Skip to main content

Hello. It looks like you’re using an ad blocker that may prevent our website from working properly. To receive the best experience possible, please make sure any ad blockers are switched off, or add https://experience.tinypass.com to your trusted sites, and refresh the page.

If you have any questions or need help you can email us.

Theatre review: Footfalls & Rockaby is a great that can still rock you

A Samuel Beckett double-bill portrays the challenges women face across the different stages of their life with triumph.

Siân Phillips in Footfalls & Rockaby. Photo: Steve Gregson

Footfalls & Rockaby
Jermyn Street Theatre,
London, until November 20;
Ustinov Studio, Bath, from
November 24 – December 4

A great many theatregoers – conscious that demand outstrips supply when it comes to legendary stage actresses – would pay good money to see Siân Phillips read out the Highway Code.

This is a fact of which Richard Beecham, the director of this Samuel Beckett double bill Footfalls & Rockaby, seems only too well aware, along with the fact his star is now 88 years old.

Beckett has obligingly written a number of plays that are eminently suitable for actors getting on a bit – there is, for instance, no great need to remember many lines for Krapp’s Last Tape – and there’s certainly no need for any heroics on the part of Miss Phillips in this production. Indeed, it’s the curtain call at the end that requires her to expend most energy.

The two pieces about the challenges women face at different stages of life merge inexorably into each other.

Phillips can be heard, but not seen in the first, and, in the second, she largely sits in a rocking chair, required only to periodically wake from her slumbers and nod along to words that she’s largely pre-recorded.

Charlotte Emerson – playing a daughter nursing her elderly mother through illness in Footfalls – evokes very well the pain she has to endure every bit as much as her charge.

Old age can, of course, be a terrible burden, but, ironically, seeing Phillips making such a strong impression in these plays – and with such economy of effort – makes me think it’s not always without its occasional triumphs.

Hello. It looks like you’re using an ad blocker that may prevent our website from working properly. To receive the best experience possible, please make sure any ad blockers are switched off, or add https://experience.tinypass.com to your trusted sites, and refresh the page.

If you have any questions or need help you can email us.

See inside the 18 November: Polluted politics edition

Young Germans singing from atop the Berlin Wall on the evening of November 9, 1989. Photo: ullstein bild via Getty Images.

Jenny Erpenbeck: A German voice from the East

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, one of Europe's greatest literary talents and most astute observers of her country's recent past and present... even if she did sleep through the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Nia Towle, Penny Layden, Siubhan
Harrison and James Bamford in The Ocean At The End Of The Lane. Photo: Manuel Harlan.

Theatre review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane proves appearances can be effective

The show's ending may be sloppy, yet sentimental, but it's the production's looks that captivates audiences.