Category Archives: Regional productions

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.

 

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

 

 

Beckett Productions in 2014

Happy Days will be staged at the Young Vic London from 23rd January-8th March 2014, with Juliet Stephenson playing the role of Winnie. Credit: Young Vic

Happy Days will be staged at the Young Vic London from 23rd January-8th March 2014, with Juliet Stephenson playing the role of Winnie. Credit: Young Vic

Looking ahead to the 2014 calendar shows that it will be another busy year for Beckett productions in the UK and Ireland. So far, January has already set the pace with Saturday seeing the end of the sold out Royal Court run of Not I/Footfalls/ Rockaby featuring Lisa Dwan, while Tom Owen performed as Krapp at the Rose Theatre Kingston on Monday 13th January . Last Thursday and Friday also saw Company SJ perform Act Without Words II as part of the Abbey Theatre’s The Theatre of Memory Symposium.

More Beckett performances are on their way as early as this week with Juliet Stephenson taking on the role of Winnie in an eagerly anticipated production of Happy Days at the Young Vic directed by Natalie Abrahami. Demand has seen this production already extend its run from 23rd January-8th March.

After a two week break Lisa Dwan returns to her acclaimed trilogy directed by Walter Asmus, though this time the production moves to the Duchess Theatre in London’s West End for a two week run from 3rd-15th February. Later in the year Dwan and the Royal Court will embark on a UK, Irish and International tour. The UK dates announced so far include:  9th-13th September-Arts Theatre Cambridge, 16th-20th September-Birmingham Repertory Theatre and 23rd-27th September-The Lowry Salford.

Productions of Waiting for Godot and Endgame are also planned for the Arcola Theatre, London (7th May-14th June) and the Wilde Theatre, Bracknell (5th-8th June) respectively. Happy Days will also tour to various venues around Ireland courtesy of the Godot Theatre Company.

Richard Wilson, renowned for his role of Victor Meldrew in One Foot in the Grave, returns to the Beckett stage having previously performed as Vladimir in Waiting for Godot at the Traverse in Edinburgh and Royal Exchange Manchester. This time he performs in Krapp’s Last Tape at the Crucible Theatre Sheffield from 25th June-19th July.

As usual Enniskillen will be transformed into Beckett Town when the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival takes its summer residency. This year’s multi-arts festival takes place from 31st July-10th August and will no doubt once again provide a vibrant international perspective on Beckett, with global productions once again expected to descend upon Enniskillen.

Beckett month in Ireland will continue with the annual TCD Samuel Beckett Summer School, from 10th-16th August, providing a rich mix of scholarship, performance and talks.

This extensive list does not even take into account the numerous productions happening internationally such as Godot’s extended run on Broadway with Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart, Barry McGovern in I’ll Go On, Mouth on Fire’s productions in Hyderabad and Pan Pan’s All That Fall touring in Sydney and Brisbane.

If you have a Beckett production coming up, please let us know and we’ll add it to the list!

 

Further productions announced since this original post:

Company SJ will present its two site-specific Beckett pieces, Rough For Theatre I and Act Without Words II as the centre piece for the exhibition: “Godot on Rubble; Beckett and Catastrophe”. These performances will run from 10th-14th June at the  Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Musuem, Waseda University, Japan, while the exhibition will be held from April-July 2014 at Waseda University.