Rockaby

Rockaby is a short one-woman play 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, and, in December 1982, at the Cottesloe, Royal National Theatre, London.

A woman dressed in an evening gown is sitting in a wooden rocking chair; no other props or scenery are called for. She sits totally still until the very end of the play. The chair apparently starts and stops “rocking of its own accord, since her feet are visible on its footrest. The motion creates a ghostly atmosphere.” The woman (W) is described in the notes as “Prematurely old. Unkempt grey hair. Huge eyes in white expressionless face.” Beckett is equally specific when it comes to the gown: “Black lacy high-necked … Long sleeves. Jet sequins … Incongruous headdress set with extravagant trimming to catch the light.”

As she rocks she hears a “dull, expressionless” pre-recorded voice (V) – her own – recount details from her own life, and that of her dead mother’s, in what Eric Brater describes as “a performance poem in the shape of a play.”

“The French title, Berceuse, means both ‘rocking chair’ and ‘lullaby’, while the English Rockaby refers to a traditional lullaby in which a baby’s cradle falls from a treetop, thus bring together in one song the images of birth and death which are so often juxtaposed in Beckett.” Both a traditional cradle and a rocking chair have . “[T]he synchrony of the rocking motion and the dimeter verse line – one back-and-forth per line – plays against the recorded narrative.” 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.”

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