Trying ‘to tell how it was’.

A lonely, tense woman routinely if reluctantly paces the narrow stage strip. She has ‘dishevelled grey hair’ and is shrouded in a trailing, tattered, faded grey wrap. Her empty eyes stare fixedly before her. Hers is a gaunt, ghostly figure.

‘May stands independent of her surroundings as a concentrated bundle on the strip of light,’ notes Walter Asmus (Director of Footfalls for the ‘Beckett on Film’ project), recalling Beckett’s own presentation of the play at Berlin’s Schiller-Theater Werkstatt in 1976. ‘No superfluous movement distracts, the tension communicates itself to the observer, one is drawn into the undertow of the story – the concentration is passed on and challenges the observer to an absolute concentration.’

Memory appears to both preoccupy and sustain her. Her habitual motion mirrors her inability to stop her mind revolving questions about her experience of living. As she ‘tries to tell how it was’, the inability to create meaning from anything other than fragmentary memories leaves her, as Beckett once explained, ‘not all there’.

Her every attempt to fathom the sense of ‘it all’ raises many unanswerable questions for both May and her audience. Whether she invents dialogues (within monologues) by conjuring up the only voice she knows – the cold, remote voice of her old, sickly mother, or through reincarnating herself as Amy (an anagram of May) to revisit the mother-daughter relationship, May is only ever able to conceive of her past experience in the detached, third person – ‘as though she had never been … as though never there’. The only certainty of her present existence is the ‘clearly audible rhythmic tread’ of her endless footfalls, ‘however faint they fall’.

Beckett directed the actress playing May in his German production to speak in ‘monotone, without colour, very distant. You are composing. It is not a story, but an improvisation. You are looking for the words, you correct yourself constantly … The voice is the voice of an epilogue. At the end it can’t go any farther. It is just at an end.’

Having done ‘revolving it all’ in her mind and finding ‘no trace of May’, her absence is all that is left.