2010
Directed and designed by Judy Hegarty Lovett
Performed by Conor Lovett
Lighting by Sarah Jane Shiels
Produced by Maura O’Keeffe
The Calmative is a short story by Samuel Beckett written around the same time as The End and First Love. In it a man recounts an episode of half-dream/half-reality where he sets out from his shelter to go on a night-time trek of the town. Foreshadowing Beckett's Texts For Nothing this is a complex and sublime text which rewards with its meditative storytelling and dreamlike atmosphere. The Calmative premiered at Half Moon Theatre, Cork on a double bill with The End in March 2010 and it has also performed at Project Arts Centre, Dublin.
"The imagery is terrifying, and Lovett delivers it with a restrained relish, a kind of mildly forceful defiance, that seems to suggest that the combatant is beyond the reach of all of us, for good or ill, not because he is already dead, but because his life has always been beyond our comprehension, its planes a multiplicity of shadows that cross our own ... and darken them. And despite any reservations that one may have, Lovett and Hegarty-Lovett have once again delivered masterly Beckett interpretations."
Sunday Independent"Brilliantly entertaining reportage from the barest edge of the human condition."
Irish Independent
