This is the most church-like event I’ve been to this year. No one smiles. There’s a lot of black. Cashmere black, wool, even fleece. There are more black clothes than I’ve seen for a long time. Black leather jackets, black jeans, black and white houndstooth, and stripes; it looks like a uniform. ‘I feel so dependent for my children,’ says a middle-aged man next to me. ‘He’s going to Harvard and…’

Before the Royal Court’s Not I/Footfalls/Rockaby starts, two women next to me snack on Turkish Delight, but not a gluttonous amount, just four neat pieces wrapped delicately in paper. Nice leather gloves are put away, and still no one smiles on my left or on my right.

Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit make a point about ‘impoverishment’ in Beckett, how he gives the audience almost nothing, which is why he cannot be so easily commodified into redemptive art. But a glance at this audience is a sure sign that Beckett can be canonised. Everything is so comfortable around me I want to throw up. I am exactly as comfortable as the people around me.

Then there’s an announcement about the darkness, how between the pieces lights don’t come up but there’ll be three minutes of darkness instead. There’s knowing nodding all around: darkness all the way until the end, that’s what we’re here for. And of course, for the love of god, no mobile phones, not on silent, not at all, so that any glimmer of light won’t penetrate the darkness.

When the lights dim, it descends, and what a darkness: such a one I’ve never experienced in London. Dark theatres are never really properly dark: there are the seat lights, the exit lights or a glow from the AV booth. It’s still comfortable in the dimmed auditorium. But in this performance all those comforting, harmless lights are switched off, every last one. It’s darker than the health and safety allows, I’m sure; like being in a cave in Yorkshire at nighttime.

Then a lone mouth, floating eight feet above the stage in the darkness, starts coughing, spluttering. Lisa Dwan as the Mouth delivers the first piece, Beckett’s Not I , the spitfire monologue about trauma and speechlessness. ‘…out…into this world…this world…tiny little thing…before its time…’

Seconds into it and you forget the antics of the affected audience. The ‘vaguening’, a neologism Beckett coined for his notes, makes sure that the Mouth’s angst is as relevant for contemporary audiences as it was in 1972, when it was first performed. Dwan’s Mouth seems sharper, more machine-like than , who performed the role at the Royal Court in 1973. Dwan, who was coached to the role by Whitelaw, talks about the physicality of the piece in an i nterview. She must be strapped to a device behind the black wall – blindfolded and arms clapped under handles – so that she doesn’t falter and her mouth stays in light for the entire duration of the piece – ten minutes or so.

The mechanism of our eyes trick us, too. Even though Dwan is strapped to the extreme, the Mouth seems to be floating and moving in the darkness as my eye relaxes its confused muscles. The Mouth commands, ‘imagine!…no idea what she was saying!…till she began trying to…delude herself…it was not hers at all… not her voice at all…’ Even to quote from the piece with the necessary ellipses seems like a violation and a misrepresentation. Beckett himself said the piece should be ‘spoken at the speed of thought’.

Detachment and universality sounds cold, if it weren’t for the recognisable details in Beckett’s pieces. ‘[L]ived on and on…guilty or not…on and on… to be sixty… something she-…what?…seventy?…good God!’ makes the audience laugh. So does the repeated scream. It surely is a trauma, something utterly horrible, but the repetition makes it funny. Is there humour in Beckett’s late pieces? In Godot , Happy Days , Endgame – of course there’s plenty of humour in those, but the late, violently abstract pieces are different. Are you allowed to laugh at the traumatic scream? First as tragedy, then as farce: seeing trauma for the first time is terrible but when it’s repeated, we laugh.

Still, the audience is perhaps not quite prepared for a whole hour of church-like silence in darkness. There are no real pauses in Not I , but there is a long, lingering hiatus in complete darkness after the piece. This time the void feels deeper than before. On the other hand, the near-silence, with the low-frequency beats and a wind-like howl which are not quite music, is calming and still, like being in the bottom of the ocean. People shuffle. The void is not necessarily cathartic, but sometimes harrowing and oppressive. Isn’t it over yet? Ok, we get it, this is enough now. Too much of being alone, together. But not quite enough.

When the light does return, with just the faintest strip of it for the second piece, Footfalls , that’s when the audience relaxes and breathes out. In Footfalls , Dwan’s May paces the floor in the dead of night, in one faint strip of light, talking t o her mother’s voice until taking over the piece. Billie Whitelaw’s influence is clear from May’s first line, ‘Mother.’ It’s like a baby learning to say its first word, detached and mechanic. With Not I you might just let the shotgun monologue hit you in the face, and let the reaction arrive much later. The more meditative, painfully slow Footfalls descends on you and drowns you in May’s sleepless night. Still not quite enough discomfort, it seems, as the mother’s recorded voice asks, ‘Will you never have done…revolving it all?’

Beckett forces you into repeating the most boring, which is also the most harrowing. May tells you how she needed to hear her footsteps, so the carpet had to go. This is utterly applicable. ‘No, Mother, the motion alone is not enough, I must hear the feet, however faint they fall.’ Beckett starts from the coldest form and fills it, with something like humanity. Of course, the fill is not necessarily amicable or jolly. ‘Would you like me to inject you again?’ May asks her invisible mother.

Even in this late stage of Beckett’s writing it’s still not too hard to see Beckett’s relati on to Joyce. The dark dreams of Finnegans Wake spring to mind immediately, but the latter part of Footfalls also feels like an drawing-out of the unconscious of ‘The Sisters’ in Joyce’s Dubliners . There’s an event in the past, or the whole past which you can’t deal with as it is, which is why it’s necessary to focus on the form instead. But Beckett turns the emphases on their head: in Footfalls , people attending mas s are ridiculed, again through repetition.

The void between the second piece and the third is not more comfortable than the one before. People whisper, there are some hands shuffling on the thighs, and there’s a faint grumbling of a leather jacket, most probably a black leather jacket. Now it’s evident that they really want the discomfort to be over.

The pace slows down through the three pieces. Not I is breakneck, Footfalls glides across the floor, and the last piece, Rockaby , is glacial. The pace and the movement in Rockaby are almost nonexistent. In it a ‘prematurely old’ woman, again played by Dwan, is rocking slowly in her chair in her glittering black nightgown, framed as in a painting. The language is, as it is in Beckett’s short prose at the time, fragmented to the fringes of grammar and syntax. It is more difficult to do Rockaby justice than to the other pieces, because it shows us the nearest we get to point zero, where all movement and language has almost ceased. The woman’s voice is even less any specific person than it is in the two first pieces:

Time she went and sat

At her window

Quiet at her window

Only window

Facing other windows

Other only windows

All eyes

All sides

High and low

For another

Another like herself

The solitude persists, and it’s more clearly a self-imposed one than in the two previous pieces. Whether hermithood is a consolation or an affliction decides your sympathies, and your ease, watching Rockaby . After the pieces end, the inevitable return from the lyrical, soft nightmare brings us to lots of applause. Despite the black army of comfort, as soon as I got out I wanted another ticket. Go to experience solitude; see how the three pieces will change your life.

The Royal Court’s Not I/Footfalls/Rockaby will run in the Duchess Theatre in the West End, February 3 – March 15.

Aleksi Koponen is an editor at Don’t Do It Magazine.