Category Archives: Events

Druid Godot at the Abbey Theatre April May 2017

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Galway-based Irish theatre company, Druid, are presenting their acclaimed 2016 production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre from 21st April to 20th May 2017. This production was hailed by Peter Crawley from the Irish Times as  ‘exceptional’ and ‘miraculous’, and ‘the best production for 25 years’, full of fresh insights into this enduring play. It received several 5 star reviews.

Here is the Abbey’s website where you might still be able to find some tickets but it is selling fast: https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/2017/waiting-for-godot

This is not the first Beckett production that Druid Artistic Director Garry Hynes has directed – Druid presented Beckett’s Happy Days in 1976 and Waiting for Godot in 1987 – if you search our Staging Beckett database using the search term Druid Theatre Company, you will find details of these and Druid’s other Beckett productions.

Staging Beckett researcher Dr Trish McTighe (University of Birmingham), who has worked on Druid’s Beckett productions, will be reviewing this production of Druid’s Waiting for Godot here, so watch this space.

 

Staging Beckett at the Margins

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Congratulations to the Chester University branch of our project on the recent Staging Beckett at the Margins conference and our thanks to David Pattie and David Tucker for hosting. Thanks too to all the delegates who contributed to the event and showed once again the richness and diversity that characterizes international productions of Beckett’s work. Adding to the list of international locales which we saw discussed at Reading in April, we heard theatre surveys from Cyprus, Romania, and the city of Los Angeles, learning also of the malleability of the figure of Godot as metaphor across the history of Israeli theatre production in Shimon Levy’s talks. We heard accounts of the work that happens outside the UK’s major metropolitan cultural hubs at, for example, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, as discussed by Mark Taylor-Batty and even within them, as our own Matthew McFrederick’s discussion of Beckett’s time at the Riverside Studios revealed.

We had two keynotes, different but complementary: Carl Lavery connected an ecological understanding of theatre with the forms of attention which Beckett’s work demands of its audiences, calling up them to witness the undoing of time and subjectivity in the theatre as ‘garden’. The wonderful Tricia Kelly talked not only of the process of creating her role for Not I (in six days, no less) but gave us a captivating reading of the play, leaving us all spellbound and pinned to the spot by the frantic energy of her embodiment of Mouth. A recording was made of her talk and will be made available in the future via the Staging Beckett website.

And congratulations also to David Tucker on the very successful ‘Seeing Beckett’ exhibition, which was launched as part of the conference. Contributors were invited to make a piece of visual art responding to Beckett’s work. The results were sensitive and compelling pieces which fit beautifully into the conference theme, giving us a sense of the aesthetic fertility of the unseen, the hidden, the subtle and of course, the marginal. The exhibition can be seen at the Liverpool School of Art & Design from the  27th – 31st Oct 2014 as part of the Liverpool Irish Festival.

 

Staging Beckett Public Lecture: Walter Asmus at TCD

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In an event jointly organised by the Staging Beckett project and the Samuel Beckett Summer School, director Walter Asmus will be speaking about his work  on the 14th of August at 1pm.

More details at http://www.beckettsummerschool.com/

Having just completed a run at the Galway Arts Festival, Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby with Lisa Dwan and directed by Walter is at the Mac, Belfast September 2-6, and will run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October.

 

Registration now open for ‘Staging Beckett at the Margins’

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From the conference  organisers:

“Our second conference, to be held at Kingsway, University of Chester, 11-12 September 2014, will focus on perceived notions of Beckett at the margins, on productions staged outside London and other major theatrical centres. What has the impact of Beckett’s drama been upon regional, small national, touring and marginal theatrical practices and cultures? What is at stake when staging Beckett in marginal cultures or lesser-known geographical areas? How does Beckett’s work move from a country’s capital city to its regions? Does Beckett’s work speak to national, or local, cultural contexts? How does it fit within established theatrical, cultural and economic infrastructures?

Keynote presentation by Professor Carl Lavery (University of Glasgow).

We have speakers coming from all over the world to talk about these topics and we expect this international aspect of the conference to be particularly productive. We hope to see you there!”

Conference organisers: Professor David Pattie & Dr David Tucker

For more information and to register:

http://www.chester.ac.uk/staging-beckett

 

 

“Performing the Archives” Conference

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Some information below about an upcoming conference on the status and use of performing arts archives at NUI, Galway:

 

 

 

“Performing the Archives” Conference

NUI Galway 2015

22 – 24 July 2015

 

In 2013, the Abbey Theatre and NUI Galway launched ‘A Digital Journey through Irish Theatre History’ – the digitization of the Abbey Theatre archive, the largest theatre archive digitization project ever attempted. When this project is completed, more than 1 million items including scripts, costume designs, prompt books and performances will be available to study for generations of scholars to come. Theatre scholarship is being transformed at NUI Galway.

This conference capitalizes on NUI Galway’s unparalleled strength in Irish theatre and literary archives, taking advantage of other holdings including the Druid Theatre, Lyric Theatre Belfast, Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe, Thomas Kilroy, Siobhan McKenna and the Galway Arts Festival, among others, to facilitate a national and international conversation about the place of archives in not only theatre and performance research and teaching, but arts practice and perception of theatre history more broadly.

By emphasizing a collaborative approach between the archive service of the James Hardiman Library, academic staff of the Drama and Theatre Department, School of English, NUI Galway, as well as fostering and creating engagement between NUI Galway students, scholars and theatre practitioners and with wider national and international research community, this event will showcase NUI Galway as a hub for research in theatre and drama as well as a world leader in innovative research technologies and digital humanities.

Coinciding with the Galway Arts Festival, the conference will immerse participants in the living performance culture of Galway as the Galway Arts Festival links together artists from around the world to mount Ireland’s largest international arts festival. Through working with further campus-city relationships, such as the Druid Academy, Galway – its University and City, as well as the west of Ireland will be shown to be a cultural landmark as well as an innovator in leading collaboration.

The conference will primarily be based in the new Hardiman Research Building, providing a base to showcase the central research point on campus for the Humanities as well as linking into adjacent exhibition space, providing an access point for local and visiting scholars to experience why the Hardiman Building is a critical and crucial exponent for encountering research and fostering discovery on campus.

“Performing the Archives” will gather together scholars, artists and archivists engaged in working with archival materials on research and performance projects to explore the uses and possibilities of the archive today from theoretical and methodological perspectives. We will debate:

  • What is the status of archival research methodologies in published research and graduate training today?
  • What are the possibilities of collaboration between researchers and practitioners working together to remount work based on the archives or research on new material? What working models exist and what have yet to be imagined?
  • How has the digital humanities begun to reshape the possibilities of archival engagement?
  • How can we support the labour of not only archival research methodologies but the maintenance of the archives themselves? How does the holding location of archives (university vs. community archive) affect the circulation of these resources?  How can partnerships be expanded or reimagined?
  • How has the cataloguing of new/recent archives contributed to new learning and change?
  • ‘From Stage to Street’ – Connection of archives, theatre and society: Documentary theatre and socially responsive theatre
  • Theatre, Peace and Conflict – How memory of theatre and conflict, especially that of Northern Ireland, is newly understood and experienced through the archives and contributing to resolution and reconciliation
  • The craft of the playwright: Drafting, editing and writing for stage or radio

 

For more information, contact Barry Houlihan (barry.houihan@nuigalway.ie)

or Charlotte McIvor (charlotte.mcivor@nuigalway.ie).

http://www.library.nuigalway.ie/collections/archives/

http://www.nuigalway.ie/drama/

http://nuigarchives.blogspot.ie

@NUIGarchives

@NUIGDrama

https://www.facebook.com/nuiglibrary

https://www.facebook.com/groups/NUIGDrama/

 

 

Staging Beckett Conference: Constructing Performance Histories

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REGISTRATION NOW OPEN:
 April 4-5th 2014, Minghella Building, University of Reading, Whiteknights Campus.
Staging Beckett’s Inaugural conference on 4th – 5th April 2014 will focus on the history, documentation and analysis of Beckett’s theatre in performance in the UK, Ireland and internationally. 
Staging Beckett: The Impact of Productions of Samuel Beckett’s Plays in the UK and Ireland is an AHRC-funded project which runs from 2012-2015. It is a collaboration between the Universities of Reading and Chester and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The project is compiling a database of all professional productions of Beckett’s plays in the UK and Ireland, with accompanying research resources. The project’s conferences are: Staging Beckett: Constructing Performance Histories (Reading April 4-5, 2014), Staging Beckett in the Regions (Chester, 11-12 September, 2014), and Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Theatre Cultures (Reading, April 2015). 
Staging Beckett: Constructing Performance Histories features papers on productions of Beckett from across the globe, including Belgium, Brazil, Hungary, India, Ireland, Mexico, Poland, Turkey, the United States and the UK. Topics will cover Beckett and stage design, Beckett’s theatrical intersections with Pinter and with Shakespeare, staging Beckett in situations of censorship, or crisis and resistance from besieged Sarajevo to the Occupy movement in Zuccotti Park New York, staging Beckett beyond the theatrical frame, and performance histories and perspectives.
Registration fee: £50 per day waged; £30 per day students, seniors and unwaged.
Keynote Lecture: ‘Beckett and the Non-Place in Irish Performance’, Professor Brian Singleton, Trinity College Dublin, Friday 4th April, 2.30pm
Practitioners’ Panel: ‘Staging Beckett Now’: Saturday 5th April, 3pm.  
Natalie Abrahami (Associate Director, Young Vic Theatre, director of Happy Days, starring Juliet Stevenson at the Young Vic, London, Feb-March 2014)
Lisa Dwan (recent performances of Not I / Footfalls / Rockaby at the Royal Court and Duchess Theatre, London, on tour during 2014)
Sarah Jane Scaife (director of site specific performances of Act Without Words II and Rough for Theatre 1 in Dublin (2013), Limerick, London and New York).
 More details at:
The Staging Beckett Research Team: Matthew McFrederick (Reading), Anna McMullan (Reading), Patricia McTighe (Reading), David Pattie (Chester), Graham Saunders (Reading), David Tucker (Chester).
Provisional Schedule
 
Friday April 4th
9.00-10.15 Tea / Coffee and Registration
10.15-10.30 Welcome (Professor James Knowlson) and Introduction
10.30-12.00 Panel 1: Historical Intersections
  • Raquel Merino Alvarez ‘Staging Beckett on Spanish censored stages: 1955-1976’
  • Paulo Henrique Da Silva Gregorio ‘Beckett and the Shakespeare Revolution in the 1960s’
  • David Tucker ‘That first last look in the shadows’: Using Performance Histories of Beckett and Pinter’
12.00-12.15 Tea / Coffee
12.15 – 1.45 Panel 2: Staging Beckett Globally 1
  • Priyanka Chatterjee ‘Staging Beckett in Bengal: Revisiting History and Art’
  • Burç Dincel ‘”They…To Play”: A Turkish Take On Beckett’
  • Brendan McCall and E. K. McFall, ‘Staging Krapp’s Last Tape in Turkey, Western Australia and Norway’
1.45 – 2.30 Lunch (served in the Minghella Foyer)
2.30 – 3.30 Keynote Lecture, Professor Brian Singleton, ‘Beckett and the Non-Place in Irish Performance’
3.30 – 4.00 Tea / coffee
4.00-5.30 Panel 3: Beyond the Theatrical Frame
  • Luz María Sánchez Cardona, ‘Beckett, the electronic medium of radio, and Krapp’s Last Tape‘
  • Brenda O’Connell, ‘Culture Shock: (Re) Staging Beckett in caves and car parks’
  • Lisa FitzGerald ‘Coming out of the Dark: Performing Place in Pan Pan’s Production of Beckett’s All that Fall‘
5.30 -7.00 Book launch and wine reception (served in the Minghella)
  • Patricia McTighe, The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
  • David Tucker, A Dream and its Legacies: The Samuel Beckett Theatre Project, Oxford c. 1967-76, Oxford: Colin Smythe, 2013.
8pm Dinner: Pepe Sale, 3, Queen’s Walk, Reading city centre (£27.50pp): http://www.pepesale.co.uk
 
 
Saturday April 5th
8.30-9.00 Tea / Coffee and day registration
9.00-10.30 Panel 4: Staging Beckett Globally 2
  • Robson Corrêa de Camargo ‘Playing Beckett in Brazil’
  • Anita Rákóczy ‘Godots That Arrived: Waiting for Godot In Budapest Before and After 1989′.
  • Ewa Brzeska ‘Violating Becketts’ Prescriptions For Theatre in Poland’
10.30-10.45: Tea / Coffee
10.45-12.15: Panel 5 Staging Beckett and Survival / Resistance
  • Thomas Saunders ‘Ownership and orphaned Irish identity in Susan Sontag’s staging of Waiting for Godot‘
  • Arthur Rose ‘Developing Beckett in New Orleans’
  • Lance Duerfahrd ‘An Unprotesting Play within a Protest: Waiting for Godot in Zuccotti Park’
12.15-12.30 Tea / Coffee
12.30-2.00 Panel 6: Designing Beckett
  • Sophie Jump, ‘Physicalising the Text: Jocelyn Herbert and Samuel Beckett’
  • Anna McMullan ‘Beckett and Irish Scenography’
  • Trish McTighe ‘The Tree at the Gate: Beckett and Le Brocquy’
2.00-3.00: Lunch (served in the Minghella Foyer)
3.00-4.15 Practitioner Panel: Staging Beckett Now
  • Natalie Abrahami (director of Happy Days, starring Juliet Stevenson at the Young Vic, London, Feb-March 2014)
  • Lisa Dwan (recent performances of Not I / Footfalls / Rockaby at the Royal Court and Duchess Theatre, London, on tour during 2014)
  • Sarah Jane Scaife (director of site specific performances of Act Without Words II and Rough for Theatre 1 in Dublin (2013), Limerick, London and New York)
4.15-4.30 Tea / Coffee
4.30-6.00 Panel 7: Performance Histories and Perspectives
  • Kate Dorney, ‘Beckett in the Frame: a visual history of productions documented at the Victoria & Albert Museum’
  • Matthew McFrederick ‘Staging Beckett at the Royal Court Theatre’
  • Nicholas Johnson and Jonathan Heron ‘The Performance Issue’

6-7pm Launch of Journal Of Beckett Studies special issue on Performance, and closing of conferen

Staging Beckett: Ian Rickson in conversation with Mark Taylor-Batty

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The Minghella Building, University of Reading, Whiteknights campus, Reading.

Thursday 3rd October 7.30pm. Doors open 6.30pm.

Followed by wine reception.

The University of Reading, the Staging Beckett project, and the Beckett International Foundation are delighted to present a conversation with acclaimed theatre director Ian Rickson, who will be talking about the challenges of directing the work of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, with Mark Taylor-Batty who has written extensively on both playwrights.

The AHRC-funded Staging Beckett project, a collaboration with the University of Chester and the Victoria and Albert Museum, is developing the world’s first comprehensive database of productions of Beckett’s plays in the UK and Ireland which will be available in 2014. This is a pilot for a wider performings arts database.

An exhibition will be open for the evening of the event to celebrate diverse productions of Krapp’s Last Tape in the UK and Ireland, including Rickson’s production with Harold Pinter, and the premiere of the play at the Royal Court Theatre in 1957, starring Patrick Magee, directed by George Devine and designed by Jocelyn Herbert.  The exhibition will showcase items in the University’s collection related to Krapp’s Last Tape, and items from the Jocelyn Herbert Archive, housed at Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts, London (Wimbledon).

Tickets are free but registration is essential. To book tickets visit: www.reading.ac.uk/events and follow the event link Enquiries: events@reading.ac.uk

Ian Rickson was Artistic Director at the Royal Court from 1998 to 2006, during which time he directed Krapp’s Last Tape, The Winterling, Alice Trilogy, The Sweetest Swing in Baseball, Fallout, The Night Heron, Boy Gets Girl, Mouth to Mouth (also in the West End), Dublin Carol, The Weir (also in the West End and on Broadway), The Lights, Pale Horse and Mojo (also at the Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago), Ashes & Sand, Some Voices and Killers. His last production for the Royal Court, The Seagull, transferred to Broadway. Other theatre includes Old Times (West End), The River (Royal Court), Hamlet (Young Vic), Jerusalem (Royal Court, West End and Broadway), Betrayal (Comedy Theatre), The Children’s Hour (Comedy Theatre), The Hothouse and The Day I Stood Still (NT), Parlour Song (Almeida), Hedda Gabler (Roundabout Theatre, New York), The House of Yes (Gate) and Me & My Friend (Chichester Festival Theatre). Film includes: Fallout, Krapp’s Last Tape and The Clear Road Ahead.

Mark Taylor-Batty is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the Workshop Theatre, School of English, University of Leeds. He is co-author with Juliette Taylor-Batty, of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and has produced a monograph on Beckett’s first director, Roger Blin: Collaborations and Metholodogies (Peter Lang, 2007). He has written extensively on Harold Pinter, including About Pinter (Faber and Faber, 2005) and the Forthcoming Theatre of Harold Pinter (Methuen Drama, 2014). He is an executive member of the International Harold Pinter Society, and a co-editor, with Enoch Brater, of the new ‘Methuen Drama Engage’ series of monographs on modern drama.