Cork Opera House and Half Moon Theatre

Emerging with a touch of Sam-fatigue from this Gaitkrash and Gare St Lazare Players Ireland weekend of six Beckett works, it’s no surprise that one leaves the theatre wondering what’s that old word for winding-sheets? Cerements? Cerecloths?

Gare St Lazare, in the persons of director Judy Hegarty Lovett and performer Conor Lovett, offered 160 minutes of monologue with First Love and The End, with lighting by Sarah Jane Shiels. A night later, it was followed by 160 minutes for the Beckett trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Around the corner at the Half Moon Theatre, Gaitkrash and Trace delivered Play introduced by a sound sequence merging sonorous, Tenebrae-like resonances. The programme was timed so that the Gare St Lazare production ended after Gaitkrash began, making it necessary to skip The Unnamable in order to catch Play; it provoked the thought that one can have too much even of a very good thing.

There is no doubt that Conor Lovett inhabits both the stage and the text with an intuitive mastery, allowing Beckett’s wit as much licence as his despair; when in First Love the character says that he has lunched lightly in the graveyard there is a susurration of anxiety in the audience: lunched on what, exactly? That audience is noticeably reduced for The End, where Lovett evokes the sense of tenacious bewilderment as compassionately as he does the writer’s desultory misogyny.

Faithfully worming his way into the likeness of life for Molloy and Malone Dies on the following night, Lovett’s chosen delivery of prolonged hesitations implies fault-lines beneath this mountainous memorisation. While often funny, the constant self-correction becomes a kind of tic, something close to parody. Perhaps that’s what Beckett is about in these musings, a ceaseless self-parody? Gaitkrash,Trace and James McCann delve not into Beckett’s brain but into his entrails. Three decapitated torsos wrapped like mummies stand above a litter of more heads than there are necks. As the cerecloths (or cerements) are unwound, the trunks glitter with putrescence but Shane Hegarty’s lighting reveals them as urns topped by real if scabrous heads speaking in orchestrated staccato – possibly from beyond the crematorium – about adultery. Beckett hints metaphor and then says that you’ve got it all wrong, but mercifully Gaitkrash doesn’t suggest that there’s more to Beckett than Beckett intended. Sometimes there’s an irresistible suspicion that there’s less.

The End tours until Mar 31