From the Director

The great attraction for me to this play has been Samuel Beckett’s ability to offer up in one static image a profoundly human question – how are we to remain positive and believe we are in control of our destiny, when the external world bears down on us with such ferocity? The evident prescient parallels of climate disaster and late capitalism’s teetering hardly need to be mentioned. The internal human tension between hope and despair, happiness and sorrow, never goes away.

I can think of no two actors other than Peter and Julie with whom I would want more to spend four weeks in a dusty rehearsal room working all this out. The clarity that arrives from their shared theatrical histories gives this production the assurance and commitment it needs to communicate, with all the brutality and subtlety that the text offers.

In the thick of rehearsals of a Beckett play, it is quite possible to drown under the seemingly impenetrable complexities of classical quotation, obtuse references, despairing utterances, and endless potential of what this pause means, or that dash. The task has been to scratch and beaver away until the luminous simplicity of Beckett’s masterpiece shines through. And if we manage to polish it just so, it should gently, and then powerfully, glow with all that there is to say about living, and dying. As Winnie says: “Life, there is no other word.”

Michael Kantor