There’s performance and then there’s this thing, this unholy exorcism Billie Whitelaw pulls off where she’s basically a human wound spitting words. Samuel Beckett’s Not I isn’t theatre in any way you’d recognize if you walked in cold. It’s a mouth. Just a fucking mouth hanging in the void, hemorrhaging language at like 200 words per minute, and somewhere behind it is Billie Whitelaw having what amounts to a nervous breakdown eight shows a week.
Beckett rehearsed her into the ground, made her hit these rhythms until they were neurological, not theatrical. And what you get is this sensation that you’re not watching someone act trauma, you’re watching trauma use a human being as a speaker system. The Mouth refuses to say “I”, keeps deflecting to “she”, and that refusal is the whole sick beautiful point. It’s dissociation as art form, the self shattering in real time.
Whitelaw said the piece left her physically and emotionally wrecked, which, yeah, no shit. You can hear it. That jackhammer cadence isn’t virtuosity showing off, it’s someone trying to outrun their own consciousness. The relentlessness is the meaning. Beckett found in her someone willing to disappear completely into the wound, and what comes out is pure, uncut human panic dressed up in poetry. It’s the kind of performance that makes you feel like you’ve witnessed something you shouldn’t have seen – something private, terminal, true.