Northward ho for Beckett festival

Catastrophe

Adrian Dunbar directs one of Beckett's last plays, the short and pointedly political depiction of a director and his assistant engaging with a performer. Frank McCusker, Orla Charlton and Dylan Quinn perform.

Roaratorio

Deep in the Marble Arch Caves, accessible by boat, a sound installation of John Cage's 1979 Joyce-inspired composition Roaratorio - An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake takes place, joined later in the week by excerpts from Merce Cunningham's 1983 choreography, performed under the earth by Dylan Quinn Dance Theatre.

Waiting for Godot

Waiting For Godot will be a play in which nothing happens several times when two productions of Beckett's seminal play are performed back to back. Marseille's Theatre Nono stage the play in its original French, accentuating its sorrowful vaudeville, while New York's New Yiddish Rep present a Yiddish version, amplifying the play's echoes of post second World War Europe and a world torn asunder.

Krapp’s Last Tape

Theatre and opera director Peter Stein brings his version of Krapp's Last Tape to offer us a singular take, with Klaus Maria Brandauer as the lugubrious birthday boy.

WorstwardHo

Inspired by Beckett's late prose work, WorstwardHo ("Ever tried. Ever failed…"), German composer and director Heiner Goebbels creates a piece of music-theatre with The Hilliard Ensemble and Theatre de Vidy-Lausanne to depict the slow subsiding of life.

Deadpan

Artist (and director of some films or other) Steve McQueen restaged Buster Keaton’s stunt in which a house collapses around him for this visual art piece. Beckett adored Buster Keaton and cast and directed him in his only film. St Macartin’s Cathedral is the venue.

A Point Of View Waiting For Godot

The photographs in this exhibition, by artist Gerard Byrne in the basement of Castle Coole, simulate the literal point of view of the characters from the play.

[ Samuel Beckett Motivational Cat Posters  ]

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