The Lovetts Of Méricourt

LIFE ON TOUR:They travel the world with three children and have bases in France and Ireland. RUADHAN MAC CORMAIC, Paris Correspondent, meets a pair of original cultural ambassadors

IT DOESN’T MATTER how often he’s asked. There are some questions to which Conor Lovett has never heard himself give a satisfactory reply. One is the Beckett thing. He’ll take a stab at explaining the attraction, trying to account for that first revelatory encounter and its still-firm hold on his imagination, but every attempt seems to him an injustice.

“More questions than answers,” is how he sums it up, with a smile. But another is the lure of France, in some ways just as heavy a presence in the lives of Lovett and his wife, director and collaborator Judy Hegarty Lovett. Their home for the past decade has been Méricourt, north of Paris, where they live with their three children and base themselves for what must seem, from a glance at their dizzying schedule, like mere interludes on a year-long touring circuit. “You have to just learn to say, ‘this is working and there’s something going on here’. And just go with it,” says Conor of settling in France.

Their link to the country dates from the early 1990s, when he trained at the Jacques Lecoq theatre school and Judy – whom he had met as a teenager in Cork – took her first steps as a director through the Gare St Lazare Players, an expat theatre troupe set up by the American Bob Meyer. Stints in Dublin and London followed, their break coming at the Edinburgh festival, where a performance of Beckett’s novel Molloy earned them the first of many raves and convinced them they might make a career of it. But France kept calling.

“Lots of things fell into place for us personally,” Judy explains, as we sit in the courtyard of the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris on a grey afternoon. “We were offered a house to live in, and we lived there for eight years, rent-free. We’ve since bought a house there, but there was an eight-year period where the gods were with us and we could do our work and not get freaked out. Circumstance allowed us to be there, and it felt like the right place to be, and we went with it.”

And yet at times it must feel like they're barely here at all. The Gare St Lazare Players Ireland bills itself as the most widely travelled company in Irish theatre, having performed in 63 cities across the world in the past decade. Recitals of Samuel Beckett's prose works have become its signature, and this year it is bringing six shows – mostly Beckett works, but also its take on Melville's Moby Dick– to 25 cities, from Munich to Melbourne to Ramallah.

Some nights from the Lovetts’ decade on the road come to mind in an instant. “Six hundred people in Ankara one night when we thought we’d be doing good to have 150,” Conor recalls. “They showed us the auditorium and I said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, this is huge.’ And there were only a handful of bookings. Six hundred feckin people. It was stunning.”

On stage in Shanghai, he couldn’t help noticing that every second face was lit up in blue. “A very young audience – texting, chatting, walking around, photographing,” Judy laughs. “I thought, ‘Is this boring them or what’s going on?’ But I went to another show, a Chinese show, and they were the same – getting up, walking out, coming back in, chatting, calling someone at the other side of the room, answering the phone.”

Long before the government made Gabriel Byrne Ireland’s cultural ambassador – a great idea, they agree – Conor and Judy had thought of themselves as fulfilling a similar role, alive as they were to the way that Irish cultural events abroad had a way of “creating a buzz about Ireland”, as Conor puts it. “When you’re in the arts, you know this already . . . We were tuned into that. And we’re only delighted that everyone else is tuning into it as well.”

And yet, at a time when Ireland needs that sort of buzz-making in bulk, support for the arts – as for so much else – has been sharply reduced. Gare St Lazare is one of about a dozen companies whose annual funding has been withdrawn by the Arts Council, an unexpectedly tough blow that has left them in a deeply more precarious place. The topic stirs their passions like nothing else. “We won’t die, because we’re too ambitious and, like all artists, we’re used to struggle,” Judy says. “We’re not going to drop our careers. We’ve been 15 years at it. I don’t know do we know what else to do.”

Gare St Lazare Players Ireland perform The End and The Calmative, a Beckett double-bill, at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin next Monday to Saturday, April 12th-17th