In Context: Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby

Beckett wanted the piece to “work on the nerves of its audience, not its intellect” and stipulated that it should be emitted at “the speed of thought”. Dwan's nine-minute performance is the quickest on record. The woman's plight is grotesquely tragicomic: having spent most of her isolated, loveless life mute, she now finds herself the victim of relentless verbal diarrhoea. Listening to Dwan's unbelievably breakneck, manic Irish-accented gabble is like watching a non-driver trapped at the wheel in a hurtling vehicle with no brakes. The actress, though, is in prodigious control of the material. The woman's recurring denial that she is the subject of her third-person narrative – “what?...who?...no!...she!” escalates, to just right degree here, in desperate, teeth-baring insistence.” —The Independent (UK)