her increasingly pathetic attempts to stave off hopelessness, are oddly ennobling. Where Lucy’s acting career to date has leant into her cynicism and imperviousness with predictable results, her Winnie leans in the other direction. Reared for slaughter”, he’s likely referring in part to himself – but it is Winnie’s play entirely, and Lucy rises admirably to the role’s myriad requirements. Spencer is suitably brutish – when he gives a definition of the word hog as, “castrated male swine. Judith Lucy as Winnie and Hayden Spencer as Willie. It certainly isn’t a marriage in any realistic sense they are merely two people in close proximity caught in the “blaze of hellish light”. He is a strangely cryptic figure, a pantomime foil, largely there for Winnie to talk at. Her husband Willie (Hayden Spencer) lives in a hole in the mound, largely out of sight, as taciturn as she is loquacious. Winnie prattles away about everything and nothing: “There is so little one can say, one says it all.” We soon realise that she isn’t quite alone, though. This disconnect between her attitude and her objective reality is the source of the play’s humour as well as its horror. What would seem an unbearable predicament to us, her imprisonment in that lifeless mound of sand, is for her a “great mercy”. The play opens with “the bell”, a hideously jangling cacophony that announces the beginning of Winnie’s day and signals its end – ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for Winnie. In performance, however, it feels wonderfully cohesive. ![]() The bone dry wit Lucy has honed all her career – those withering barbs she directs at herself as often as others – feels like the polar opposite of Winnie’s prating cheerfulness. Lucy’s comedic persona is entirely wrapped up in a self-effacing irony, and irony is a quality Winnie almost certainly lacks. On paper, the casting of Judith Lucy as Winnie seems counterintuitive.
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