Claire Booth's mouth, isolated against a black background, carries Samuel Beckett's "Not I" at the Minghella Theatre in Reading. Rufus Norris directs the production, which forms part of the 2026 Beckett Biennale.

The evening builds slowly. Luciano Berio's experimental "Sequenza III", performed by soprano Booth, opens the programme and becomes, in retrospect, a musical companion piece to Beckett through its stuttering repetitions, gasps and throat-clearings. A trio of short films follows, documenting the Irish playwright's relationship to Folkestone, where he married in 1961. The three-part programme then culminates in the drama itself.

None of that buildup proves necessary. Booth's mouth, again the sole instrument, remains arresting in its speed and urgency, reaching for a truth that rests just beyond its rapid articulations even as syntax breaks down.

Norris's setting is academic — the theatre sits on Reading University's campus — but the production has nothing dusty or donnish about it. Booth delivers a performance that captures the racing brain, the split interior self and the speed of desperation, replaying a life that flashes before a woman's eyes, or rather her mouth.

The life runs from birth to this moment in a field, among the cowslips, at the age of 70 — possibly the moment of death. From the repetitions and verbal hiccups, you glean that the life has been hard, loveless and undermining. Yet the mouth insists on speaking it aloud.

Norris's staging of "Not I" suggests the Biennale format can frame Beckett's compressed dramas with musical and biographical context without diluting their force.