Event overview
London Beckett Seminar welcomes Dr Sarah Jane Scaife (Company SJ) of Trinity College Dublin to speak on “Beckett sa Chreig: Laethanta Sona / Beckett in the Rock: Happy Days”
During our recent production of Laethanta Sona, on the occasion of the 2022 Galway International Arts Festival, we presented Happy Days as a sculptural installation set in the most remote area of the island of Inis Oírr, using the local landscape and language to generate a site- responsive, immersive performance.
We filmed and recorded everything we encountered, including the sculptural set, the landscape, the rocks, the horizon of sea and sky, and the local Irish language during a series of interviews with the islanders. We worked then on the filmed elements in order to create an installation of landscape, language and forms within a theatre space, with the idea to offer a new encounter with the text. Our staging of Happy Days in Irish was naturally concerned with several challenges regarding the translation, performance and set design of Beckett’s dramatic work, having also to face the difficulties caused by the pandemic of Covid-19.
There is a very important distinction between our event in Inis Oírr, which was set in a landscape of Beckettian lunar nature, and our staging in traditional theatre spaces. The stage design of the former was sculpted by men who are experts in shaping rocks and turning them into building material, as they did in the remote fields of Inis Oírr. The latter was conceived as an attempt to recreate imaginatively the West of Ireland, basing on the documents which we gathered and on the technologies at our disposal. The former was in Irish with no translation, the second could be compared to an opera with English surtitles, for those who require them, placed high above the stage.
Dr Sarah Jane Scaife, Artistic Director of Company SJ, researches and directs the work of Samuel Beckett both nationally and internationally. She has conducted two main research projects: “Beckett in Asia” (2002-06) and “Beckett in the City” (2009-16) which set out to place side-by-side the socio-historic wounds of Ireland’s past with the current social tensions within the city itself, using the writing of Samuel Beckett in interaction with the social and architectural spaces of Dublin. In 2018 she presented Samuel Beckett’s prose piece, Company, for the Dublin Theatre Festival. She is also Assistant Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 19 Nov 2021 | 6:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
