Happy Days are here again as Enniskillen celebrates Samuel Beckett writes Robert McMillen
"IT'S a bit too high-brow for a provincial town like this," said the kind stranger who gave me directions during the last week's Beckett International Festival in Enniskillen. "No," I wanted to scream, "Enniskillen is just perfect." Nobel prize-winning writer Samuel Beckett spent four years as a border at Portora Royal School on the Derrygonnelly Road between 1920 and 1923 so it makes perfect sense to have a multi-arts festival in the town in his honour. Ireland's only island town has many advantages. It is compact enough so that people can get to most of the events; it has enough venues to make a festival viable. Indeed Happy Days makes use of venues, the Unionist Hall as one example, which even locals didn't know existed. Add the ambitious vision of artistic director Sean Doran to the goodwill and active participation of the townsfolk and local businesses and you get an idea of what the festival is all about.
Sensibly, Doran has decided to focus on Beckett's universal vision and on those who influenced him so Happy Days is more of a guided tour of the Dubliner's inner world more than a nostalgic look at his past. That's why we had the incredible, unforgettable event at Marble Arch Caves outside the town.
Dante, one of Beckett's favourite poets, saw the sun as God's light but his life led him into darkness and so the audience left the sunshine over Cladagh Glen deep down into the seven miles of cavernous limestone caves beneath the Fermanagh countryside. All was silent in the dark void apart from the sound of water falling into the underground rivers until we reached a screen where we watched Beckett's play, Not I, an internal scream of a play with only the mouth of the actress Lisa Dwan visible as she voices the inarticulate anguish of her invisible physical character. It's an unsettling performance, as we are then led on foot in single file through the shadows and the light but this time we pass lost souls each with their backs to us reciting poetry in many languages and at this stage I noticed I was biting my lip.
The sight of one young girl, sitting alone in the dark was particularly moving and as we moved towards the end of our journey through the underworld, we were treated to the mezzo-soprano Ruby Philogene singing the stunningly beautiful Dido's Lament, also known as As I am Laid in Earth. The mood now was one of despair and then, Ruby began to walk us back from where we came singing Amazing Grace, as she led us back to the light.
It was as scary, beautiful, dramatic, uplifting a show as I have ever experienced.
From the Inferno, we travelled the following morning to Purgatorio on
Devenish Island, where actor Adrian Dunbar read from the Beckett monologue Krapp's Last Tape while Anna Nygh read his early poem Alba. I couldn't help thinking about the early Gaelic poetry of the monks of Devenish and the terse writings of Beckett, thinking he would have approved of Purgatorio. Although we got very different versions of Endgame and Waiting for Godot, there was a lot more of Beckett's short prose in this year's festival, as Beckett saw himself more as a prose writer and the plays for which he is best known were secondary so we had Ian McIlhinney reading two stories in Enniskillen PSNI station and a litany of other great actors spread across the town, from pubs to churches. But the festival also delved into other arts, most spectacularly with Alan Milligan's chess set in the buzzing town centre where the Belfast-born artist built 32 metal pieces based on characters and props from Beckett's plays. But there was classical music, a comedy night in the highly-recommended Enniskillen Hotel - too much for one person to get along to everything in a town which, unlike many others, has lost little of its character. The Beckett festival ended on Monday with Japanese artist Tomoko Mukaiyama's memorial to the victims of the 2011 Japanese Tsunami while the South West College hosted the largest exhibition of Beckett archive material since that at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2007. High-brow? Maybe.
Inspirational, fun, enlightening, moving, fascinating? Definitely.
? SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE: Enniskillen celebrated all aspects of Samuel Beckett in the Happy Days festival, above and below