There is a man, pale, shaved head, gaunt and haunted sat behind a desk with a ledger and a tape recorder. He stares from his seat, subduing the audience into silence as they enter. Beckett's 1958 monologue Krapp's Last Tape visualises a writer who has recorded his thoughts on tape every year since he was 24 years old. He now sits with these thoughts, on his 69th birthday, alone except for his previous selves, as unrecognisable to him now, seeming to be no more than acquaintances.

The first five minutes of the play take place in silence. Something undoubtedly as important as the words of this play, the script is imbued with it. Beckett's two works performed here seem to create a symbiotic relationship between words and silence, each accentuating the beauty of the other. Although this play is permeated with silence, Christopher Page's Krapp is acted so physically that the audience is immediately captivated, holding onto each simple movement he makes. Krapp is a disembodied man. Corpse-like, he moves as if there is nothing alive in him, a delay between his movements and any understanding of them. He eats two bananas, the second of which he puts into his mouth, holds it there for some time, then takes out, and stores it away in a pocket. His movements, the moments that he puts his body through, appear not to make sense to him. I think this is the greater issue that the play illustrates; life is made up of discombobulated moments, with no links and no ties. We hear of a memory, on the day his mother dies, that Krapp holds a black rubber ball in his hand: 'I shall feel it in my hand until my dying day.' This tiny insignificant feeling is so important to him but not to anybody else. And we are all constructed of these feelings, feelings that universally mean nothing, and will become nothing, regardless of our recordings of them. Krapp reads aloud from the ledger, words he has written about his own life, but they do not jog his memory. On his tapes, he repeats the word 'spool', elongating it, feeling the sounds around his mouth. Through this manipulation of the word, changing it into simple sounds, Beckett manages to accentuate the vast, lonely emptiness that his character exists in. The soundplay allows us as an audience to fall so easily into the character, the play causing even words to lose their sense. I wonder if this is made the easier through the character's disembodiment. As an audience we can fill him, so to speak, and thus more profoundly we can not feel what he does not feel.

The second of Beckett's plays performed, Rockaby (written in 1980), pushes the audience even closer to the brink of death. An old woman (performed by Natalie Woodward) in a black dress is sat in a rocking chair. The clever lighting ages her face extensively, making hollows of her eyes as she repeats and repeats her monotone monologue of her fruitless search for 'another living soul', the windows she looks out on and the blinds which are always closed. Sometimes she speaks out loud, sometimes it appears as if we are eavesdropping on her thoughts. Finally she rocks herself 'to the end of this long day'. Down she falls, down into oblivion. Darkness falls and when the lights come up again the chair is empty, rocking, and the audience file out into the night.