Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars Watching Samuel Beckett is a bit like listening to Country and Western music. The older you get, it seems, the more you understand where they're coming from. This is likely to have been the case for many who saw all five productions of the Edinburgh International Festival's season of Beckett's non-stage works. This final piece, produced by Dublin's Gate Theatre, finds actor Peter Egan transforming Beckett's brief and at times brutal novella into an extended solo routine to die for. It begins beside a grave and ends with a baby's cry, as Egan's lone figure regales the audience with a life and death yarn that begins with him telling how he associates his brief 'marriage' to a woman he meets on a bench with his father's death. Used to keeping both himself and others at an emotional distance, the affection he feels for the woman he first calls Lulu and later Anna catches him by surprise. Even as he moves into the room next to hers, however, he can feel the love he has let into his life dissipating after just one night of passion, and once a child is born, he can stand it no longer, and flees. Egan relates all this in Toby Frow's production with a gloriously unsentimental gallows humour which, as he relives every moment of his and Lulu/Anna's liaison, turns out to be a form of self-protection. As assorted doors and windows are discreetly projected behind him, he remembers the song she sang, but not the words, however much it haunts him still in a life spent trying to purge something that will never go away in this bitter-sweet hymn of regret. The Herald August 29th 2013 ends
Intro – Snapshots – Deaf School
1
In 1980, the same year as the Manchester band, Magazine, released a 7
inch single called A Song From Under The Floorboards – a three verse
and chorus distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes From Underground
– an art school scandal occurred.
This scandal took place in Liverpool, and was based around a project
called the Furbelows, although it became better known in the Liverpool
Echo and other organs that reported it as the Woolly Nudes.
The Furbelows, or Woolly Nudes, were a group of artists who had come
out of Liverpool College of Art, who, dressed in grotesque woolly
costumes which featured knitted approximations of male and female
genitalia, made assorted public interventions around the city centre as
kind of living sculptures acting out assorted narratives.
The Furbelows project had been funded by what was then Merseyside Arts
Association, and, after the participants were arrested and taken to
court on obscenity charges after what…
1
In 1980, the same year as the Manchester band, Magazine, released a 7
inch single called A Song From Under The Floorboards – a three verse
and chorus distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes From Underground
– an art school scandal occurred.
This scandal took place in Liverpool, and was based around a project
called the Furbelows, although it became better known in the Liverpool
Echo and other organs that reported it as the Woolly Nudes.
The Furbelows, or Woolly Nudes, were a group of artists who had come
out of Liverpool College of Art, who, dressed in grotesque woolly
costumes which featured knitted approximations of male and female
genitalia, made assorted public interventions around the city centre as
kind of living sculptures acting out assorted narratives.
The Furbelows project had been funded by what was then Merseyside Arts
Association, and, after the participants were arrested and taken to
court on obscenity charges after what…
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