Samuel Beckett’s Rough For Theatre I and Act Without Words II
Installation for Beckett in the City
Photo by Hazel Coonagh.
A and B asleep in their sleeping bags are goaded into their respective lives by an unseen force, although they never meet they carry each other through life. On a street corner a blind beggar and a wheelchair user pass the time pondering their existence, a tragic-comedy of razor sharp wit from one of the world’s funniest writers.
“Bringing Beckett out of the theatre and into your soul, Company SJ and Barabbas will change your Dublin street-view forever”
— Roise Goan
The Virgin Mary statue.
Think that Samuel Beckett wrote for an intellectual elite removed from your life? Think again. Every day, everywhere you look as you walk through the city of Dublin you encounter the characters and situations from his dramas. A and B asleep in their sleeping bags are goaded into their respective lives by an unseen force, although they never meet they carry each other through life. On a street corner a blind beggar and a wheelchair user pass the time pondering their existence, a tragic-comedy of razor sharp wit from one of the world’s funniest writers.
Directed and Designed
by Sarah Jane Scaife
Rough for Theatre I
A — Trevor Knight
B — Raymond Keane
Act Without Words II
A — Raymond Keane
B — Bryan Burroughs
Credits
Lighting Design
Lianne O’Shea
(original design for Act Without Words II, courtesy of Aedin Cosgrove)
Costume
Steven Quinn and
Liadain Kaminska
Publicity
Rachael Moore
Graphic Design
Mel Keane
Produced by Company SJ
and Barabbas
Supported by Dublin City Council, Culture Ireland and The Irish Theatre Institute
Company SJ at
the Barbican Centre
in London.
Photo by Hazel Coonagh.
“You cannot but be astounded by the physical theatre here…”
— The Irish Examiner, October 2010
Dublin City Quay car park.
“…reminds us how important Samuel Beckett’s theatre is for our understanding of contemporary times”
— The Beckett Circle, Autumn 2012
The installation of the production of Act Without Words II took place in St John’s Lane, by Christ Church Cathedral (Fringe-2009), subsequently the same design was re-placed, or re-situated, in Tangiers Lane (2010), in Watford Palace Theatre stage door lane and Greenwich’s St Alfrege’s Park (2011), Theatre Alley, NYC, and Mallow Street Arch, Limerick (2012), and the underpass, Enniskillen. In 2013 it was part of the project Beckett in the City with Rough For Theatre I as an installation in City Quay car park (2013). This installation subsequently toured to Tokyo in 2014 and will be seen in the Barbican’s Beckett Festival, London, June 2015. In each presentation of these pieces, they interact afresh with the architecture and social spaces wherein they are placed.
“The performances are wickedly excellent and Sarah Jane Scaife directs with divine detail. Where once the pauses in Beckett's work struck silence in an auditorium, here they are filled with the hums and cries of the city”
— Musings Intermissions Blog