Gare St Lazare Ireland, the company led by actor Conor Lovett and director Judy Hegarty Lovett, return to the Coronet for their third show this decade, The Beckett Trilogy.
This time around, Lovett is the sole performer in a three hour show comprised of extracts from three novels by Samuel Beckett. It’s a beast of a show.
First up is Malloy, a tale of a man of age and infirmity who can’t recall his own name or address, and extorts money from an old, deaf, blind and incontinent mother by inflicting taps on her skull.
Then we have Malone Dies, where a man is confined in a space he doesn’t recognise. When he fumbles for pleasure, he tells us of it. When he wanders and witnesses an increasing scene of carnage, he tells us of it.
Finally, The Unnamable is less body than head and shadow. There’s no story here, just an unflinching sense of place and space.
As each piece is staged – with no set required – the lighting by Simon Hennison – tightens. The performance space shrinks, the words stagger on a pretence of sense.
Lovett and his wife/director know Beckett intimately, having staged his works many times before. Between them they selected which extracts to use to create a show which flows but also require concentration and patience.
In Malloy, I missed my favourite passage about the stones but found the story of the dog absurdly engrossing. There’s humour to be had here, and Lovett finds it in Beckett’s mastery of the circumstantial and scatalogical.
This is a man who exists, barely, but doesn’t quite belong. The world is harsh to him, and he is ill at ease within it. His companionship is not to be tolerated, yet we pity him.
Malone Dies is the portrait of a pathetic character, a thinker who is waiting for the final goodbye. The novel is largely explanatory and concerned with the mundane, but the extract here focuses on the bloody ending.
Malone, Sapo, McMann. These are all one to the narrator, who sometimes slips between first and third person. The place in which he lies down is all one to him, too, and his place in it.
Lovett gives this piece a more conspiratorial, conversational tone, an almost stand-up chat. More open than Malloy but just as lost, we know less of him but see more.
The Unnamable is the best, but this culmination of a long evening may come a little too late. In a tight light and tall shadow, Lovett evokes Beckett’s words with a resignation as bleak as it is joyous.
The ending is in sight, but with difficulty. As with the other pieces, we have searching pauses but also journeys into the darkness.
It’s an assured performance of words and disjoins, sending us blinking into the streets of Notting Hill as the 11th hour approaches.
The Beckett Trilogy continues at Coronet Theatre until 22 Jun. Standing tickets are available here.
****
Image credit: Ros Kavanagh