• 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…

  • Waiting For Godot: Berliner Ensemble @ Samuel Beckett Happy Days Festival

    August 6, 2015 - By 

    Almost sixty years to the day since Waiting for Godot’s English language premier in London, which then prompted The Observer’s Kenneth Tynan to write that it “jettisons everything by which we know the theatre”, Samuel Beckett’s most famous play still has the capacity to delight, provoke and confound in equal measure. Yet from the off, there is something a little unusual about this production of Waiting for Godot by the legendary Berliner Ensemble. Stage left, removed from the performance space but conspicuous is a small table and chair. On the right, an old, rather regal looking armchair. Above the theatre’s…