by Samuel BECKETT
Presentation Judy Hegarty Lovett
with Conor Lovett, Garth Knox (viola), Benjamin Dwyer (guitar/composer), Emma Coulthard (flute/vocals)
Cie Gare St Lazare Ireland
JULY 30 AT 9 pm – Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt
Beckett wrote the short prose work Lessness first in French under the title Sans in 1969. In the strange, experimental text he employs an aleatory method to arrange his text, “first in one disorder, then in another,” as he wrote. The resulting text has only residual narrative drive yet extraordinary evocative power, denying and affirming past and future, registering the capacity of the imagination to imagine its own extinction.
How It Is was written ten years earlier and represents the writer’s return to prose fiction following the period dominated by the success of En Attendant Godot and the subsequent demands for more dramatic work. The work seems to have benefitted from the time spent in the theatre and shows a shift towards the uncertainty of the narrative voice’s owner. This comes back later in the dramatic work exemplified by Rockaby, Footfalls and That Time where the voice is often removed from the protagonist and heard as a recorded voice.
In both these works, and many others by Beckett, it is almost impossible to answer the question, what is it about? It seems the work doesn’t benefit by a psychological approach. A scenario forms almost accidentally in the imagination as a result of the combined words and will be different at each reading for each reader or, in this case, each member of the audience. Gare St Lazare have always tried to put Beckett’s writing in front of any efforts we may make to interpret and as such we invite the audience, as we feel Beckett does, to be a part of the creative act. Perhaps this is our ‘interpretation’…
For over 15 years we’ve been inviting musicians and composers to join us when we put Beckett’s prose texts before an audience in the hope that the music and the collaboration give new ways to hear and enjoy the writing. Composer Benjamin Dwyer has been fascinated by Beckett’s work for most of his career and has collaborated previously with Gare St Lazare with his concert piece entitled What Is The Word. Inviting Emma Coulthard and Garth Knox and performing himself, the players are improvising around some of Dwyer’s previous motifs and he and director Judy Hegarty Lovett invite them to respond spontaneously around the text as performed, verbatim, by Conor Lovett.
“Mercredis de Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt”
With the Mairie of Saint-Saturnin-lès Apt, Initiative Théâtre of Sorbonne Université and Artcom Diffusion
