Half Moon Theatre, Cork
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. This is a fact which Lovett employs in his treatment of these two prose pieces by chipping out the telling phrase, never over-stressing it but yet presenting its meaning, or its significance or even its contradictions, in a manner which makes them register. 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.
For this monologue on a vagrant's resilient odyssey Lovett remains physically and almost totally in one place yet seems in constant movement, his body leaning forward or back, his head turning sideways, his arms and hands articulate as they express a commentary on a text which, infused with the amiable logic of the alienated, has reminiscences of Flann O'Brien. Written in 1946 and collected in Stories and Texts for Nothing, both pieces are meditations on solitariness, of adapting to what is predicted and of looking back, as if clinically researching that adaptation.
In The Endthe theme is an examination of the likeness, that is the simulacrum, of a life and the conundrum of its closure. In The Calmative(here receiving its stage premiere) the close has been achieved; this is darker, sadder and more intense although Lovett's fluid and well-projected voice never blunts the incisions of the prose even as he moves companionably among the audience. As usual with Beckett the obligation is to seek interpretation beyond the prose and beyond the masterful pauses, but director Judy Hegarty Lovett doesn't make a fuss about this. Instead there is a background of voluptuous scarlet velvet drapery, tasselled and immense, against which a shredding bench and a solitary human voice gather us into this passing hour as if life were a dream or a myth of one's own making. At The Project Arts Centre, Dublin April 12-17
