by Samuel Beckett
Directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett
with Conor Lovett
Monday 15 JULY 9 pm – ÔKHRA – ECOMUSEUM OF OCHRE –ROUSSILLON
In English with French surtitles
Conor Lovett – (c) Ros Kavanagh
The Beckett Festival is delighted to present a show in English for the first time and to welcome the renowned Irish theatre company Gare St Lazare Ireland.
In his biography of Beckett, James Knowlson notes that the manuscript of ‘The End’ begun on 17 February 1946, runs to twenty-nine pages in English, after which a line is drawn a third of the way down the page, and the text continues in French until the end. The story was first published in the journal Les Temps Modernes.
The End is a short story by Samuel Beckett in which a man recounts an episode late in his life when, having been expelled from an institution of care, he finds his own way in the world. He meets a variety of characters and situations before finally lying down to let life ebb away. It is one of Beckett’s most complete, most compelling and most beautiful works and is a Gare St Lazare Ireland favourite.
The End premiered at Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2008 and has toured to Edinburgh, London, Dublin, Brighton, Paris, California, New Hampshire, New York, Massachusetts and to 20 venues in Ireland.
Nominated jointly with Gare St Lazare’s production of First Love for The Judges Special Award at Dublin Theatre Festival 2008.
Breathtakingly human DAILY TELEGRAPH
Lovett’s character offers us the simple truth that to be human is to be funny. EDINBURGH GUIDE
Conor Lovett’s command of the stage for this Gare St Lazare production of The End and The Calmative is so apparently effortless as to be relaxing, except that with Samuel Beckett one can never relax. With The End the result is comedy, sly and biting, all the sharper for seeming to come out of hiding and ascending, or descending depending on one’s attitude to Beckett, to actual merriment. Irish Times
At this stage, having seen nearly all of their profoundly moving interpretations of Beckett, all attempts at restrained objectivity go out the window. Conor Lovett has refined his technique and his empathy to a degree, which surely makes him one of the world’s leading interpreters of the work. The Sunday Independent
The performance of The End will be followed by an on-stage discussion led by Professor Florence Naugrette, Sorbonne University.