I knew before walking into No’s Knife that I would either love it or hate it. I’m glad to say I absolutely adored it, but I wanted to find some quotations from reviewers that hated it:

“The speech was so fast and woven tightly together, I think it was definitely aimed at literary audiences as opposed to a general audience.”

“Here’s the thing about No’s Knife. It’s extremely intense and completely baffling. I consider myself a fairly intelligent person and studied English but this was basically indecipherable. I spent the entire performance mystified, quite frustrated and wondering what I would eat for dinner. I don’t think I’d be alone in saying that it went on a bit.”

“To the one gentleman who gave a standing ovation at the end, if you understood it so well, perhaps you could explain it to the rest of us?”

One thing was universally true: Lisa Dwan absolutely fantastic. No matter how anyone felt about the play itself, the performance was unreal. While her interpretation of Beckett was much more intense and schizophrenic than mine, her ability to switch between different characteristics and play with the scenery and sound was impeccable. Her interpretation made Beckett what he should be – the play isn’t meant to be followed, it’s meant to be experienced. You may relate to some parts and not to others, and your neighbors in the theatre may be the exact opposite, and that sparks a conversation that will last long after the play is over. The part most interesting to me, past the dialogue, was Dwan’s legs – were those leggings? Body paint? Did I see them correctly as gangrenous legs with bloody gashes? What exactly is that supposed to mean – something different for everyone, like the dialogue itself?

While I don’t have answers to these questions, I think that Beckett’s Texts for Nothing and, thus, No’s Knife, absolutely stand to represent each person’s reflection on his or her own life and their experiences. The gravely breathing sound track that ran during the entire time before the play started and at every scene change was certainly meant to worm into the audience members’ brains and create tension that lasted throughout the play – similar to the feeling I got while reading Texts for Nothing.