Actors Stephen Dillane, Conor Lovett, and award-winning Irish company Gare St Lazare return to The Coronet Theatre with the UK premiere of How It Is (Part Two), the second stand alone part of a three part staging of Beckett’s novel, following the success of Part One in 2018 “… you experience moments of pure wonder, when all sense of time and space disappears and you enter a strange, other world, with Beckett whispering cool truths in your ear.” Time Out on How It Is (Part One).
As with all Gare St Lazare work, this production is directed and designed by Judy Hegarty Lovett, with sound designed by their long time collaborator, composer Mel Mercier, and played by Mercier and the 14 member Irish Gamelan Orchestra.
A Best Director nominee for this production at the upcoming The Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards, Hegarty Lovett knows that with Beckett, you let the words be your guide. “It’s not about what we can do to Beckett; rather it’s about what he brings out in us”.
How It Is (Part Two) is both a continuation of (Part One), and a stand-alone piece in its own right. How It Is (Part One) saw an unnamed narrator in a landscape of mud and darkness with only a sack of tins and a tin opener, as he recounts a journey towards a fellow traveller, Pim, repeating his life as he heard it, uttered by another voice. In (Part Two), he is with Pim, and when a brief honeymoon period ends, violence seems the only way to make sense of their bizarre predicament.
Originally written in 1961 in French, How It Is (Comment c’est) was Beckett’s last full-length prose work. This production offers audiences a new way to encounter a book in which, with a profound compassion and understanding, Beckett explores the essence of human relations.
For over 20 years, joint Gare St Lazare artistic directors Judy Hegarty Lovett and Conor Lovett have explored Samuel Beckett’s work, gaining an enviable reputation worldwide for their distinctive stagings of his prose and novels in productions that are at once accessible and innovative. How It Is (Part Two) continues a 6 year engagement with Beckett’s masterpiece, and (Part Three) will premiere in Ireland later this year. Taking the lead from the novel’s linguistic experiments and breaks with convention, Hegarty Lovett’s design and Simon Bennison’s lighting engages spatially, visually and aurally with The Coronet’s auditorium and the glinting Javanese Gamelan instruments.
Gare St Lazare are delighted to be working with soloists Nick Roth (saxophone), Claudia Schwab (violin) and tenors Robert Murray and Daniel Thomson.
