The Beckett Trilogy
Molloy, Malone dies, The Unnamable
Performed by Conor Lovett
Directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett
Premiered Kilkenny Arts Festival 2001.
These three novels, written in French between 1947 and 1950, finally appeared in Beckett's English translation in one volume in 1959. To many readers they constitute the very core of Beckett's achievement as a prose writer. The three novels are written as first-person narratives so they lend themselves to performance or recital very readily. The only real editorial problem that has to be faced is one of selection from the great wealth of material here deployed. That material carries all of Beckett's celebrated signature effects - rhetorical shapeliness, scabrous wit, poetic lyricism, shocking crudity and piercing insight. As we move successively through the three novels we are presented with characters who are increasingly immobilised, who have fewer and fewer resources but who struggle mightily "to go on" with living, with dying.
The Gare St Lazare version, featuring Conor Lovett, has been in creative evolution for some time and has toured extensively.
