Footfalls
Billie Whitelaw, for whom the piece had been written, played May whilst Rose Hill voiced the mother.
After this the lights fade up to reveal an illuminated strip along which a woman, May, paces back and forth, nine steps within a one-metre stretch.
"[2] "These 'life-long stretches of walking,' he told his German May, Hildegard Schmahl, are 'the centre of the play; everything else is secondary'.
"[2] To ensure that every step could be heard "sandpaper was attached to the soles of [Billie] Whitelaw's soft ballet slippers"[3] during the London premiere.
As she covers the nine paces (seven in earlier printed texts) she hugs herself, the arms crossed, with the hands clasping the shoulders in front.
"[4] The full list of comforts offered to the suffering mother carry a biblical resonance: dressings, sponge, lip-moistening and prayer.
May may or may not be a ghost but she is undoubtedly a haunted individual; the umbilical cord has clearly never been severed.
We learn that the turning point in May's life, the "it" happened in girlhood: "when other girls her age were out at … lacrosse"[7] she had already begun her obsessive pacing.
We also learn how May sleeps, "in snatches" with her head bowed against the wall which is reminiscent of Mary in Watt (novel).
[10] "Beckett explains [why] the mother interrupts herself in the sentence 'In the old home, the same where she—(pause)' and then continues 'The same where she began.
In that sense the recitation becomes a verbal structure repeated in consciousness rather than a sequence of memories in spontaneous association.
She asks if Amy had seen anything strange during the service but the daughter insists she did not because she "was not there" a point her mother takes issue with because she is convinced that she heard her distinctly say "Amen.
"[16] This is not a dramatisation of the event that traumatised May however as that happened in girlhood and Amy is described in the text as "scarcely a girl any more.
"[17] "As the play ends, Mrs Winter speaks to Amy the very words spoken to May by her mother: 'Will you never have done … revolving it all?'"
But it should be remembered that [a] ghost has a curious relation to finitude, which means it is never entirely unearthly or out of this world.
"[20] James Knowlson and John Pilling in Frescoes of the Skull (p 227) come close to summarising the entire play in a single sentence: "We realise, perhaps only after the play has ended, that we may have been watching a ghost telling a tale of a ghost (herself), who fails to be observed by someone else (her fictional alter ego) because she in turn is not really there … even the mother's voice may simply be a voice in the mind of a ghost."
Beckett's mother, also called May, had "difficulty sleeping through the night, and there were often times when she paced the floor of her room or wandered through the darkened house as silently as one of the ghosts which she swore haunted it… She [also] removed the carpets in some areas" so she could hear her feet no matter how faint they fell.
Jung, the psychologist, once gave a lecture in London and told of a female patient who was being treated by him.
Beckett recognized in this psychological dilemma an example of "his own womb fixation, arguing forcefully that all his behavior, from the simple inclination to stay in bed to his deep-seated need to pay frequent visits to his mother, were all aspects of an improper birth.
Among the myths underlying psychic life, Jung favoured that of the hero who has to stand up to a devouring Great Mother figure threatening to drag him back into symbiotic unconsciousness.
[24] "Only two years before writing Footfalls, [Beckett] had also met the daughter of an old friend, who described to him graphically her own depression, distress and extreme agoraphobia, telling him how, unable to face the world, she used to pace relentlessly up and down in her apartment.
If we viewed May's pacing from above "we would see the tracing on the stage floor of a tremendously elongated variation of the figures 8 turned on its side … the mathematical symbol for infinity.
"[26] Beckett was also indebted to the French psychologist Pierre Janet for his conception of hysterical behaviour.
In his overview of Janet's work, Robert Woodworth in his Contemporary Schools of Psychology, a work Beckett read, pays particular attention to Janet's description of the "hysterical paralysis of one arm", which Beckett incorporated, into May's posture.
There are a number of analogies between Footfalls and Janet's work with a patient called Irène: He lists "the deep sleep, the sleep-walking, the hearing of the mother's voice … the terrifying extreme of Irène's fabulation, the drama of daily re-enactment, of pathological memory possessing the body and mind of the traumatised hysteric, … returning again and again each night light a nightmare in a private theatre.
[28] In reality her pose creates "a striking parallel with the picture of The Virgin of the Annunciation by Antonello da Messina",[29] which Beckett had seen forty years earlier in Munich's Alte Pinakothek.
The chain is joined that ties the thousands of past generations to the thousands of generations to come"[30] "He painted a woman in warm hues," Anna K. Norris observes, "her torso bare and her head tilted back, with long reddish hair flowing around her body.
The lithograph versions have the sperm border, and a fetus with its arms crossed in the corpse position looking up unhappily at the Madonna from the lower left corner.
Munch is playing with opposites here: fertility and virginity, lust and chastity, and in his words, life and death.
"[31] "Maddy Rooney remembers 'one of those new mind doctors' lecturing on a little girl patient: 'The trouble with her was she had never been really born!'
