12-year Beckett Biennale launches cross-border theatre project
A new 12-year theatre festival spanning Britain and Ireland aims to reclaim Samuel Beckett as a European writer, reflecting his homeland's shifting cultural identity.
The Samuel Beckett Biennale has launched, promising a 12-year series of experimental "performed readings" across Britain and Ireland. Organised by Seán Doran through his cross-border group Arts Over Borders, the project will unfold at locations of significance to the playwright, from Enniskillen and Belfast to Reading and Folkestone.
The most ambitious commissions involve long-term planning. In 2036, actor Samuel West will perform Krapp’s Last Tape at the exact age of the protagonist, 69, playing a tape recorded in 2006 when he was 39. Two years later, Richard Dormer will do the same using a similar recording currently held in a BBC vault.
The cross-border scope addresses a historical ambiguity surrounding the playwright. Beckett emigrated to Paris in 1927, wrote his masterpieces in French, and spent the last 21 years of his life avoiding Ireland. As the country's theocracy receded and it integrated into the European project, the nation's relationship with its most famous modernist exile shifted. "It really felt as though it was a national conversation, and a national reclamation of one of our greatest writers," recalls Anne Clarke, a producer at Irish theatre company Landmark Productions.
Navigating the strict oversight of the Beckett estate, managed by the author's nephew Edward, Doran uses the "performed readings" format to allow for experimentation. Early events have included an Ulster-Scots translation of Waiting for Godot in Derry, and a staging of Krapp's Last Tape in Greystones where Malcolm Sinclair performed opposite an AI-generated recreation of his younger voice. "That doesn’t restrict the possibilities of doing it differently," Doran says.
The programme will increasingly emphasise Beckett's continental identity. The 2028 edition will feature a Waiting for Godot directed by Portuguese filmmaker Marco Martins, casting four homeless actors matching the characters' nationalities: French, Slavic, Italian and English. Other upcoming highlights include Rufus Norris directing soprano Claire Booth in Not I at Reading University in September.
