3 weeks Ago By Jane Coyle
Never bet on the Irish weather. A week ago a site-specific performed reading of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot was presented on a bleak plateau in the Fermanagh-Cavan borderlands. It powerfully captured the writer’s stark opening stage directions: “A country road.
A tree. Evening.” Four actors, two from each side of the Border – Conor Grimes, David Pearse, Andrew Bennett and Tadhg Murphy – came together, as though by accident, watching and waiting beneath Antony Gormley’s 3.
5m-tall, stainless-steel Tree for Waiting for Godot. Following the exact chronology of the piece, the two acts were performed on consecutive days. In commemoration of Beckett’s birthday – Good Friday of 1906, which fell on April 13th – and of the strengthened ties emerging from the Belfast Agreement, Seán Doran and Liam Browne, directors of Arts Over Borders, have curated Oh My Godot!, a new festival held over two weekends in the Co Fermanagh island town of Enniskillen.
The highlight of its second weekend was scheduled as Walking for Waiting for Godot, a one-off reading of the play in the same isolated setting, featuring two actors from England and two from Ireland. But the inclement elements have driven Saturday’s performance indoors, albeit to the apt location of Steele Hall, at the prestigious Enniskillen Royal Grammar School/Portora Royal School, where Beckett, and Oscar Wilde before him, were boarders. For the first time in Ireland, the UK and other anglophone countries, the estate of Samuel Beckett, which strictly protects the writer’s literary legacy, has allowed a woman into the cast.
Honours go to the extraordinary Olwen Fouéré, as an androgynous, scuttling, beetle-like Lucky, a servile carrier cowed and bullied by Lorcan Cranitch’s Pozzo, a blustering, gravel-voiced landowner hewn from the soil of his forefathers. To the speechless bewilderment of Alex Jennings’s Vladimir and Malcolm Sinclair’s Estragon, Fouéré launches into Lucky’s famously impassioned stream of consciousness with a haunting, rhythmic musicality, which builds to a semi-operatic climax. Although the production does not modify the character’s gender, it is nonetheless unsettling to watch a woman playing this pathetic creature who is controlled and abused by a domineering man.
Surrounded by the school’s gold-lettered rolls of honour and the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom, Gormley’s tree creates a circular performance space. It also provides shelter and a recognisable landmark within a state of human uncertainty. Jennings and Sinclair’s precise pacing and cut-glass English accents give eloquent voice to Beckett’s ricocheting dialogue.
Almost instinctively, they craft a touchingly beautiful partnership, like an old married couple with a lifetime of shared experiences. Lorcan McManus, a school pupil, comes and goes stealthily as the local Boy who tends the sheep and goats, delivering the role with an appealing, grave innocence. The sublime acting by the four principals is all the more remarkable for being unpolished, undirected and unrehearsed.
As an exercise in theatrical happenstance, their chance encounters vividly accentuate Beckett’s vision of lost souls adrift in a chaotic, nihilistic world with nowhere to go and nothing to do except wait for the arrival of an unknown saviour. Written 72 years ago, the play continues to chime with troubling issues besetting the time and place in which it is performed. Jane Coyle is a contributor to The Irish Times specialising in culture.
