Cork couple do their bit for Samuel Beckett

Conor Lovett and Judy Hegarty Lovett are renowned in the theatre world for their Beckett productions. Marc O’Sullivan Vallig visited them in France where they offer a chance for people who want to explore the world of the great writer

Judy Hegarty Lovett and Connor Lovett in Paris. Picture: Augusta Sagnelli

No one familiar with Gare St Lazare Ireland’s body of work will have been surprised by the success of what the  Hollywood Reporter hailed as their “authentically powerful” production of Samuel Beckett’s  Waiting for Godot at the Geffen Theatre in Los Angeles late last year.

Gare St Lazare is run by Cork couple Judy Hegarty Lovett, who directed the production, and her partner Conor Lovett, who played Pozzo. They launched the company in 1996, when Hegarty Lovett first directed Lovett in their acclaimed adaptation of Beckett’s novel Molloy at the Battersea Arts Centre in London, and they have since presented the Nobel Laureate’s work to rapt audiences all over the world. In Los Angeles, more than 26,000 people saw their Godot, which also starred Rainn Wilson of NBC’s The Office as Vladimir and Aasif Mandvi of The Daily Show as Estragon, over its seven-week run.

For much of their career, Hegarty Lovett and Lovett have been based in Méricourt — a village on the River Seine an hour northwest of Paris. Méricourt is where they reared their family of three, Louis, Ruby and Lux, and they don’t foresee ever leaving. If anything, they’re digging in. In 2023, in a gesture that acknowledges their devotion to both Beckett and Méricourt, Hegarty Lovett and Lovett established Atelier Samuel Beckett, an artist’s residency in a house next door to their own.

“We’re at that stage where we felt we should be giving something back and the residency seemed the best way of doing it. Méricourt is a small
community of 380 people, and we’re part of its fabric. We’re very pleased that our neighbours have been so open to the idea, and are very happy with it. They all came to walk through the house and offer help and furniture. They’ve been very generous. You don’t want to parachute in with an idea like this. You want to integrate it into the community, ”says Hegarty Lovett.

Hegarty Lovett and Lovett first got to know Méricourt through the late Bob Meyer, a theatre producer from Chicago they’d worked with in Paris. “Bob had a place in Méricourt where we’d come and stay,” says Lovett. “He mentioned that an American couple had a summer house nearby, and they might let us move in when they were not around. So we approached them, and they let us have it.

“After a year we tried to formalise the arrangement; we already had one child, our son Louis, and another on the way. But they didn’t want rent, they were just happy to have us in the house. When they came over for the summer, we might be out on tour, or we’d go back to Cork. It worked out fine. It gave us a great start, having the place for so long. We had the same arrangement for six or seven years until we managed to buy another house in the village, where we still live today.”

Samuel Beckett

Hegarty Lovett’s ground-breaking work as a director and Lovett’s achievements as an actor have ensured that Gare St Lazare is one of the most dynamic Irish theatre companies at work today. Growing up, however, neither was initially drawn to the stage. Hegarty Lovett attended the Crawford College of Art and Design, while Lovett did a bilingual secretarial course.

“My French teacher on that course was Roisin Crowley, who decided that we should do an end-of-year show, The Lesson by Ionesco,” says Lovett, who lived in the Ballinlough building that also housed his parents’ restaurant. “I’d never been on stage before, but I suddenly thought, ‘oh my God, this is where I’m supposed to be’. I went on to study Stagecraft at Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa on Tramore Road, and after that, I started acting with the Dram Soc at UCC.”

Hegarty Lovett, from Monkstown, became interested in performance art in her final year at the Crawford, which led onto working in the theatre, and completing a post-graduate degree in Dramatherapy at University of Hertfordshire in Britain. When she and Lovett started working together, “we went into it without fully identifying what it was or what our titles were,” she says. “It’s only in the past few years that I’ve started thinking of myself as a director.”

Their interest in adapting Molloy for the stage led to a meeting with Beckett’s publisher, John Calder. “Because Molloy is a prose work, John was the point of contact for permissions. He was very supportive. He brought Edward Beckett, Samuel’s nephew, to see us in London, and thankfully, he liked what we were doing as well. Edward manages the Beckett estate, and from then on we dealt directly with him. We’ve always maintained a really good relationship.”

After Molloy, they went on to adapt Malone Dies and The Unnamable, the other novels in the trilogy Beckett produced after the war, around the same time he composed Waiting for Godot. Later, they also adapted two of his novellas, First Love and The End.

Eventually, they branched out into producing larger Beckett productions, beginning with Godot, with Lovett playing the role of Vladimir, which they presented at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2013 and toured to Shanghai, Boston and New York.

Actor Stephen Dillane and director Conor Lovett at The Everyman, Cork in 2018. Picture: Darragh Kane

They’ve worked with other writers as well. Hegarty Lovett has directed Lovett in Conor McPherson’s The Good Thief, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, and Will Eno’s Title and Deed, which they premiered at Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2011. Hegarty Lovett’s work on another Eno play, The Realistic Joneses, won her the Best Director award at the 2022 Irish Times Theatre Awards.

Lovett has also worked with other theatre companies, in roles such as Lucky in Walter Asmus’ 50th anniversary Godot production at the Gate in Dublin; The Old Man In His Coffin in Michael Keegan Dolan’s The Bull for Fabulous Beast; and David in Lucy Caldwell’s Leaves, directed by Garry Hynes for a Druid/Royal Court co-production in Galway and London. He has also acted in films such as Moll Flanders, Intermission, De Gaulle and Ritornello, and on television in Father Ted, Charlie, Versailles and Belgravia.

The couple’s primary interest, however, has always been in finding new ways to bring Beckett to the stage. In 2015, they began work on an adaptation of his 1961 novel How It Is, which became the basis of the PhD, on the staging of Beckett’s prose, that Hegarty Lovett completed six years later through the University of Reading. Even by Beckett’s standards, How It Is is bleak, featuring a narrator lying in a pool of mud in the dark who repeats the story of his life as he hears it recounted by a voice inside him.

“ How It Is is often seen as being one of Beckett’s more inaccessible or impenetrable works, but we think it’s a masterpiece,” says Hegarty Lovett. “We presented our adaptation in three parts over three years from 2018, on a residency at the Everyman Theatre in Cork, working with people like the tenor Mark Padmore and the Irish Gamelan Orchestra. Edward Beckett came to each of the premieres, and he couldn’t believe what we’d done with it. We eventually filmed the whole thing as well, during the COVID pandemic. The film is six hours 17 minutes long.”

Gare St Lazare has had many supporters, in Ireland and elsewhere, but it was an American couple who helped bring the Atelier Samuel Beckett project to fruition. “Paul Ralston and Deb Gwinn from Vermont have been patrons for years,” says Hegarty Lovett. “When they were selling up their coffee business to retire, they approached us and said ‘look, we’d like to do something substantial for the company, and make sure you’re secure going forward’. When they asked what we’d like to do, we said ‘let’s create an artist residency in Méricourt’. They thought it was a brilliant idea. They said ‘100% let’s go for it’.”

The Beckett Atelier

Lovett adds: “And at the same time the woman who used to own the house next to ours approached us and said ‘I’m thinking of selling, and I thought you guys might be interested’. Which was the weirdest thing, as we hadn’t put anything out about it. So we bought and renovated the house. We asked Edward Beckett if we could name it the Atelier Samuel Beckett, and he was delighted. That’s a huge branding. But it’s also a huge endorsement for us as artists, that the Beckett Estate would give us that permission. Edward is a patron of the project, along with the actor Ciarán Hinds, who’s based in Paris.”

“Currently it’s the only Beckett destination building in the world,” says Hegarty Lovett. “Beckett’s apartment in Paris is still in the family, and he left his retreat in the village of Ussy-sur-Marne to the local farmers who used to look after it for him. But there’s no Beckett museum, and no other Beckett residency.”

The Atelier in Méricourt has two en suite bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, and a study, which houses the Beckett Library, with books donated by Edward Beckett, John Calder’s widow Sheila Colvin Calder and the Lovetts themselves. The house overlooks the River Seine, and there are a number of caves on the property they hope to develop as studio spaces.

“Méricourt is a beautiful place to stay in,” says Lovett. “Paris is 40 minutes by train, Claude Monet’s house in Giverny is a 10-minute drive away, and La Roche-Guyon, another nearby village, has a massive chateau that’s well worth a visit. We make our second car available to our residents. As long as you’re licensed, we have a fully comprehensive insurance that will cover you.”

Edward Beckett and Hinds have both stayed at the Atelier, as have writers Kevin Barry and John Dunlea; composers Benedict Schelpper-Connolly, David Stalling and Anthony Kelly; and actors Faline England, Sorcha Fox and Ally Ní Chiaráin, among many others.

“Galway Culture Company has sponsored two residencies, and we’re hoping to come to a similar arrangement with Cork County Council and the National Sculpture Factory,” says Hegarty Lovett.

The couple have also just announced a three-year collaboration with the National Latinx Theatre in Los Angeles, awarding three-week residencies to the Chicano playwright Luis Alfaro in 2026, the Uruguayan Gracia Rogelia in 2027, and the Venezolana Rebeca Aleman in 2028.

Along with the space for artists to stay and work in, residencies at the Atelier come with the option of mentorship. “When we started the Atelier, it was obvious to us that it should provide access to the artistic directors of Gare St Lazare,” says Lovett. “We feel we have something to offer, all this Beckett knowledge we’ve built up over the years that we’re happy to impart to others.”

“We also have access to the greater Beckett community,” says Hegarty Lovett. “We know we can call on these people to give mentorship, workshops or whatever. And all of that can be tailored to whoever’s coming through and whatever their specific needs are. We’re not suggesting that everyone who stays here must work on a Beckett project, of course. The only prerequisite, really, is that they be curious about Beckett and want to learn more.”

Hegarty Lovett and Lovett currently run the Atelier themselves, but longterm they’d like to get somebody else in to run it.

They have two new Gare St Lazare productions in development. “One is another collaboration with Will Ono, which we’re developing with the Gate Theatre in Dublin,” says Hegarty Lovett. “The other is a new version of a Marcel Mihalovici chamber opera based on Beckett’s one-man play, Krapp’s Last Tape. We hope to launch that in Ireland next year, and then tour it internationally.”

Their family is equally busy. “All three live in Paris,” says Lovett. “Louis is a filmmaker, Ruby works at Art for Human Rights, and Lux is studying interior design, though she also acts. She worked with us on Shades Through a Shade at the Samuel Beckett Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival last year.”

Looking back, they’re sometimes surprised at just how rich their journey has been. Hegarty Lovett says: “In those early years in Méricourt, we created the body of work we’re still bringing out around the world today, It has sustained us hugely.”

SAMUEL BECKETT 1906-1989

Samuel Beckett was born and reared in Dublin, but settled in Paris in 1937. For all that he found Ireland too conservative a place to live in, he still took a certain pride in his background.

Once, when asked if he was English, he replied: “Au contraire.” Beckett published a short story collection, More Pricks Than Kicks, in 1934, and went on to produce a series of novels that included Murphy (1938), Watt (1934), Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1958). However, he is better-known for his plays, including Waiting for Godot (1953), Endgame (1957), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Happy Days (1961).

Beckett is associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. His works for the stage are renowned for their bleak sense of humour. In Waiting for Godot, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, pass the time in idle banter. When Estragon embarks on an eloquent description of the Dead Sea, Vladimir remarks: “You should have been a poet.” Estragon gestures at his rags and replies “I was. Isn’t that obvious?” Beckett did not enjoy the limelight. When he won the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, his wife Suzanne Dechevaux- Dumesnil called it “a catastrophe,” knowing the prize money might bring them financial stability, but it would be at the cost of their privacy.

Suzanne died in July 1989 and Beckett in December.

They are buried in Montparnasse, under a headstone that Beckett insisted could be “any colour, as long as it’s grey.”

 

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