Writer: Samuel Beckett
Director: Judy Hegarty Lovett
In 2018, Gare Saint Lazare Ireland (GSLI) brought a production of Part One of Samuel Beckett’s How It Is to the Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill. Part Two was supposed to open in April 2020, but now, finally, opens this week. Was it worth the wait?
Judy Hegarty Lovett directed Part One with the audience on the stage and the three actors, Conor Lovett, Stephen Dillane, and Mel Mercier, wandering the various levels of the auditorium, springing up in surprising places, delivering Beckett’s tale of a life lived crawling in mud against the decaying plaster and peeling paint of the once-fancy cinema, now a 200 seat theatre. The effect was mesmerising. Now the same company is performing the second part, but only Conor Lovett and Stephen Dillane are acting. Mel Mercier leads the Irish Gamelan Orchestra, set up on stage, shiny brass gongs and rich Afghan carpets prominent, nine musicians coming and going. Lovett and Dillane still pace through the auditorium but now the audience has to crane backwards to watch, and when they come on stage they thread their way through the instruments.
Two hours and forty minutes of dense Samuel Beckett prose is not everyone’s idea of a good night out, but the wit and ease with which the actors navigate the piece is a joy to watch, and the intelligence of the company makes fairly obscure, strikingly repetitive passages of text clear and comprehensible. Both actors are also very adept at finding the funny, which makes the evening’s entertainment a lot less forbidding.
It is a story about torture, about being compelled to speak and to create, Beckett’s principal themes. It isn’t easy. Stephen Dillane embodies this with a series of extraordinary twisted poses, held for an agonisingly long time, while still talking in a well-modulated, somewhat actorly manner. Conor Lovett’s voice is reedier, and they play the contrasting tones brilliantly, giving the audience’s ears a rest every half hour or so. The speech and the movement through the auditorium are as dynamic in Part Two as they were in Part One. The difference is the director’s decision to make a cluttered stage full of exotic instruments the visual focus, and to compel her splendid cast to act behind the audience’s heads a lot of the time. The comings and goings of the musicians is distracting, at one point they drown out Conor Lovett’s words with music, the impetus of the story-telling is broken, and there doesn’t seem to be a reason for it, apart from diversifying the performance. Stephen Dillane also stops the story to boil a kettle and make a hot drink, and that too is hard to explain. Possibly Judy Hegarty Lovett thinks breaking up the torrent of words helps concentration. It doesn’t.
It is an extraordinary text, performed with jaw-dropping skill by Conor Lovett and Stephen Dillane. It is beautifully accommodated in the decaying splendour of the Coronet. It is a brave, unique, wonderful production. It doesn’t need gimmicks. Or gamelan.
Runs until 7 May 2022
The Reviews Hub Score
Comic, coherent, compelling
