• Endgame @ Project Arts Centre, Dublin

    December 17, 2019 - By 

    “You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that!” When tackling any of Samuel Beckett’s plays, never mind one of his most emblematic, the challenge for a theatre company is how to leave its own imprint while navigating the author’s exacting directions. As people enter the Project Art Centre’s theatre to take their seats they are greeted by a recorded reading of Endgame’s text and stage directions. The voice is mechanical, almost synthetic. Beckett wanted actors to downplay the emotions in this farcical tale of stagnation and hopelessness. Pan Pan Theatre, however, has other plans. Pan Pan Theatre has scored notable…

  • Cascando @ Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival

    August 12, 2019 - By 

    It’s too far to see the expressions or to hear the reactions of the rowers gliding past as they observe twenty figures clad head to toe in black-hooded robes like Medieval monks, walking silently along the riverbank in single file. A penny too, for the thoughts of the two children, and their dog, on the opposing bank of  The River Erne. The ‘audience’ in this immersive piece of theatre is moving to the rhythms of Samuel Beckett’s radio play Cascando, headphones under hoods relaying this new interpretation by the award-winning Pan Pan Theatre. Created by Aedin Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn…

  • Pas Moi/Not I @ Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival

    August 5, 2019 - By 

    A broken mind is a terrifying notion. Once gone, so too, has a large slice of the humanity. Isn’t that why we hurry past the insane, with their babbling interior monologue, on the street? It’s a brave playwright who subjects an audience to the mad jabbering of a fractured mind, delivered relentlessly  at the speed of thought for a dozen minutes. And in the pitch black, with only the speaker’s mouth illuminated. Samuel Beckett, who was many things, was nothing if not a courageous writer. Beckett’s Not I, a powerful and unsettling portrait of the isolation of madness, returned to…

  • Purgatorio: Walking For Waiting For Godot @ Happy Days Enniskillen Beckett Festival

    August 31, 2018 - By 

    “We are all born mad. Some remain so.” It’s been a wait alright. Six years, in fact, for the first English presentation of Waiting for Godot at the Happy Days International Enniskillen Beckett Festival. Had Vladimir and Estragon – Samuel Beckett’s beloved vagabonds from his landmark play – had to wait six years in vain for Godot to arrive, they surely would have hanged themselves from that famous tree. Previous editions of the festival have seen renditions in Yiddish, German and French – the language of the original manuscript – and now, like buses, two performances in English by different…

  • The Old Tune @ Happy Days Enniskillen Beckett Festival

    August 27, 2018 - By 

      One of the great things about the Happy Days Enniskillen Beckett Festival – and there are many – is the opportunity to experience rarely performed Samuel Beckett plays. The Old Tune, for one, doesn’t get too many run outs. Perhaps that’s because it’s comedic portrayal of two elderly men struggling with memory and the onslaught of modernity is considered too light for serious Beckett actors and directors – anxious to sink their teeth into the meatier existential stuff. However, in the hands of nuanced actors Barry McGovern and Eamon Morrisey, and with the subtle guidance of Director Conall Morrison,…

  • What Where @ Happy Days Enniskillen Beckett Festival

    August 16, 2018 - By 

    Even before the passengers disembark at a secret destination in the Fermanagh countryside, the drama has begun. Franz Schubert’s Winterreise provides the soundtrack en route before the bus stops. The door opens. A woman in green overalls gets on. Megaphone in hand, a bandana masking her face, though oddly, with an opening for the mouth. She walks silently down the aisle, scrutinizing the faces as though searching for the guilty party. Silence descends amongst the passengers. Search over, the woman gets off the bus, as do the passengers, who find themselves in front of a green cattle shed or some…