Review: No's Knife

When Matthew Warchus revealed his initial season for the Old Vic, he made it clear that he wanted the theatre to offer 'something for everyone.' Programming the likes of Ralph Fiennes in Ibsen’s The Master Builder, a musical adaptation of Groundhog Day, and Timothy Spall in Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker against a monologue adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s short prose collection ‘Texts for Nothing’ certainly fits that bill.

Beckett's writing is recognised for pared back, experimental form - he is held up as one of the last modernist writers - and his dramatic works are challenging. No’s Knife, presented by Lisa Dwan, an actress known and respected for her revivals of Beckett's work, at no point backs away from that challenge.

The pieces that make up 'No's Knife' are adapted by Dwan from the original prose and she, with her co-director Joe Murphy, produces a fractured monologue, which exhibits her supreme command of voice. Her solo performance captivates, expressing, as the Old Vic put it 'A voice searching in the dark for who it is and why it speaks.' Even through the difficult nature of the plays form, Dwan draws you in to follow her through the twists and turns of the voice's journey.

Designer Christopher Oram has created a setting that is part bog, part battlefield, and all bleak. The dull, fractured landscape provides the perfect backdrop for Dwan's voice(s), as it clatters against itself in a search for direction and identity. The hugeness of the space contrasts with her apparent frailty, which then clashes up against her power as an actor.

No's Knife is, overall, an amazing bit of theatre. It is not easy to concentrate on 70 minutes of monologue, but if we expect theatre to be always easy, then we are letting a vital element of it atrophy. Dwan's work forces you to examine what it is to be lost, and what it is to be conflicted: it is an important reminder of what theatre can be and do. It makes you think on a deep, real level, about identity, and the discomfort you feel watching a lone woman struggle through a broken landscape is part of that. Theatre can unsettle, and as an audience we should embrace rather than avoid the difficulty. After all, struggle is a function of being alive.

4/5 - Desolate and challenging: remind yourself there's more to theatre than a night at a musical.
The Old Vic