Is there a faint whisper of the erotic – ever so faint – in the late plays of Samuel Beckett? Is there not something that hums, albeit irregularly, in those grave, grey-toned puzzle pieces written in the 1970s and 1980s? These are the plays in which actors are famously held in place by props and lighting and gesture, confined to ever-diminishing zones of visibility. Yet something resists confinement and withdrawal – a thin thread of wanting, almost extinguished, but not entirely.

Beckett’s characters, caught between the comic and the abysmal, are generally impatient with the body’s stirrings and wary of the claims of past appetites. What do they really want? The profoundest nothing. They lean into extinction, quietly awaiting the close of a long day. All bodies are tiresome, especially one’s own. What remains is skeletal: a parody of eros, thwarted by time and the forces of decay and desiccation.

Yet the body persists. Beckett works to make it vanish but it persists. As does desire. It moves beneath the dusty surfaces: the barest form of yearning – minimal, flickering – which is perhaps only the desire not to desire.

These speculations on Beckett’s late style arise from a new production of Footfalls at fortyfivedownstairs, presented alongside James Hazelden’s Dark Erotica Quartet. The pairing is suggestive, but even more so is the casting of Maude Davey. Her career spans theatre, film, television and a significant body of cabaret work, including foundational work in The Burlesque Hour ensemble and a 2013 retrospective called My Life in the Nude.

She brings to Beckett’s play a long history of experimenting with pleasure and performance. And her Footfalls is fascinating: less forbidding than Billie Whitelaw’s canonical interpretation; shaped rather with calmness and tenderness. Beckett named the play’s solitary figure May after his mother, whose nocturnal pacing during a long illness left a deep impression on him, according to at least one biographer. This performance brings that biographical detail to the surface.

The play begins in the middle of the night. May walks a narrow track across the floor, nine steps each way, back and forth, revolving some obscure hurt in her mind. Then she calls out to her old mother, who is already awake. Traditionally, the mother’s voice replies from off stage, from behind a light that represents an open door. Sometimes her lines are pre-recorded. Here, however, Davey performs the roles of both mother and May as if May were having a conversation with herself, ventriloquising for the absent mother.

This choice is crucial to the atmosphere of the play. This production is less haunted by absent figures, by ghostly voices coming out of the darkness. It is not so fragmentary. May has not yet begun to disappear; she is disturbed but nonetheless coherent. Davey projects a sense of weariness and fragility rather than blank ghostliness. Beneath the austerity trembles a strange, hesitating warmth and a continuing interest in the maternal relationship.

The imaginary conversation with her mother generates more imaginary conversations. The mother recalls the time when May, still a child, insisted the hall rug be removed so that her feet might fall more audibly on the bare boards. May then has her turn, narrating a story from a time when it was as though she had never been. There’s a church, a candelabra, a tangle of tatters, and a moon passing through ragged clouds. And then there is more walking, up and down, up and down.

Beckett reportedly drew inspiration from a girl described by a famous psychoanalyst as ‘existing but not living’. Davey complicates this: her May lives, even if she expresses a longing to withdraw her presence. What unsettles is not absence but the desire for absence, the pull toward erasure that fails to cancel the need to be heard. In the last of the three stories we are left to ponder how someone can be heard, perhaps even felt, while not present. Into that gap – the gap between presence and its refusal – slips the erotic: a last wager that meaning might still pass from one person to another across the void or even out of it.

Hazelden’s Dark Erotica Quartet, meanwhile, bares a superficial resemblance to another quartet in Heiner Müller’s sexually explicit 1980 adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, titled Quartett. And yet, it has none of the claustrophobic intensity and self-seriousness of Müller’s play. Performed by a cast of four, including the playwright as an onstage cellist, the work is divided into three fantastical narratives. These vignettes are playful, wry, lightly absurd, and staged with almost no set. In a way, they are about the difficulty of sustaining erotic fantasies. They are not exactly sexy – at least not in any conventional sense – but nonetheless revel in comic mischief.

Hazelden frames the show as an inquiry into the lost art of spoken erotica. What interests him, however, is not the problem of how to titillate with words, but rather the mutability of erotic imagery. Fantasies collapse or turn strange and become the opposite of what they were meant to be. This culminates in a wonderfully derailed monologue by Cat Spiker, an attempt at pillow talk repeatedly undone by the instability of her subject matter. Perhaps the trouble is her attention to the fantasy, rather than to the language that is meant to bring it to life?

Which brings us back to the peculiar eros of Footfalls. Beckett lingers over his words – their weight, spacing, and drift into silence:

The semblance. Faint, though by no means invisible, in a certain light. Given the right light. Grey rather than white, a pale shade of grey.

William Gass once praised Beckett as the exemplary ‘blue’ writer for just this sort of passage: erotic not by explicit content but by the measured pressure of phrasing, the caress of rhythm, the care with which each sentence is allowed to resonate: a persistent longing for the words to register somewhere – for someone, somewhere, to hear them.

Dark Erotica Quartet / Footfalls, directed by Blake Barnard and Keith Brockett, continues at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, until 16 November 2025. Performance attended: November 13.