Read the latest update from our Community Company in Residence Encore Productions
With the Christmas tree gone from the square and the transformation into what looks to be a stunning St Brigid’s event the New Year is truly underway. Never ones to wait around, Encore Productions are now back on the stage and in the rehearsal room – script in hand – getting their bearings in the world of The Beckett List.
The personnel remain unchanged from the previous production, but the tense moral drama of The Visit has been replaced by something more elliptical and dreamlike – requiring a different style of acting and a very fluid approach from the cast. Over the course of what will ultimately become a 70 minute multi media show the cast hope to create a diverse range of spaces – real and imagined – from the life and works of Samuel Beckett. Dublin’s cobbled streets and Wicklow hills will give way to Paris and the French Countryside via the bleak abandoned spaces of Beckett’s dramatic imagination.
When the audience finally sits down to see the show, what they will witness will be end result of editing and experimentation. In creating a piece like this pages of the original script can disappear to be replaced by a piece of music, a lighting change, a tiny gesture from an actor. New scenes emerge in the rehearsal space as actors find the energy hidden in a tiny stage direction. This is why the room is called –‘ The Workshop Room’. A place where mistakes are made and dead ends encountered. A place of surprises and collective imagining.
This weekend the group will make the trip to The Project Arts Centre in Dublin to see a production of Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape. In this uncompromising one man show, Krapp – an aging man with failing memories revisits the tape recordings he has made documenting the years of his life. Hope fully the performance by Stephen Rea in the single role and the production, light and sound design will be an inspiration as we begin our own journey to the stage.
Meanwhile the Wednesday group are making their own plans – writing poems and creating art inspired by Beckett’s Artistic contemporaries -Picasso, Mondrian, Giacometti and Magritte. These will dovetail into a series of arts workshops with award winning artist Orlaith Cullinane and song writing sessions with Sophie Coyle – all to be showcased at an exhibition and evening event in September.
We’ll keep you up to date!
Sandy Sneddon
Encore Productions.