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
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.