The first time producer
and director Michael Colgan brought I'll Go On to Edinburgh, he and
actor Barry McGovern were chased by police. That was in 1986, when
McGovern was performing his solo stage adaptation of Beckett's
trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, at the
Assembly Rooms as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Colgan and
McGovern had been out with a bucket of paste putting up posters for
the production by the Gate Theatre, Dublin, which Colgan had been
artistic director of for three years, when the local constabulary
intervened.
Twenty-seven years on,
Colgan is still at the Gate, and the pair are returning to Edinburgh
with McGovern revisiting I'll Go On for a season of Beckett works as
part of Edinburgh International Festival. Rather than opt for the
familiar terrain of Beckett's great stage works such as Waiting For
Godot, Endgame and Happy days, however, Colgan and EIF have opted to
present stagings of work originally penned for radio and TV, as well
as other prose works alongside I'll Go On.
The Gate will present
three pieces, while the Pan Pan company will present two. The season
kicks off with Eh Joe, a half-hour miniature first seen on TV in
1966. This production will be directed by Atom Egoyan and performed
by Michael Gambon alongside the disembodied voice of Penelope Wilton.
Following I'll Go On, Colgan will direct First Love, a novella penned
by Becket in 1946. Pan Pan will present two radio plays, Embers,
first broadcast in 1959, and All That Fall, first heard in 1956.
As well the five show,
there will be a marathon screening of the nineteen films of Beckett's
entire dramatic canon, co-produced by Colgan at the turn of the
century. These include Waiting For Godot with McGovern in the cast,
Catastrophe, David Mamet directing Harold Pinter, Rebecca Pidgeon and
John Gielgud in Catastrophe, and Breath, directed by Damien Hirst.
This followed on from the gate's Beckett Festival in 1991, when
Colgan staged all nineteen works. These were restaged in New York in
1996, and in London three years later.
“There's a little bit
when you're doing something for a long time, that you don't want to
get bored with yourself,” says Colgan of his choices for the
Edinburgh Beckett season. “The Gate doing Beckett has become a
brand in a way, but at the same time it could be both a brand and a
yawn if you're not careful. We've produced more Beckett than any
other theatre, but you try and mix it up a bit. I admire Pan Pan a
lot. They're very different to the Gate, but what you try and do is
try and get some kind of homogeneity to a season to give it cohesion.
I had seen Pan Pan do All That Fall, and then the idea came of the
gate doing plays by Sam that weren't written for the theatre. You
become more of a missionary when it comes to Beckett. You proselytise
it, and you want everyone to get it.”
This is in stark
contrast with what might be seen as an academic hi-jack of Beckett,
which, despite clear vaudeville influences in the work, gives it a
rarefied image which can make some audiences afraid of it.
“Academe still holds
onto Beckett,” says Colgan, “and I think they did damage to it.
They set up this bleak little philosophical world, and of course
that's there, but they're missing the humour, and I think we were the
first to look at that. The reason Beckett is so good, is that he's
able to survive scrutiny and interpretation.”
Colgan's conversation
is peppered with anecdotes involving Ralph Fiennes reciting First
Love down the phone to him while walking through New York, or of
joshing with David Mamet and Harold Pinter that they maybe didn't
know the text of Catastrophe well enough. Best of all are the yarns
about the man Colgan calls Sam, and how his whole journey with
Beckett's work began.
“I was terrified when
I got the job at the Gate,” and wrote to Barry and asked if he'd do
Beginning To End, which was this brilliant thing that Jack MacGowran
did with bits of Godot and all the other plays in. Barry and I had
seen it when we were students, and I wrote to Sam to ask permission.
He wrote back to say Jack's widow had the rights, but then came the
immortal line, 'there remains the possibility of a different play.'”
it took nine months for
I'll Go On to be completed before its Edinburgh debut.
“It's getting easier
to get people to get Beckett now,” Colgan says. “It wasn't then,
but now something like Waiting For Godot is practically a commercial
choice. I suppose I'm on a mission with Beckett, and it's the best
job in the world, because I got to meet Beckett and all these other
people, and that's a joy. Why I do the job I do, it's because of the
company I keep.”
Eh Joe, Royal Lyceum
Theatre, August 23rd, 27th-31st; I'll Go On,
Royal Lyceum Theatre, August 25-26, 28th, 31st;
First Love, Royal Lyceum Theatre, August 28th-31st;
Embers, Kings Theatre, August 24th-25th; All That Fall,
The Hub, August 25th-26th.
The Herald, August 2013
ends
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