Soft station

The name, Gare St Lazare Players, has an aura of sepiatinted romance. This theatre company, born in Chicago in the early 1980s with offshoots in London and Paris, sounds like something from evert's Carne's great celebration of bohemian Paris, Les Enfants du Paradis. With their modest but adventurous productions mounted in Irish bars on the Left Bank (where else?) the Players sparked the interest of a couple of young Irish boulevardiers - actor Conor Lovett and designer/director, Judy Hegarty, who left their native Cork for Paris in the late 1980s.

Conor Lovett first came to the notice of Irish theatre audiences during the Dublin Fringe Festival three years ago, when his solo portrayal of Beckett's Molloy created queues that snaked down Suffolk Street, as word of mouth swelled the numbers of hopefuls trying to squeeze into the International Bar. With a steady gaze and the sparsest of gestures, Lovett (as Molloy) stood in his two overcoats and held the audience rapt as he gave an erratic account of his attempts to go to see his mother, by bicycle. A gaunt man without occupation or fixed abode, Molloy has difficulty remembering his own name but insists on absolute linguistic precision and relishes semantic nuances.

Lovett's performance was subtle and disciplined, with a quality of charged stillness, a degree of physical control that reflected his training in movement at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris. "There are only about five moves in the whole play," Lovett says, laughing. "But for all that it's a heavily text-based production, friends from the Ecole said that it had Lecoq written all over it. People tend to be frightened by the notion of physical theatre, but it can be brought into anything."

Lovett's light Cork cadences brought out the humour in Beckett's text. He and Judy Hegarty - who directed the show - adapted the novel themselves, seamlessly, and won the approval of Beckett's original publisher, John Calder. One of the show's biggest fans, he gave the company the much-coveted rights to perform Beckett's work in the US.

Lovett and Hegarty have now adapted the second novel in the trilogy, Malone Dies, in a Gare St Lazare Players' production which they are bringing to Kilkenny Arts Festival, before playing at the Civic Theatre, Tallaght, for a week in September. It presents Malone lying in his bed, convinced that he's at death's door. He tells himself stories, but becomes side-tracked by his urge to question, unrelentingly, his whole life, scrutinising decisions taken and not taken, bridges burned, paths not followed.

Beckett's work draws Lovett irresistibly; as well as his performances with Gare St Lazare Players, he has played in What Where and Acts Without Words 1 and 2 in the Gate's Beckett Festival at the Barbican in London. Molloy is going to tour around the Republic, before travelling to the Beckett festival in Berlin in the autumn.

Economy of means (by necessity) and simplicity of style are the defining elements of Gare St Lazare Players. "We pare everything back to the essentials," Judy Hegarty says. "Bob Meyer, the company's founder, has a distinct style," Lovett says. "I'd call it `garage theatre', with a lot of jazz influences. He's attuned to the rhythms of language first and foremost, and finds out what else is going on. His method is very instinctual."

The company is now based in the small village of Mericourt, north west of Paris - "this is where we'd like to be for the foreseeable future", Lovett says. "This is our base where we rehearse and from which we tour. Our first stop is always Ireland, where we've now established a circuit, and that helps keep us in touch with what's happening in Irish theatre. Otherwise we might feel a bit cut off. We don't perform in Paris any more - the audiences there for English-language theatre are limited and you tend to see the same ex-pat faces - but it's great to be so close to the city."

"We have a core group here," Hegarty says, "including French, Irish, English, American and Dutch. We're hoping to set up a facility for emerging Irish playwrights, so that they can come here and workshop plays. We hope to produce plays as well, eventually. It's a bit arid just to workshop work - it needs an audience.

"We've a good, informal set-up here with studios and the attraction of being beside Paris, with all its associations with great Irish writers." Enough said - it's time to whip out that dog-eared playscript . . .

Malone Dies plays at the Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny on Friday August 18th and Saturday 19th at 10 p.m.