These are exciting times for husband-and-wife duo, actor and director respectively, Conor Lovett and Judy Hegarty Lovett who have been inseparable since they met as 14-year-olds in Cork and together discovered the work of Samuel Beckett.
Artistic directors of the Gare St Lazare Ireland theatre company, which they established 30 years ago, they are not long back from Japan. They took part in Expo 2025 in Osaka, in a revival of the 1965 Oscar-nominated best foreign language film, the forgotten masterpiece Kwaidan.
It is based on a collection of ghost stories by the Irish-Greek author Lafcadio Hearn, who died in Japan in 1904. Hearn’s life is celebrated in the Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Gardens in Tramore, Co Waterford, founded by Agnes Aylward who was conferred last week with the Order of the Rising Sun by the Japanese government.
Composers and musicians Matthew Nolan and Seán Mac Erlaine were commissioned by Dublin City Council’s Bram Stoker Festival to compose new music for Kwaidan, which they performed alongside Japanese soundscape artist Tomoko Sauvage, while Conor took on the role of the narrator or ‘Benshi’ under Judy’s direction.
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“I was quite excited at doing this because in many respects it got me out of my comfort zone,” said Conor. “The Benshi tradition in Japanese cinema dates from the era of silent films. Someone stands in the cinema and does a voiceover for the audience. They can also translate or heighten the tension of the film.”
They fitted in a performance of Beckett’s The End at the Irish Embassy in Tokyo before returning for a sold-out Halloween screening of Kwaidan in the National Concert Hall.
The Lovetts’ attention is now shifting to their participation in next year’s Venice Biennale in June as part of a theatre programme curated by the American actor Willem Dafoe, which will feature the latest addition to their 20-strong repertoire of Beckett productions, How It Is, a challenging text with no punctuation.
Parts 1 and 2 made their debut in the Everyman Theatre in Cork in 2017, but Covid put paid to plans to stage the full six-hour, three-part production during the Dublin Theatre Festival. Now it will be staged in its entirety by Conor Lovett and the British actor Stephen Dillane in 10 performances at the 18th century Palazzo Diedo, under Judy’s direction and with a sound design by Mel Mercier.
[ Celebrating the Irish writer whose ghost stories still grip JapanOpens in new window ]
Nothing daunted by the length of the performance, Conor said: “We paid a site visit to Venice last month and it’s a marvellous setting. It’s a fantastic opportunity for Judy and I, and Gare St Lazare, but especially for myself and Stephen Dillane. We started learning this 10 years ago. Finally, we will get to do all three parts in Venice.”
Only diehard Beckett fans will be aware that the Foxrock scribe collaborated with the French/Romanian composer Marcel Mihalovici on Krapp’s Last Tape – the opera which will be seen for the first time in Ireland at next year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival, in a production directed by Judy and starring British tenor Mark Padmore and Stephen Dillane, backed by two pianists and two percussionists.
Another Lovett collaborator is the American playwright Will Eno – once described by a New York drama critic as “Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation” – who has written a new play for Gare St Lazare which will be performed in 2027. The working title is The Green Room.
As if all that was not enough, the Lovetts are also busy expanding their Atelier Samuel Beckett, which they founded two years ago with the support of their American patrons, Paul Ralston and Deb Gwinn.
To date, it has provided a short-term haven outside Paris for 25 artists to enjoy fine views of the river Seine while getting on with creative work on the rue Vieille Côte in the lovely cliffside village of Méricourt, home to the Lovetts and Gare St Lazare Ireland for the last 26 years.
In a fortuitous turn of events, the American owners of the house where the Lovetts first stayed in Méricourt, and where they raised their three children, have now put the residence at their disposal for nine months each year to accommodate a further influx to the Beckett inspired artists’ colony on the banks of the Seine.
They enjoyed great success last year with their LA production of Waiting for Godot. Lines from the play uttered by Vladimir in a mad burst of optimism come to mind: ‘What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer.’
The Lovetts have found the answer, on the banks of the Seine.
