How It Is
Internationally renowned Beckett specialists, Gare St Lazare Ireland make a welcome return to the festival with the world premiere of all three parts of Beckett’s towering novel, How It Is reimagined for film. How It Is charts a journey undertaken by turns alone and accompanied. Time and space are fragmented and juxtaposed in one of the most eloquent and exquisite texts in the Beckett canon, continuing the company’s critically acclaimed exploration and illumination of Beckett’s prose texts, How It Is seeks out new ways for audiences to experience Beckett’s prose by jumping genres—the novel to the stage and now the stage to screen. This durational piece of six hours is a first-time opportunity for an audience to experience the work in one sitting.
Internationally renowned Beckett specialists, Gare St Lazare Ireland make a welcome return to the festival with the world premiere of all three parts of Beckett’s towering novel, How It Is reimagined for film.
How It Is charts a journey undertaken by turns alone and accompanied. Time and space are fragmented and juxtaposed in one of the most eloquent and exquisite texts in the Beckett canon, continuing the company’s critically acclaimed exploration and illumination of Beckett’s prose texts, How It Is seeks out new ways for audiences to experience Beckett’s prose by jumping genres—the novel to the stage and now the stage to screen. This durational piece of six hours is a first-time opportunity for an audience to experience the work in one sitting.
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VENUE INFO & DATES
ONLINE ONLY
1 OCT: 3.30PM
2&3 OCT: 5PM
4-7 OCT: ON DEMAND
Duration: 6hrs 20 mins approx. no interval
Duration: 2 hrs. approx., with interval.
DIRECTORS NOTE
And so we go on. Six years in the making, at last we have all three parts of this
majestic novel as a single event, from the page to the stage and now to the screen.
We have embraced new forms and media exploring them just as the novel does with the
written word. Working with an assembled team of over 40 artists: some with us since
2015, others new, some at home in theatre, others in film, and it has been a joy. For
me the crossing of disciplines and the crossing of genres in this ambitious film
reflects the innovation and power of the unparalleled source work that is the novel,
How It Is by Samuel Beckett. This spirit of creative innovation is central to the
actors’ mastery of this unique text.
Judy Hegarty Lovett, September 2021
COMPANY INFO
GARE ST LAZARE IRELAND
For 25 years the Irish theatre company Gare St Lazare Ireland have staged Samuel Beckett’s
novels, short stories and unclassifiable later prose texts and, in the process, has made - and
continues to make- a significant addition to Beckett’s performance legacy. Through its fresh
and accessible productions the company offer audiences a ‘way in’ to Beckett’s work. Their
repertory of Beckett productions now consists of 19 Beckett titles.
As early as 2001 Fintan O’Toole, writing in The Irish Times about the company’s production
of The Beckett Trilogy, said that by making the work ‘at once completely clear and utterly
strange” the company “finds a way to by completely faithful Beckett". The hallmark of the
company’s work is collaboration. Founding artistic directors Judy Hegarty Lovett and Conor
Lovett have built a repertory that now includes 19 Beckett titles as well as an adaptation of
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and new plays by Michael Harding and Will Eno. In 2022 they will
produce Will Eno’s ‘The Realistic Joneses’ which ran on Broadway in 2014.
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