right in front of her. Because the play was being performed in the round she had to be installed in a box, which could be wheeled on and off the stage. Inside this ‘contraption’ she stood holding onto two iron bars on either side of the box. She was dressed in black and wore a hood, which made her feel like "an old English hangman". At first her head was held still by a strap but she found it unbearable and unnecessary and asked for it to be removed. They also had an operator hidden in the box to reset the focus on the mouth if it did drift slightly out of the light. Additionally, her teeth were coated with a substance that exaggerated their brightness and then polished to attract the glare. 16 January 1973 Royal Court Theatre, London: Initially Billie Whitelaw wanted to stand on a dais but she found this didn’t work for her so she allowed herself to be strapped in a chair called an ‘artist’s rest’ on which a film actor wearing armour rests because he cannot sit down. Her entire body was draped in black; her face covered with black gauze with a black transparent slip for her eyes and her head was clamped between two pieces of sponge rubber so that her mouth would remain fixed in the spotlight. Finally a bar was fixed which she could cling to and on to which she could direct her tension. She was unable to use a visual aid and so memorised the text. "Whitelaw has described the ordeal of playing Mouth, how she was totally cut off from others, high above the stage, clamped, swathed in a black hood, subject to panic attacks; after the dress rehearsal she was for a time totally disoriented. Yet this stage experience came to seem her most meaningful one. She heard in Mouth’s outpourings her own 'inner scream': 'I found so much of my self in Not I. Somewhere in there were my entrails under a microscope.'" 17 April 1977 BBC2, The Lively Arts: Shades, Three Plays by Samuel Beckett: Arguably the definitive performance of the piece albeit in a completely different medium from which it was originally intended. Not I on its own was re-broadcast on 7 February 1990. The British Film Institute database says this is a film of the 1973 Royal Court Theatre performance above but