STILL
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https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2025/still-x-6
Date Reviewed: 13/07/2025
If you’re drawn to minimalist, meditative theatre that cuts straight to the essence of life, STILL is for you.
In a dimly lit, chalk-dusted room at St Kilda’s Explosives Factory, Robert Meldrum doesn’t just perform Beckett, he fills the stage with the ache, silence and depth of Beckett’s late prose. Under Richard Murphet’s direction, the line between literature and theatre merges. You become immersed in Beckett’s language, losing sight of where the text ends and the performance begins.
Melding six of Samuel Beckett’s rarely presented short prose works, including “Stirrings Still,” first published in The Guardian in 1989, STILL traces a solitary man’s internal monologue as he drifts between consciousness and oblivion, presence and absence, the external and the innate, speech and imagination. There is no traditional plot, only flickers of experience. Vignettes plonked into the silence of being, rather than doing.
What unfolds is an elegy for existence told through the ordinary: a table, a wicker chair, a coat, a nightingale, a handful of yellow flowers. These small details, stripped of sentimentality, offer quiet beauty in the simplicity and stillness of life.
Robert Meldrum’s performance is a masterclass in restraint and nuance. With a disciplined physicality and a voice finely tuned by decades of craft, he conjures landscapes, ghosts, memories and absences. At times he is the dying man; at others, an outsider looking within himself. “He sees himself rise and go,” he says. He channels an old woman, even death itself.
The stage, though bare, feels inhabited by many as Meldrum channels an old woman, even death itself. His presence is total.
Jenny Kemp’s consultative lighting serves as its own character. It creates imaginary windows and sculpts shadows that stretch and contract, flowing like the breath of time. Language, light, and stillness dominate.
The brilliance of this work lies not only in Beckett’s writing but in the integrity of its translation to stage. As Meldrum said before the performance:
“To turn it into speaking rather than words on a page that are prose, not written for theatre. We need to find solutions just to get it out on the floor.”
They succeed.
While Beckett’s earlier works like Waiting for Godot and Endgame embraced absurdism with more overt theatricality, his later prose, such as those featured in STILL, peels everything back to the barest reflection. Here, language is pared down to the essential, stripped of drama, yet full of haunting presence.
Following the sold-out season of Worstward Ho, this production is a continuation of the Murphet-Meldrum duo's commitment to illuminating Beckett’s late period, giving voice and life to words never intended for the stage, until now.
This production isn’t “boundary-pushing” in the bombastic sense. Its rebellion lies elsewhere. In a world addicted to spectacle and speed, STILL makes a radical case for presence, for silence, for listening. It asks us not to skim across the surface of life but to sit with its depth.
There is a kind of grace in the invitation to see absence not as emptiness, but as possibility. In Beckett’s universe, the lack of narrative clarity becomes a mirror for our own questions: What is left when all the noise fades? What matters in the end?
The audience was visibly engaged, focused, attuned to every shift in light, breath and inflection. Just stillness, mirroring the title itself. Most stayed enjoying a glass of wine and interacting with the creators long after the performances ended.
Ultimately, STILL doesn’t instruct, it offers. It invites you to reflect on the fragility of existence long after the play has ended.
Don’t miss:
• Lighting as language, creating ghostly architecture out of shadow and chalk.
• Beckett's text, sparse yet thunderous, each line a world unto itself.
• A final image that suspends time and leaves the audience breathless.
• Linger longer with a complimentary glass of post-show wine.
Who it’s for: Lovers of Beckett, minimalism, and introspective theatre; audiences willing to surrender to slowness and subtlety; thinkers, dreamers, philosophers. Not for those who need resolution.
STILL runs until July 26th at The Explosives Factory, presented by the Victorian Theatre Company in collaboration with Theatre Works. 60 minutes.
Note: The venue is not wheelchair accessible, as access is via a flight of stairs.