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Rockaby is a short Solo performance 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 .
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 Rock-a-bye Baby in which a baby's Bassinet 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 . "The Synchronization 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 ‘’ – 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."
As with Not I, the voice speaks in the third person.
"Life is nothing more nor less than the act of perception or the state of being perceived, or, in the words of George 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
"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.’"
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 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
It has been suggested that the "other" that the woman has been searching for all this time is actually her mother.Oppenheim, L., ‘Female Subjectivity in Not I and Rockaby’ in Ben-Zvi, L., (Ed.) Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p 222 There is clearly an underlying text here of a little lost girl looking for her ‘mammy’. Having abandoned the search she opts for the rocker's "embrace" ("those arms at last") dolled up as her mother"Girls spend more time with dolls, in domestic role play and dressing up." – Giddings, M., Halverson, C. F., ‘Young Children's Use of Toys in Home Environments’ in Family Relations, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Jan., 1981), pp. 69 so that she can fulfil both roles, she can become her "own other". "Other" and "mother" sound very similar. As Molloy puts it: "I have her room. I sleep in her bed ... I have taken her place. I must resemble her more and more.Beckett, S., Trilogy (London: Calder Publications, 1994), p 8
As with all Beckett's later plays it is clear he has drawn again on personal memories. "There was the frail figure of his maternal grandmother, ‘little Granny’, Annie Roe, dressed in ‘her best black’, sitting in a rocking chair at the window of Cooldrinagh, where she lived out the final years of her life. The woman in the play gazes out at other windows for ‘another living soul’, as Beckett himself sat, often for hours on end, staring at the rows of cell windows on the grey Santé prison" which backed his apartment in the Boulevard Saint-Jacques.Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p 476
Needless to say, knowing Beckett to be the art lover he was, one can catch glimpses of a number of paintings he was familiar with: Whistler's Mother, van Gogh’s La Berceuse [4] or Rembrandt’s Margaretha Trip (de Geer) [5]. A favourite of his, Beckett owned a copy of Jack B Yeats’s exhibition catalogue, which included one entitled Sleep, a painting of an old woman a sitting by the window, with her head drooped low onto her chest.
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