2005 / 2006
Directed and designed by Judy Hegarty Lovett
with
Conor Lovett
Lighting by Tom Creed (Cork 2005 European City of Culture)
Judy Hegarty Lovett directs Conor Lovett in 3 of Beckett’s 13 Texts For Nothing. nos. 3, 8 and 11.
Written following The Trilogy and described by Beckett as ‘the grisly afterbirth of The Unnamable,’ these exquisite pieces seem to follow the structure of musical pieces, where a theme is proposed, developed and returned to.
A favourite of the company for its haunting rhthyms and mysterious emotional undercurrents.
The production toured to Los Angeles, New York, Brighton and Dublin during the Beckett centenary year of 2006.
“Conor Lovett eases his way through Texts for Nothing as if he is composing the lines in performance. In fact, it's hard to conceive of this as performance: he has a transparency that enables him to embody the narrative voice like a medium. His words play with - and against - time, tentatively trying out and discarding various strategies for keeping the void at bay, "not knowing if you'd ever get to evening". With total command of the text's rhythms, Lovett's precision is astonishing.”
— The Guardian“One could hardly come up with a better human instrument to intone the sonorous waves of Samuel Beckett's blasphemous comic prose than Conor Lovett. Lean, unassumingly masculine and blessed with a voice like a cello, the Irish actor exudes a gentle humanity that can recede at will into an existential blankness.” — The Los Angeles times
Photo: Ros Kavanagh