Happy Days on bleak sets and Beckett gets schooled

Samuel Beckett’s granite face looms over the counter at Sweeney’s butcher shop. In The Jolly Sandwich cafe there are a variety of Beckettian treats on offer: The Endgame Sandwich (Hamm and Clov, of course) or Krapp’s Last Meal (banana and Nutella).

These are just some of the gestures that local businesses in Enniskillen have made to the famously austere writer, whose life and work have become a major boon to the local economy since the foundation of the Happy Days International Festival in the town four years ago.

Beckett was a pupil at the nearby Portora Royal School, where he distinguished himself as a sportsman – if not as a student – between 1920 and 1923. Despite several invitations when he became well known, he never returned, either to the school or to Fermanagh.

He never made reference to his alma mater as a shaping influence in his life or work either. Until the inauguration of the festival in 2011, Beckett had made little impact on the cultural landscape of Enniskillen. Now, however, his famously riven face lurks around every corner of the higgledy piggledy town.

Even festival founder Sean Doran admits that the link might seem a "somewhat tenuous" one. Indeed, Doran himself confesses he "didn't know that Beckett had a connection with Enniskillen" when he originally came up with the concept for a festival celebrating Beckett's work.

“Of course, Dublin or Paris,” he says, “would have been the obvious choices for a location [for the festival], but capital cities aren’t as interesting to me, because the provision for culture is already there.

“I thought the idea of doing something of a world-class nature in an unexpected place – a town where there is actually only one theatre – would have the potential to have a much greater artistic impact.”

Having worked in Australia for several years, where the geographical expanse of the country makes cultural coherence difficult, the Derryman saw the potential of using Enniskillen as a base for creating a “destination festival”, where people would come for “cultural pilgrimage”. It would be important in the broader cultural sense of post-conflict Northern Ireland too.

Doran is not shy about likening his ambition for Happy Days to that of the Edinburgh International Festival, which was founded after the second World War to foster a mood of optimism in the war-shattered cultural landscape.

So far his gamble has paid off: 70 per cent of audiences for Happy Days are visitors to the region, with more than 40 per cent coming from south of the border; for many, it is their first visit to Northern Ireland.

Theatrical ghosts Doran’s programming, meanwhile, ensures they get to see as much of Enniskillen and its surrounds as possible. Because there is a limited arts infrastructure in the town, Doran has commissioned and curated work in unusual locations of stunning natural beauty. This year, the Augustinian ruins of Devenish Island have provided a home for Beckett’s theatrical ghosts, as Frankie McCafferty and Vincent Higgins play watery reflections of each other in a production of Ohio Impromptu directed by Adrian Dunbar, while festival artists take the boat across to the island with audiences every morning for a Beckett reading.

At Castle Caldwell, at the western end of Lower Lough Erne, meanwhile, an abandoned farmstead nestled in a thicket of trees serves as a fitting venue for a performance of Beckett’s final prose piece Stirrings Still, by Ian McElhinney in a production conceived by Netia Jones. The image of a man meeting himself as he departs this world lingers long after the coach journey back to town has ended.

A cynic might suggest that it all feels a little like a live advertisement for the Northern Ireland Tourist Board – and the tourist board is a chief funder of the festival – but the environmental landscapes greatly enhance the desolate emotional atmosphere of Beckett’s work, even if they occasionally scupper logistical plans.

A cynic might also question whether the work of one writer can sustain an annual festival, particularly a writer as challenging as Beckett can be. However, Doran is unfazed by the constraints. “I see the festival as a ‘bio-festival’,” he says, “and the idea is to take a single creative source – Beckett’s work, his life – and extrapolate the programme from it.”

So there is the staging of Beckett’s short plays and full-length dramas, like Waiting for Godot, which celebrates the 60th anniversary of its premiere this year and is being presented at the closing weekend of the festival by the Berliner Ensemble.

Formidable crank Then there are theatrical transpositions from Beckett’s prose, radio or television plays. Last weekend Beckett’s radio play All that Fall was brought to chilling life in the darkness of the auditorium of St Michael’s Boys School, with Rosaleen Linehan as the formidable crank Maddy Rooney, while his televisual experiment Eh, Joe got the postmodernist treatment on the four split screens of Eric Prince’s hypnotic production. Then there are lectures about the writer; readings from writers who might share similar interests; as well as productions that are obviously or implicitly inspired by him.

In fact it was precisely because of the potential for such spin-offs that Doran thought Beckett’s work would translate so effectively into the festival model.

“His work integrates so many other art forms: classical music, movement, technology. That is why he has been so influential, and why the work lends itself so well to a multi-arts festival, rather than just, say, a theatre one.

“Put it this way, I wouldn’t be afraid of running out of work to programme,” Doran says with confidence. “The audience mightn’t see the connection, but that doesn’t bother me. I just want them to enjoy the show.”

Mesmeric Indeed, the headlining show at this year’s festival, Maguy Marin’s extraordinary non-narrative dance piece May B, is arguably better appreciated without giving thought to the writings that inspired it.

In a controlled language of gestures and grunts, the shuffling reconfiguration of the company of dancers evokes the same sort of emotional rectitude as Beckett’s work. The choreography is parsed and spare and absolutely mesmeric: it is a pity, then, that the literal inspiration intrudes in the shape of Pozzo and Lucky from Waiting for Godot and Hamm and Clov from Endgame.

This year, meanwhile, the closing of the Happy Days festival is not an endgame for Doran, who will travel northwards as soon as the festival closes to start work on his next project, the Lughnasa International Friel Festival, which opens in Donegal before moving to Belfast. Although Doran "never set out to do a cross-Border festival, Brian was born in Omagh, lives in Donegal, and the whole idea of borders is critical to his work, so that's reflected in the dual location". It also creates two more "destination festivals" that can only help to invigorate the cultural calendar in Northern Ireland.

The Lughnasa festival starts on August 20th and the programme is not yet finalised, but Doran is unflustered. “You have got to say you’ll do it, because then it is on the record, you have to do it, it will work out fine.” As if to prove his point, he reveals that he will launch another Beckett Festival in Paris next March. Yes, that is March 2016. He has said it now. He has conjured it into being.

The Happy Days International Festival runs until August 3

The Lughnasa International Friel Festival runs from August 20-31