Staging Beckett: Constructing Performance Histories

University of Reading · Inaugural Conference, 4-5 April 2014

4-5 April 2014, Minghella Building, University of Reading, Whiteknights Campus.
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Staging Beckett's Inaugural Conference on 4th - 5th April 2014 will focus on the history, documentation and analysis of Beckett's theatre in performance in the UK, Ireland and internationally.

Staging Beckett: The Impact of Productions of Samuel Beckett's Plays in the UK and Ireland is an AHRC-funded project which runs from 2012-2015. It is a collaboration between the Universities of Reading and Chester and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The project is compiling a database of all professional productions of Beckett's plays in the UK and Ireland, with accompanying research resources. The project's conferences are: Staging Beckett: Constructing Performance Histories (Reading April 4-5, 2014), Staging Beckett in the Regions (Chester, 11-12 September, 2014), and Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Theatre Cultures (Reading, April 2015).

Staging Beckett blog: http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/staging-beckett/

Staging Beckett: Constructing Performance Histories features papers on productions of Beckett from across the globe, including Belgium, Brazil, Hungary, India, Ireland, Mexico, Poland, Turkey, the United States and the UK. Topics will cover Beckett and stage design, Beckett's theatrical intersections with Pinter and with Shakespeare, staging Beckett in situations of censorship, or crisis and resistance from besieged Sarajevo to the Occupy movement in Zuccotti Park New York, staging Beckett beyond the theatrical frame, and performance histories and perspectives.

Registration fee: £50 per day waged; £30 per day students, seniors and unwaged.

Keynote Lecture: 'Beckett and the Non-Place in Irish Performance', Professor Brian Singleton, Trinity College Dublin, Friday 4th April, 2.30pm

Practitioners' Panel: 'Staging Beckett Now': Saturday 5th April, 3pm.

• Natalie Abrahami (director of Happy Days, starring Juliet Stevenson at the Young Vic, London, Feb-March 2014)
• Lisa Dwan (recent performances of Not I / Footfalls / Rockaby at the Royal Court and Duchess Theatre, London, on tour during 2014)
• Sarah Jane Scaife (director of site specific performances of Act Without Words II and Rough for Theatre 1 in Dublin (2013), Limerick, London and New York).

The Staging Beckett Research Team: Matthew McFrederick (Reading), Anna McMullan (Reading), Patricia McTighe (Reading), David Pattie (Chester), Graham Saunders (Reading), David Tucker (Chester).

Provisional Schedule

Friday April 4th

9.00-10.15 Tea / Coffee and Registration

10.15-10.30 Welcome (Professor James Knowlson) and Introduction

10.30-12.00 Panel 1: Historical Intersections

• Raquel Merino Alvarez 'Staging Beckett on Spanish censored stages: 1955-1976'
• Paulo Henrique Da Silva Gregorio 'Beckett and the Shakespeare Revolution in the 1960s'
• David Tucker 'That first last look in the shadows': Using Performance Histories of Beckett and Pinter'

12.00-12.15 Tea / Coffee

12.15 - 1.45 Panel 2: Staging Beckett Globally 1

• Priyanka Chatterjee 'Staging Beckett in Bengal: Revisiting History and Art'
• Burç Dincel '"They…To Play": A Turkish Take On Beckett'
• Brendan McCall and E. K. McFall, 'Staging Krapp's Last Tape in Turkey, Western Australia and Norway'

1.45 - 2.30 Lunch (served in the Minghella Foyer)

2.30 - 3.30 Keynote Lecture, Professor Brian Singleton, 'Beckett and the Non-Place in Irish Performance'

3.30 - 4.00 Tea / coffee

4.00-5.30 Panel 3: Beyond the Theatrical Frame

• Luz María Sánchez Cardona, 'Beckett, the electronic medium of radio, and Krapp's Last Tape'
• Brenda Farrell, 'Culture Shock: (Re) Staging Beckett in caves and car parks'
• Lisa FitzGerald 'Coming out of the Dark: Performing Place in Pan Pan's Production of Beckett's All that Fall'

5.30 -7.00 Book launch and wine reception (served in the Minghella) 

• Patricia McTighe, The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
• David Tucker, A Dream and its Legacies: The Samuel Beckett Theatre Project, Oxford c. 1967-76, Oxford: Colin Smythe, 2013.

8pm Dinner: Pepe Sale, 3, Queen's Walk, Reading city centre (£27.50pp): http://www.pepesale.co.uk

Saturday April 5th

8.30-9.00 Tea / Coffee and day registration

9.00-10.30 Panel 4: Staging Beckett Globally 2

• Robson Corrêa de Camargo 'Playing Beckett in Brazil'
• Anita Rákóczy 'Godots That Arrived: Waiting for Godot In Budapest Before and After 1989'.
• Ewa Brzeska 'Violating Becketts' Prescriptions For Theatre in Poland'

10.30-10.45: Tea / Coffee

10.45-12.15: Panel 5 Staging Beckett and Survival / Resistance

• Thomas Saunders 'Ownership and orphaned Irish identity in Susan Sontag's staging of Waiting for Godot'
• Arthur Rose 'Developing Beckett in New Orleans'
• Lance Duerfahrd 'An Unprotesting Play within a Protest: Waiting for Godot in Zuccotti Park'

12.15-12.30 Tea / Coffee

12.30-2.00 Panel 6: Designing Beckett

• Sophie Jump, 'Physicalising the Text: Jocelyn Herbert and Samuel Beckett'
• Anna McMullan 'Beckett and Irish Scenography'
• Trish McTighe 'The Tree at the Gate: Beckett and Le Brocquy'

2.00-3.00: Lunch (served in the Minghella Foyer)

3.00-4.15 Practitioner Panel: Staging Beckett Now

• Natalie Abrahami (director of Happy Days, starring Juliet Stevenson at the Young Vic, London, Feb-March 2014)
• Lisa Dwan (recent performances of Not I / Footfalls / Rockaby at the Royal Court and Duchess Theatre, London, on tour during 2014)
• Sarah Jane Scaife (director of site specific performances of Act Without Words II and Rough for Theatre 1 in Dublin (2013), Limerick, London and New York)

4.15-4.30 Tea / Coffee

4.30-6.00 Panel 7: Performance Histories and Perspectives

• Kate Dorney, 'Beckett in the Frame: a visual history of productions documented at the Victoria & Albert Museum'
• Matthew McFrederick 'Staging Beckett at the Royal Court Theatre'
• Nicholas Johnson and Jonathan Heron 'The Performance Issue'

6-7pm Launch of Journal Of Beckett Studies special issue on Performance, and closing of conference.

Praise for Lisa Dwan's Samuel Beckett Trilogy

Still time to catch Not I/Footfalls/Rockaby in London's West End

The Telegraph

Lisa Dwan performs in Becket's late plays. Photo: Alastair Muir

From Charles Spencer (The Telegraph):

When I was younger, I intensely disliked Samuel Beckett. I found his gloom oppressive and the ambiguity of his writing frustrating.

These days however I hang on to his every word, for there is no better guide to the human spirit’s darker depths and never more so than in this extraordinary triple bill of late works. Taken together, they last only an hour but the experience is profound and deeply moving.

In all three Beckett transports the audience to a strange and mysterious world apparently located at the very brink of death – that “undiscovered country” that Beckett and his characters so often yearn for.

But the evening is far from depressing. There is great beauty in the writing and a determination to stare mortality in the face. All three plays were originally performed by that great actress Billie Whitelaw, who was something of a muse to Beckett, but Lisa Dwan makes the pieces entirely her own with a rapt concentration that holds the audience throughout. [Read More]

Metro

Lisa Dwan readies herself for another demanding performance of Not I. Photo: Finn Beales

From Metro:

First comes the tar-like make-up, covering the face and neck. Over that goes a blindfold, then a clinging layer of opaque black fabric. The woman climbs a flight of stairs that will position her 8ft above the floor.

Her arms are placed in restraints that hold her body, cruciform, against a board, her head tightly strapped into an aperture. Only her lips, pink and moist in the darkness, are visible.

All that remains is for her to perform a theatrical feat that will last less than nine minutes but was described by Billie Whitelaw, who gave it its British premiere at the Royal Court in 1973, as ‘falling backwards into hell’.

‘I hope it doesn’t feel like a public execution,’ laughs Lisa Dwan.

But anyone who’s caught her performance as Mouth in Samuel Beckett’s brilliant and demanding Not I – which Dwan has been delivering off and on since 2005, notably in last year’s 40th anniversary shows at the Royal Court – can testify to its shattering power.

Alone on stage, the actor performs a breakneck stream-of-consciousness monologue evoking a lifetime of despair, vomited from their mouth spotlit in a dark void. Not surprisingly, it is held to be the most demanding of parts.

For all that, Dwan is returning to it at the Court, performing it alongside two other Beckett shorts, Footfalls and Rockaby, prior to a regional and international tour. [Read More]

The Independent

Lisa Dwan as Mouth in Samuel Beckett's Not I. Photo: Finn Beals

From Paul Taylor (The Independent):

Lisa Dwan delivers a virtuosic performance of three of Beckett's short later works in an extraordinary hour-long experience that feels more like a group hallucination or a troubling collective dream than a theatrical event.

The pieces emerge from and lapse back into a rumbling absolute darkness so dense it's like fur and it's a tribute to the memerising power of Walter Asmus's production that there wasn't a single flicker from a mobile phone or a whispered exchange throughout the proceedings on press night.

The evening kicks off with Not I, the most familiar of the plays, first performed in this theatre forty years ago by Billie Whitelaw. Eight feet in the air, a disembodied female mouth materialises, spotlit in the pitch-black, and spews a fractured steam-of-consciousness monologue in a demented torrent. It's a stage picture that still astonishes – imagine the Cheshire Cat's grin as reinvented by Munch.

Beckett wanted the piece to “work on the nerves of its audience, not its intellect” and stipulated that it should be emitted at “the speed of thought”. Dwan's 9 minute performance is the quickest on record. The woman's plight is grotesquely tragicomic: having spent most of her isolated, loveless life mute, she now finds herself the victim of relentless verbal diarrhoea. Listening to Dwan's unbelievably breakneck, manic Irish-accented gabble is like watching a non-driver trapped at the wheel in a hurtling vehicle with no brakes. The actress, though, is in prodigious control of the material. The woman's recurring denial that she is the subject of her third-person narrative – “what?...who?...no!...she!” escalates, to just right degree here, in desperate, teeth-baring insistence. [Read More]

Lisa Dwan talks to The Guardian

Lisa Dwan's dressing room. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for The Guardian

Lisa Dwan talks to The Guardian about her dressing room, and how she prepares for her performances:

My dressing room is a bit of a sanctuary. It's where I take my anxieties, my sleep and my prayers. It's a kitchen, a dining room and a meeting place. Everything happens there.

Not I is only nine minutes long but it requires a lot of preparation every time. I arrive at the theatre about three and a half hours early and before every show, I'll do a line-run or two, a vocal warm-up, at least half an hour of meditation and then eat early enough to digest my food. The last thing you need is a burp building up!

It took ages to find the right black makeup, because it can't be light reflective. I use a matt grease eyeliner and a thick, grease eyeshadow. On top of that I wear a black eyemask and a pair of tights over my head, then I'm harnessed into a head brace. My neck goes all the time and I've got a hernia from doing this show. I'm a dancer, so I'm used to pushing my body through pain thresholds. I've been on a mission not to be ill. Hence all the over-the-counter meds. It's not like I've got an understudy. [Read More]

Walter Asmus talks to The Economist

Walter Asmus directs Lisa Dwan during rehearsals. Photo: John Haynes.

Director (and friend of Beckett's) Walter Asmus talks to The Economist about working with Lisa Dwan on the late plays:

A 73-year-old German living in Berlin, Mr Asmus was told last year about an astonishing nine-minute version of Beckett's "Not I" performed by an Irish actress, Lisa Dwan. (Its most famous performer, Billie Whitelaw, used to do it in 14 minutes.) Ms Dwan has been delivering "Not I", in which memories of childhood and other strangled thoughts are spat out by ghoulishly lit lips in otherwise complete darkness, since 2005. But she had hopes of doing a fuller Beckett programme, and after she had met Mr Asmus, the Royal Court asked him to direct her in two other “dramaticules”, as the playwright called his shorter late pieces, to be put on with "Not I".

So audiences at the Royal Court also got to see "Footfalls", in which Ms Dwan plays May, pacing up and down in dialogue with her mother, and "Rockaby", in which another spectral woman in a rocking chair listens to the musings of perhaps her own ghost. All three plays are being revived from February 3rd for 14 performances at the Duchess Theatre. [Read More]

The sold out show is playing at the Duchess Theatre in the West End for a limited run, 3-15 February 2014.

Five top Beckett plays

Benedict Nightingale (The Times) lists his favourites

Billie Whitelaw, pictured with Beckett. John Haynes/AP

From The Times (link via Lisa Dwan): 'They may be short but they’re powerful: the most memorable performances of the work of Samuel Beckett' [Read More]

Lisa Dwan to perform Not I/Footfalls/Rockaby (2014)

Royal Court Theatre · 9-18 January 2014

From Royal Court Theatre (thanks to Julia Séguier for the link):

Lisa Dwan returns to the Royal Court Theatre to perform a one-woman Samuel Beckett trilogy after a critically acclaimed sell-out run of his landmark one–woman piece Not I, performed at the Royal Court forty years after the theatre held its UK premiere.

Lisa will perform Not I alongside two other Beckett classics Footfalls and Rockaby, directed by Walter Asmus.

Beckett’s Not I is an intense monologue, set in a pitch-black space lit by a single beam of light. A disembodied female mouth floats eight feet above the stage and delivers a stream of consciousness, spoken, as Beckett directed, at the speed of thought. Lisa Dwan was tutored in the role by Billie Whitelaw, who originally performed the part at its 1973 UK premiere and was personally coached for the part by Beckett himself.

Rockaby is probably the most famous of Beckett’s last works. It explores loneliness and features a prematurely old woman dressed in an evening gown, sitting on a wooden rocking chair that appears to rock of its own accord. Rockaby was first performed in New York in 1980 starring Billie Whitelaw and then at the National Theatre in 1981.

Footfalls features May, wrapped in tatters, pacing back and forth like a metronome, on a strip of bare landing outside her dying mother’s room. Footfalls was first performed by Billie Whitelaw, for whom the piece had been written, at the Royal Court Theatre as part of the Samuel Beckett Festival, in 1976 directed by Beckett himself.

Lisa Dwan has worked extensively in theatre, film and television both internationally and in her native Ireland. Film credits include; Oliver Twist and John Boorman’s Tailor of Panama and Bhopal – A Prayer for Rain due for release this year. In 2012, she adapted, produced and performed the critically acclaimed one woman play Beside the Sea at the South Bank Centre and on tour and starred in Goran Bregović’s new music drama, Margot, Diary Of An Unhappy Queen at the Barbican. She most recently performed in Ramin Gray’s production of Illusions by Ivan Viripaev at the Bush Theatre.

Walter Asmus directs. He was Beckett’s long-time friend and collaborator, assisting him on all his productions at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin and internationally. His production of Waiting for Godot which toured extensively, including a 40 date all Ireland tour in 2008 was widely described as the ‘definitive production’.

FRIENDS AND MEMBERS BOOKING OPENS TUE 9 JULY at 10AM
PUBLIC BOOKING OPENS THU 11 JULY at 10AM

Tickets
£25, £20, £12

Not I/Footfalls/Rockaby will tour International festivals and theatres in 2014 [Read More]

via apieceofmonologue.com

Night Waves: Derval Tubridy talks to Lisa Dwan

Dwan on Not I at London's Royal Court Theatre

From BBC Radio 3: 'The stage is in darkness except for a mouth visible about eight feet above stage level, "emitting" a stream-of-consciousness account of a life. Samuel Beckett's 'Not I' received its European premiere 40 years ago at the Royal Court Theatre in London. To mark the anniversary the theatre is staging the piece again, performed by Lisa Dwan. Lisa joins Samira, along with Derval Tubridy, author of several studies of Beckett's work, to discuss a text Beckett said he wanted to "work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect".' [Listen]