The play is a single actor monologue in a pitch black space with only actor and singer Claire Booth’s mouth in the spotlight.
Sir Rufus Norris is to direct Samuel Beckett’s Not I play as part of an Irish-British celebration of the playwright.
The show for the inaugural Samuel Beckett Biennale will be the first UK production Sir Rufus has worked on since leaving his role as artistic director of the National Theatre last year
The play is a single actor monologue in a pitch black space with only actor and singer Claire Booth’s mouth in the spotlight.
Sir Rufus said, “I have always been terrified of Beckett. There is something so open and yet so unforgivingly precise in his writing, and this is never more so than in Not I.
“The text is everything and any attempt at understanding it, in the usual sense, risks compromising its utter integrity. Charting a course through it has been a profound lesson in trust and humility.
“To do so with Claire, however, has been a joy. Her rigour and precision, borne of her complete musical control, has enabled us to find both footholds and a bespoke palette within the vertiginous face of Beckett’s sensory assault.
“It is a masterpiece in miniature, compellingly untameable and poetically, viscerally transcendent.”
The biennale sees Beckett’s plays performed in locations such as his Dublin birthplace, his Enniskillen school, in England, Belfast and the Wicklow Hills.
Along with Not I, the event curated by Artists Over Borders will see a performance by Booth – who was last year’s Royal Philharmonic Society singer of the year – of Sequenza III by Luciano Berio, before Booth and Sir Rufus have a live conversation, followed by a selected text reading.
Other events for the biennale include a performed-reading production of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, in a new Ulster-Scots translation, on the Antrim Plateau and in the Wicklow Hills.
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