Opening and closing. Opening and closing. Company isn’t a play; it’s a sense of tension, one which eases and tightens with eventually a comforting predictability.

‘You are lying on your back in the dark.’ An old man in a dark room suffers isolation. Samuel Beckett’s achievement is to explore this nothing as an 89 page novella. The man speculates, of the voice he hears, ‘Its object: to have the hearer have a past, and acknowledge it.’ So we listen to his memories, and we hear him narrate his speculations about the Voice who voices his memories. These two modes alternate, the memories a reprieve, and the analysis an intellectual’s primal scream to escape the self. (I say scream, Beckett is also at ease here, probing the possible, the theoretical, the abstract.)

As actor Simon O’Connor establishes the Voice for us, I’m on board, and I’m triggered. Statistically, some of the audience over the show’s two nights will experience hearing voices. Although Beckett’s knuckling into second- and third-person self-awareness, there’s an immediate crossover with the way many hearers describe their voices as narrating their actions and thoughts. It’s also not a big deal. I watch on.

O’Connor has internalised this whole hour and a half monologue. A feat! Perhaps an unimportant feat for him, his focus on the sweetness of recursive lines. The audience laughs as he coughs and bats at an imaginary fly, telling us of the temptation to have a fly for company, a fly who mistakes him for dead.

Artfully, he doesn’t demonstrate but illustrates the lines, like ‘see fig 1’. He gets down on all fours to deliver lines about the mechanics of crawling, and withholds from movement, despite the text bringing one knee forward, then the other. Because: theatre. (Director Richard Huber emulates Beckett’s minimalism in his director’s note: ‘It [Company] wasn’t written for theatre so you have to make it. Theatre.’)

Why do you have to make it theatre, Richard? Stuart Young? Why is this better than an audio book? If it were an audio book, I could roam. The stage is claustrophobic. We audience too are trapped. The groaning of metal and faint wind or rush noise (Sound by Kerian Varaine) lowers the beams and draws the walls in. Scritching and rattling emphasise vacancy. ‘It’s incarceration,’ a friend later says, of Company. 

Usually, unless the playwright is debuting, reviews focus on the cast and crew. But O’Connor has me cornered: I need to reckon with Beckett.

Why do I identify our man on stage as the Hearer, not the Voice? Shadowy lighting (by Martyn Roberts) makes for enlarged hand shadows because: theatre. Shadows amplify and accompany—if I dare—the man questioning his own memory. O’Connor gestures. Points the finger; clasps hands; regards all audience; coughs in character; keeps hand on chest. Every sentence its own gesture, every clause, and many words, their own gesture. Strokes his chest in self comfort. 

‘But to erode, a drop must strike unwavering on the place underneath.’ Backlit, O’Connor returns to his fundamental pose of hands like manacled at his crotch, a condemned pose. A close friend of mine wears earplugs in quiet environments. Theatre can hurt. Theatre doesn’t help. That is okay.

It passes, the unbearable passes. Things are not okay, then things are okay. Reprieve of the memories. Episodes, therapists talk of, of psychosis. Nothing very very good or very very bad lasts for very very long – Glyn Maxwell. No sustained feeling. Desolation; comfort. Desolation; comfort. I mention mental illness, but O’Connor is articulate with each line. He doesn’t dissolve his character into so-called madness. He’s crisp. Even for the passages of mathematical calculations which aren’t designed to be easy to follow, O’Connor’s understands what he’s delivering. Picturing him studying and preparing his lines, Lectio divina, comes to mind. Beckett would hate me saying that; Absurdist Theatre does away with interpreters. ‘Confusion too is company, up to a point.’ O’Connor, Huber and Young have a lot of respect for this novella.

As does the audience, clapping a long time. Then, a later climax of applause and whoops brings O’Connor back to the stage. This time he lifts the novella from backstage and brings Beckett forward, for his round of applause.

Opening and closing. Desolation; comfort. Desolation; comfort.

Leave it at that. 

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Alone. Company. Two words of such tremendous significance. Is the first so fearful we will, if necessary, invent the second? A man lies on his back in the dark, alone. In his need for some emotional connection, for companionship, he imagines he is not alone. A voice speaks, initially addressing him in the 2^nd person, ‘You are on your back in the dark’. Metaphysical speculation begins to merge with some of the stories of the man’s life, but are they memories, or fantasies?

Company was written by Samuel Beckett not as a play, but as a short story, a novella. It has been seen as more autobiographical than any of his works, though as he insists, our memories of the past are unreliable at best. Short stories have made effective monologues, of course, it is not uncommon for them to be re-interpreted as theatre. 

Highly accomplished scholar-directors Richard Huber and Stuart Young are surely to be trusted with the writing of the man who altered the direction of 20^th century theatre. Young’s programme notes are exceedingly profound, and Huber directed a robust Waiting for Godot that I reviewed back in 2011. But a narrative like this one? A meditation on what it is to be solitary? Who, after all, is this creature, and why in the dark – insomniac, imprisoned, ill, dying? Dead? 

The more impossible a performance concept is, the more likely it is that afterburner will seize on it. Over the years they have brought us one mind-expanding show after another, intentionally leaving the audience with more questions than answers. So how will this innovative team tackle Company?

The script is so utterly stark, that surely a staged performance will need to bring in all the bells and whistles. Interesting set, elaborate costumes, marionettes, lively movement, great vocal variety, cool lighting, maybe striking projections? One production in the USA even had the audience lying in the dark being gently stroked.

Ha ha, this is afterburner. We know their methods by now. Force the audience’s imagination to do the mahi, steal their props, strip them bare, scrape away anything extraneous, painfully if need be. Minimize, minimize. 

To ensure our attention is focused on the language and imagery, afterburner’s stage-lighting wizard, Martyn Roberts, has designed deliberately low, mysterious lighting, in which the sole actor’s outline may be dimly seen, but not his face. Kerian Varaine has designed the sound, similarly unobtrusive. As Huber has noted, when we are in the dark and our body is still, our inner self awakens. 

So, on a bare stage, in near-dark, can any actor make this ambiguous monologue work as theatre? Memorising the meandering script alone must be a most prodigious feat. Well, if anyone can pull it off, it is Simon O’Connor. He has held us spellbound while he watched paint dry. Quite literally, not a word of a lie, the play was even called Watching Paint Dry. From King Lear in the 1960s through Fortune productions like Bent, Othello, Gifted, Krapp’s Last Tape, to recent experimental works like The Toy Factory Fire, his presence on stage imbues any production with his own special alchemy. 

Company proves no exception, for O’Connor instantly has us in thrall. He is brilliant. Some in the audience might prefer to see his facial expressions, but I have a secret advantage – after viewing so much of his work I can picture exactly how he must look on any line. O’Connor’s masterly vocal delivery certainly requires no histrionics, his voice is perfectly modulated, a joy to listen to, even when, as Beckett often demands, he speaks in a flat monotone. There is room, however, for a sardonic humour to creep through the soft tones, and we are surprised into sporadic laughter.

His hand movements in the subdued light are as precise and elegant as those of an impeccably controlled praying mantis, but the image that lingers is the actor as a child crawling – hand, knee, hover, hand – the very reality of that first tentative struggle.

The darkness, the quiet, draw us into an intense concentration which is akin to meditation. I would like to record that I philosophise profoundly, but in fact I am irresistibly drawn to the snippets of what is presumably Beckett’s own life story, and now told mostly in the 3^rd person – the child who tried nobly to rehouse a hedgehog, the boy who watched his father reading, hopefully chuckling whenever his father did, the young man ‘on the bloom of adulthood’ waiting in the summerhouse for his beloved, ‘a light step for a woman her size’. 

O’Connor’s beguiling delivery brings this possible history to life, while he simultaneously speculates on whether a long-dead rat would make better company than a live fly who mistakes him for dead.

Once again, with courage and sensitivity, afterburner has created for us an experience rather than a performance. The rehearsal period must have been quite revelatory. Directors Richard Huber and Stuart Young delicately nudge us to enter a strange world and take from it what we will. Existentialist soul-searching, amused acceptance of the faultiness of memory, or simply a rueful examination of our own pitiful need for company. 

Company. Alone. Which of these two words will be the last spoken??

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