Imelda Staunton, miscast as Joyce's prim wife Nora, bustles farcically around in a long-term sulk like some bottom-oftherange Irish Lady Bracknell. She struggles to change the bedding arrangements for her son Giorgio's Jewish-American mistress - to whom Issy Van Randwyck lends an accent vague enough to be stateless - and to curb Lucia's night-time jaunts.
There is too little emphasis upon Joyce's suspicious, quite conceivably incestuous, relationship with Lucia. The prime concern is Lucia's instant passion for Beckett and the bittersweet-comedy of her uninvited appearances in and under his bed and all over his life.
Body tilted slightly forward at the waist, Garai's gangling, ungainly Lucia, arms and hands wildly gesticulating or surrendering to a mad flurry of expletives, seems stranded in looselimbed, disturbed adolescence.
Garai tries to seduce Weyman's bemused, confused Beckett with the dogged ridiculousness of a charming stalker and the desperation of a lost soul. She makes Lucia's dilemma entrancing.
