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
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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