Two Godots At The International Samuel Beckett Festival

Sean Doran discusses the third year of the festival.

The third year of the Happy Days Enniskillen International Samuel Beckett Festival has captured every aspect of Enniskillen, a town in Northern Ireland, from the church to the hairdresser, according to The New York Times. Spanning ten days, ending on Sunday, August 10, the festival, dedicated to the Nobel Prize-winner writer, is growing in size and success.

Sean Doran first began this festival because he hoped to associate the town with its Portora Royal School alumnus, rather than the Irish Republican Army bomb that took the lives of 11 people at a Remembrance Day service in 1987. This year, the attendance is expected to top last year's 8,000 people, of which 31% were from outside Northern Ireland.

Beckett has so much varying work that the festival finds it difficult to program it all. Despite Beckett's precise stage directions, the French and Yiddish productions of the same play, Waiting for Godot, were surprisingly different. The French version worked in the act of performance as a subject and featured performers in clown-like makeup. Meanwhile, the Yiddish production focused on an emotional reading of the play, reflecting the "playwright’s own experiences in the French resistance, his awareness of the Holocaust and subsequent post-war exile and dispossession," according to The New York Times.

For the full article, visit The New York Times. Below is a video interview with Sean Doran on the third year of the Samuel Beckett festival.