Congratulations to the Chester University branch of our project on the recent Staging Beckett at the Margins conference and our thanks to David Pattie and David Tucker for hosting. Thanks too to all the delegates who contributed to the event and showed once again the richness and diversity that characterizes international productions of Beckett\u2019s work. Adding to the list of international locales which we saw discussed at Reading in April, we heard theatre surveys from Cyprus, Romania, and the city of Los Angeles, learning also of the malleability of the figure of Godot as metaphor across the history of Israeli theatre production in Shimon Levy’s talks. We heard accounts of the work that happens outside the UK\u2019s major metropolitan cultural hubs at, for example, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, as discussed by Mark Taylor-Batty and even within them, as our own Matthew McFrederick’s discussion of Beckett\u2019s time at the Riverside Studios revealed.<\/p>\n
We had two keynotes, different but complementary: Carl Lavery connected an ecological understanding of theatre with the forms of attention which Beckett\u2019s work demands of its audiences, calling up them to witness the undoing of time and subjectivity in the theatre as \u2018garden\u2019. The wonderful Tricia Kelly talked not only of the process of creating her role for Not I<\/em> (in six days, no less) but gave us a captivating reading of the play, leaving us all spellbound and pinned to the spot by the frantic energy of her embodiment of Mouth. A recording was made of her talk and will be made available in the future via the Staging Beckett website.<\/p>\n And congratulations also to David Tucker on the very successful \u2018Seeing Beckett\u2019 exhibition, which was launched as part of the conference. Contributors were invited to make a piece of visual art responding to Beckett\u2019s work. The results were sensitive and compelling pieces which fit beautifully into the conference theme, giving us a sense of the aesthetic fertility of the unseen, the hidden, the subtle and of course, the marginal. The exhibition can be seen at the Liverpool School of Art & Design from the\u00a0 27th – 31st Oct 2014 as part of the Liverpool Irish Festival.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"