The Performance by Claire Thomas review – Samuel Beckett and the inner lives of women
The Performance is a celebration of art and human connection, and a tribute to the late playwright Samuel Beckett, whose play Happy Days turns 60 this year. Claire Thomas, a Melbourne writer and academic, uses Beckett’s play to structurally and thematically inform the novel, which follows three women watching a live performance as the world outside is ravaged by bushfires.
The Performance – Thomas’s follow-up to 2008’s Fugitive Blue, which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin prize – divides its narration between the three main characters. Margo is an ageing literature professor preoccupied with thoughts of her fading career and increasingly unwell husband; Ivy is a philanthropist frustrated by the trappings of wealth, who navigates the trauma of maternal grief alongside the joy of new motherhood; and Summer is a young usher plagued by anxiety and afraid for her girlfriend’s safety, as the bushfires outside the theatre threaten her family home.
Margo, Ivy and Summer, three women at different stages of life, are increasingly isolated by their fears and absorbed in their own thoughts, as they search for meaning in the action onstage and in their brief encounters with each other.
Related: Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days is turning 60. Its image of a trapped woman is as potent as ever
Their narratives intrude on each other, interrupting, and are interrupted by the fidgets and snores of the theatre-goers around them. Much like Winnie, the lead of Happy Days – famously buried up to her waist on stage in a drying mound of grass – Margo, Ivy and Summer find their words and thoughts fractured, as one thought gives way to the next; one chapter cut off by another.
The book is like this, carefully constructed and deliberately meta, with the threads of Beckett’s play woven through every element of the narrative. In his much praised, absurdist work, Winnie, from her mound on the stage, rummages through the contents of her handbag as she unloads a stream of consciousness on her husband, Willie, who is in varying stages of collapse on the slope behind her. On the one hand, her narrative is fussy and domestic; on the other, it ponders life in a way that borders on the profound. “What’s the idea of you? What are you meant to mean?” she says at one point, causing Ivy to question her own existence and endurance.
In 1961, the year of the play’s release, the critic Howard Taubman commented that Beckett “dispenses with the commonplaces of plot and action; nevertheless, he arrives at an emotional essence”. Thomas follows his lead. Although her writing isn’t as sparse as Beckett’s script, she limits her plot by allowing it to unfold in the silence of a theatre where its characters are, for the most part, unable to move or speak as the action on stage takes place. But far from being stagnant or dull, the result is an intimately rendered dive into the internal lives of Margo, Ivy and Summer, and the common thread of desperation as they each try to find meaning in their situations, and in the bleak knowledge of the raging bushfires.
Like Winnie’s chatty dialogue onstage, the internal monologues that make up the bulk of the chapters are lively and engaging. It is easy for each of the women, with the reader following close behind, to succumb to each train of thought as it arises, and there are moments where they follow it so deeply that the return to the theatre is a shock – even more so when they discover that Winnie’s dialogue seems to echo their innermost anxieties, as if she has read their mind. Is this the function of art – to speak the essential truths of our existence when we are unable to?
At times the book does threaten to become too clever, the mechanisms and techniques afforded by its experimental structure sitting a little too close to the surface. Ultimately though, the way Thomas plays with the reader is a sort of genius – as Winnie searches for meaning in Happy Days, Thomas uses her performance to allow Margo, Ivy and Summer to search for meaning (and, in doing so, forces the reader to search for meaning as they read). It is contrived, but thrillingly so.
In The Performance, Thomas concerns herself with the minutiae of women’s lives, and the enormity of their experiences. It is a love letter to a play whose absurd tragic reflections of reality continue to resonate with a dying planet full of people trying to figure out what they’re meant to mean.
• The Performance by Claire Thomas is out now through Hachette
