US writer pens first ‘Irish’ play
Highly-regarded American playwright Will Eno has written a play for the Gare St Lazare Players Ireland. The American has been described by the theatre critic for the New York Times as “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.” Eno won a Fringe First award at the Edinburgh Fringe and has been short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize.
Last January, after watching Conor Lovett perform Beckett’s The End in New York, Eno approached the actor and his wife and director, Judy Hegarty Lovett, to tell them he wanted to write a play for their theatre company. It was a big commendation.
“It’s kind of daunting,” says Lovett. “It’s quite an honour. He’s a big playwright. He’s on the up-and-up there for sure. He’s well-known in most of the big theatres. In many respects, he could have gone to anyone and said, ‘I’ve a new play’ and they’d have all been looking to do it. He came to us and said, ‘Actually, I’d like to write one for you.’ He knows our work very well, and he knows how Judy and I operate and he knows what we’re interested in. He’s written something that’s right up our street.”
The Gare St Lazare Players Ireland are renowned for adaptations of Beckett’s prose work. Their repertory includes nine of his prose pieces, most memorably the Beckett Trilogy: Molloy; Malone Dies; and The Unnamable.
Over the years, they have put on a production of Conor McPherson’s The Good Thief; Hegarty Lovett has directed Michael Harding in a performance of Swallow, a play he wrote himself; and recently, the company staged an adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Eno’s play Title and Deed will take them down another welcome byroad. It will premiere at the Kilkenny Arts Festival.
“It takes where we’ve been headed with our work,” says Lovett. “In each case, we’ve been developing the way we’re addressing the audience. It’s really happening in that moment. Beckett lent himself to this because he wrote in a way that was almost like a voice being taken down, almost like dictation. The way he wrote on the page is exactly the way a voice speaks. It hesitates and it corrects itself. It makes mistakes. He left all that stuff in. Will has written something which — no question — is written specifically for the audience sitting out front in that moment.”
Lovett is reluctant to say much about the specifics of Title & Deed. It is set in an indeterminate place. A man arrives in a country. He’s there only a few weeks. He wrestles with ideas of home and place and exile, making comparisons of his new land with his homeland. “It’s about trying to find your place in the world,” says Lovett, before adding that his character is “really good company, very funny and very alert,” hallmarks of many of the characters from Beckett’s gallery.
Lovett started reading Beckett at 18 years of age, around the time he performed as Hamm in Endgame. He finds Beckett’s writings endlessly stimulating. “Beckett is one of the freshest writers going,” he says. “He’s way ahead of his time. I think people haven’t caught up with him. With his prose works in particular, you look around and think, ‘Gosh, all the writing that’s out there’ but you read Beckett and notice that he’s gone beyond that. He really has opened a whole door.
“We don’t ever find that his writing has dated. There’s nothing old-fashioned about it. I think the amount of touring we’ve done with Beckett, the demand for our Beckett work, has shown the same thing. In fairness, people have not been exposed to a lot of Beckett. I think it’s changing now and I think his publisher would say the same.”
One wonders if, after all these years ransacking the Beckett canon, Lovett can still return to the body of work to discover new angles, with the same drive. “Totally,” he says in a slow, inimical Cork drawl. “Would you be a Bob Dylan fan? I’d often make the connection that the work is just timeless and it’s so rich. Each time you listen to a Bob Dylan song — not every one — you hear something you didn’t hear before or you’d forgotten. Depending on where you’re at, at a given moment, in your own life, you get that reflected back from Dylan and Beckett.”
Gare St Lazare Players Ireland will bring Title and Deed to New York next spring. Life on the road is a feature of the Paris-based company. They spent six months of 2010 touring nine different countries.
It is a nice cultural exchange. Hegarty Lovett says that it is also a significant feather in Eno’s cap to showcase work for the first time in Ireland.
“It is huge for an American writer to premiere work in Ireland because most Americans — and particularly writers — are profoundly conscious of our literary heritage,” she says.
“The gods in literature are Joyce and Beckett. So for a US writer to have an opportunity to bring work to Ireland, possibly to the Abbey, in this instance it’s to bring it to the Kilkenny Arts Festival — where our company has premiered shows over six years — is a big deal. Where that kind of fusion is happening is brilliant. Irish sensibilities, Irish style of working, a company that’s very rooted in Ireland, is now going to the United States, finding a US writer and bringing his play back to Ireland. I think that’s kind of magical,” he says.
Title and Deed is at Barnstorm Theatre, Kilkenny, Wednesday, August 10 — Sunday, August 14; there will be a post-show discussion with Will Eno, Saturday, August 13.
Colm Tóibín has compiled another impressive roster of writers for this year’s literature strand, including the Americans Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life; David Vann, who returns after a maiden voyage last year; and the PEN/Faulkner award-winner, TC Boyle. The joint Pat McCabe-Dermot Healy session is bound to be entertaining. John Banville — or rather his nom de plume Benjamin Black — will share a stage with literary critic Michael Wood.
Meanwhile, Morgan Kelly, the country’s economics soothsayer, will deliver this year’s Hubert Butler Lecture.
Eileen Walsh, reunited with her old cohorts from Corcadorca, is performing the acclaimed German playwright/author/actor/film director Franz Xaver Kroetz’s play Request Programme. The New York ensemble company Banana Bag & Bodice will doubtless have hundreds of laughs for audiences at their Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage show.
Fearghus Ó Conchúir, one of Ireland’s leading choreographers, has an interesting take on religion in Tabernacle while St Canice’s plays host to possibly the festival’s holiest alliance. On Tuesday, August 9, Donal Lunny will accompany four Donegal divas — Tríona and Maighread Ní Dhomhnaill, Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh and Moya Brennan — for one night only of singing, piano, fiddle and harp.
- Kilkenny Arts Festival (tomorrow to Sunday, August 14). Further information: www.kilkennyarts.ie
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