The End/The Calmative

Project Arts Centre, Dublin Apr 12-17 8pm €18/€15 01-8819613

Samuel Beckett once decided on an equation when it came to the division of his writing: prose into performance would not go. The writer's inflexibility followed Mabou Mines's heavily embellished version of his novel The Lost Ones. "Permission was granted for a straight reading," he wrote. "This is a very crooked straight reading to me." For a long time after, any transposition from one medium to another was carefully policed by the prickly Beckett Estate.

No small feat, then, that with The Calmative,performed as a double-bill with The End, Gare St Lazare Players are presenting their 10th Beckett prose work on stage. One of the reasons that performer Conor Lovett and director Judy Hegarty Lovett have proven so successful at doing things by the book is that their delivery is neither distractingly crooked nor aridly straight. Instead, Lovett capitalises on the ambiguous first-person narration, remaining utterly faithful to the words but parsing them with a thoughtful, extemporary freshness while rendering their nameless protagonists as fascinatingly vivid characters.

The staging is invariably minimal, but there is something incantatory about Lovett’s focus. And, with dates in the company’s astonishing touring schedule set for Istanbul, South Africa, Australia, the UK and the US, few have found a more direct passage from the page to the world’s stage.

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No EscapeThe Peacock, Dublin