The image of actor Billie Whitelaw, dressed almost like an Victorian widow, rocking back and forth silently in her chair, is one of the iconic visuals of the Beckett canon. The lone protagonist in the ‘spare, compact, provocative’ play Rockaby was modeled on Beckett’s maternal grandmother Annie Roe, a solitary woman in her later years, dressed head to toe in black , sitting in her room staring silently out the window.
Continue reading “Rockaby, baby: digitising a recent addition to the Beckett Archive”