‘Laethanta Sona’ is Beckett, But Not as You Know it 

Presenting Samuel Beckett's 'Happy Days' in Irish on Inir Oírr displays the universal appeal of his work.

Siothrún Sardina & Anastasia Fedosova

Oct 15, 2021
Source: universitytimes.ie

Laethanta Sona, the Irish-language adaption of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days by Micheál Ó Conghaile, came to Inis Oírr on the Aran Islands at the end of August. Produced by Company SJ and the Abbey Theatre in collaboration with Dublin Theatre Festival and Galway International Arts Festival, it brought a well-known Beckett play out of the theatre to the rocky island of Inis Oírr and the Irish tongue.

The director and Assistant Professor in Trinity Drama Department, Dr Sarah Jane Scaife, has a long and colourful history of inserting Beckett’s plays into new environments. One of her first introductions to Beckett was through his short mime play, Act Without Words II which opened her eyes to the power of physical elements within a text. “There are no words, obviously, so it’s all action”, she explained. “So it really kind of opens up a text physically, or it opens up the idea of the physical within the text.”

It was while working on this project that she got to know Raymond Keane, the actor playing Willie in Laethanta Sona. Several years after Act Without Words II, in 2009, the pair would reunite to create the Beckett in the City project, which brought Beckett’s dramas onto the city streets. Reflecting on this project, Keane noted that taking Beckett outside its traditional space was done “with the different sensibility of putting it out on the streets and inserting it into the architecture of the city, with a sensibility of homelessness and addiction” that could speak to the people of the time.

And this sort of dialogue with people was much of what drove Scaife to start looking into Laethanta Sona, a play with only two characters – Willie and Winnie – with almost all of the dialogue coming from Winnie. “I just began to be really interested in that relationship between almost the silent presence of Willie and the deep, deep necessity for Winnie to know that there was somebody to witness her life”, she explained. To the director, in fact, this is one of the central elements of Beckett. “Whether it’s a king, or whether it’s somebody living on the street, the one basic thing that humans need is that they have been witnessed, that somebody knows the story of their life.”

This left Keane, as a performer, with a very unique role: with hardly any speaking lines at all, bringing Willie’s story to life relied almost entirely on the physical. Though, his background in mime and physical theatre prepared him perfectly for the role. “If I think something, Raymond feels it and moves it… there isn’t really a separation as such”, Scaife shared. “He is my muse.”

However, the physicality of the play was not its only distinct element. The setting in the Gaeltacht of Inis Oírr and the presentation of the work through the Irish language also made it unique. “The West of Ireland has always been this imaginative place”, Scaife explained. “[It] provides a kind of an aesthetic and a cultural landscape for us.”

Not far from the Burren, Inis Oírr’s land is covered with rock, which served as another source of inspiration. “I’ve always felt that that landscape [the Burren] was the landscape of a Beckettian mind … that bleak – in one way you could call it bleak – rocky kind of landscape”, she said.

Keane felt much the same, seeing special meaning both in the location and in the use of the Irish language. “You can’t help but be influenced by your surroundings”, he said. “It influences how I speak, how I behave physically.” Indeed, “the smells, the sound, the feel of the landscape, the feel of the rocks” were all part of this influence.

By acting through the Irish language, Keane found a deeper connection to the work’s meaning. “Being in this translated version of Happy Days and listening to Winnie, something happened for me… I’m still trying to articulate it. It re-awakens something in me, through its sound”, he commented. “[It] makes me respond to the meaning of the play in a whole new way.”

This deeper connection also went beyond directing and acting, to design. Sinéad Cuthbert, a junior lecturer in the Trinity Drama Department and the costume designer for Laethanta Sona, reflected on how the location influenced her design choices. Rehearsing the play in Inis Oírr back in June, both Cuthbert and Bríd Ní Neachtain – the actress who played Winnie – were drawn to the poetics of the rocky landscape and the “beautiful wildflowers growing through the cracks” of it. “We wanted to make [Winnie] as real as possible and give her a personality”, says Cuthbert, “without stylising Beckett too much.”

Relying on the metaphor of “something soft” growing “against the hard rock” and the floral patterns common to the 1950s fashion, Cuthbert created a costume that made Winnie both a “real woman” and a period-accurate middle-class Sandymount housewife, while also bringing out her “youthfulness” and “sexuality”.

Much of this design was oriented around understanding Winnie as a housewife from Beckett’s era, a character often understood as being a dominant force in the domestic sphere but having little other power in society. The use of the colour red in the design also highlighted the combination of the 1950s Sandymount housewife and the natural rocky scenery of the Aran Islands. “Red lipstick was very important”, said Cuthbert, “it suddenly made her face sing.”

From all these perspectives – directing, acting and designing – the location was central to the understanding, interpretation and presentation of the play. The Irish language similarly had a large impact not only on the acting, but also on its interpretation – as Keane described it, the language stretched “deep inside of [his] ancestral self.”

As Laethanta Sona comes to the Samuel Beckett Theatre, the production will be fundamentally changed. No longer located in the unpredictable Inis Oírr landscape, it will be re-rendered within the theatrical space. While this will certainly change how the audience perceives the work, it will also provide a chance for new interpretations and new understandings, both regarding the presentation of nature and the Irish language.