Describing itself as 'lecture-demonstration' in its program introduction, Laquearia attempts to answer whether the chess match in Samuel Beckett's 1938 book Murphy could be used as a basis for John Cage's Reunion which itself was the product of a musical chessboard created by Lowell Cross. The play goes about answering this by staging that same chess match from Murphy with Beckett playing Murphy and Cage Endon. Hands up if I've lost you yet?
To call Laquearia dense would not be doing justice to the level of intellect and research that has clearly gone into the making of this work. There are layers upon layers to this piece, it plays with some big philosophical concepts and the level of literary analysis is simply staggering. Despite this, the popular idiom that art cannot exist in a vacuum springs to mind and therefore to simply judge this an intellectual exercise is wrong, particularly as nowhere in its listing does it say that it is simply this. So if we are looking at this as a play it has some clear issues.
Firstly unless you are an expert in either Beckett novels or Cage's compositions I feel it is a piece you will struggle to get any real meaning out of it by simply watching it. Perhaps this is why the audience are all handed copies of the script the moment they enter the theatre. But this in itself is a problem as you force the audience into a difficult dilemma as either they must take their eyes off the performance to read the script in order to fully grasp the ideas being put forward or risk getting lost the language of this intellectual behemoth. In addition the only cue that the audience receives that they have to do this precarious juggling act is one of the two commentators in the play reading copiously from the same thin book they have just been handed.
As a pure analysis of Beckett and Cage Laquaeria delivers on all levels, however this feels more like a thesis than a piece of drama and I can’t help feeling that I would have rather just been given the script and told to go away to a dark corner and read it. As a piece of theatre, it simply doesn’t deliver.
