Gare St Lazare: Cork theatre company bring Beckett opera to Kilkenny
Conor Lovett in rehearsals for The Last Tape. Picture: Ewa Figaszewska
It is 30 years since Judy Hegarty Lovett and Conor Lovett launched their theatre company Gare St Lazare Ireland with a production of Samuel Beckett’s at the Battersea Arts Centre in London.
Since then, the couple have toured the world many times over with their innovative takes on Beckett’s oeuvre, with Hegarty Lovett directing and Lovett playing any number of the Irish writer’s unforgettable characters.
This year, they have focused on two ground-breaking productions, the world premiere of their five-hour adaptation of Beckett’s novel in Venice in June, and an updating of his opera collaboration with the Romanian-born French composer Marcel Mihalovici, which will have its premiere at Kilkenny Arts Festival on August 14.
is based on , Beckett’s one-act play from 1958, in which an old man plays back recordings he made of himself speaking 30 years before. Within a year of its first performance, Beckett began collaborating with Mihalovici on a chamber opera adaptation that was broadcast on the French language RTF radio in May 1961, and performed on stage in Paris a few months later.
Mihalovici’s opera featured an orchestra of 35 performers, which Hegarty Lovett and Lovett have downsized for their production. “The Arts Council gave us funding to commission Andrew Synott to rework the score,” says Hegarty Lovett. “He’s reduced it to two grand pianos and two percussionists. He did an incredible job.”
The new production will also feature the British tenor Mark Padmore and the conductor Elaine Kelly, from Cork. “We're putting the opera and the play up alongside one another,” says Lovett. “Elaine and the musicians are on stage with us. I play the older Krapp, and Mark plays him as a younger man. I'm sticking to Beckett’s original text for the play, and Mark is sticking to his libretto for the opera. It's like a hybrid, I suppose. You hear almost the same thing, but it’s slightly different from time to time.”
Hegarty Lovett has worked with the Dublin artist Jessie Presley Jones on the set design. “Productions of often feature an attic room with a table,” says Hegarty Lovett. “But we’ve gone with a more creative response to Beckett’s description of the setting as a ‘den.’ Jessie has done an incredible job on the design. She's very inventive and imaginative, and a real team player.”
has a running time of about 75 minutes, without an interval, and is not without its challenges, but is at least five times as long, with a text that runs to about 30,000 words of unpunctuated text. Hegarty Lovett and Lovett first produced their adaptation in three parts over three years from 2018, on a residency at the Everyman Theatre in Cork, before filming the entire production as a six-and-a-half hour film for Dublin Theatre Festival in 2021. Lovett’s co-star was Stephen Dillane, who played Stannis Baratheon in
“Since then, for the past five years,” says Hegarty Lovett, “Conor and Stephen have met online every Saturday to run the lines. They’ve had to do that, because if you drop them, they're gone. Having put all the work in, it was a real treat for us to get to the point where we could present the whole production live.”
That opportunity finally arrived when they were invited to perform at the Palazzo Diedo in the Cannaregio district in Venice. “The Palazzo Diedo is a three-storey modern art gallery in a 200-year-old building,” says Lovett.
“It’s a fantastic space, with a very modern programme. We were in discussion with these guys about mounting the piece for the past two years. We really looked at it as a live art event rather than a theatrical performance. And it couldn’t have gone better, to be honest.”
The production team included the composer Mel Mercier, lighting designer Simon Bennison, and Michael Craig-Martin, who collaborated on the set design. Getting Craig-Martin on board was quite the coup; the Irish-born artist has exhibited worldwide and is often credited as a mentor to the Young Brit Artists, such as Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume, whom he taught at Goldsmiths College in London.
“We first made contact with Michael about 20 years ago, with a view to doing a project together,” says Hegarty Lovett. “That didn’t transpire, but as it happens, he’s now got a studio in Venice, and he knows the folks at the Palazzo Diedo, so we got in touch again. He’s a lovely man, and a brilliant artist. When he saw the space where we were going to perform the piece, he just said, 'I see magenta, I'm going to cover the floors in magenta'. And that's what he did.”
Gare St Lazare presented 10 performances of over a two-week period from June 7. “It was brilliant to perform it in that kind of setting,” says Lovett, “and we feel it could go on to play at other galleries. We're in discussions with one space in Naples, and possibly another in Greece.”
Hegarty Lovett and Lovett hope to bring to the REDCAT arts centre in Los Angeles in January 2027. Beyond that, they are also preparing a new production of Beckett’s that will feature the star Gary Oldham. “He’s totally committed,” says Lovett. “We can’t say much more about it than that, but obviously it’s a very exciting prospect.”
As if these projects were not ambitious enough, the couple are also working on expanding the Atelier Beckett artists’ residency programme they founded in 2023, when they renovated a property next door to their home in the village of Méricourt, northwest of Paris.
“We’ve recently acquired a second property, and we’re just putting the finishing touches to that,” says Hegarty Lovett. “We’ve got a Mexican artist named Claudio Valdés Kuri staying this month. He’s the inaugural recipient of an award for Latinx artists to stay at Atelier Beckett, sponsored by Olga Garay-English and her late husband Kerry English, a couple we met while touring in the US. We’ll always be hoping that more of our Irish supporters will fund a residency as well.”
- Gare St Lazare Ireland present at the Watergate Theatre for Kilkenny Arts Festival at 2pm and 8pm, August 14 and 15. See kilkennyarts.ie
