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For the 53rd Dublin Theatre Festival in October 2010, the Gate Theatre offered not a solo festival on some of the plays of Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter as it had in the past, but a mini-festival combining works by Beckett and Pinter with a third playwright (and the only one still living), David Mamet. The three names had already been conjoined by Michael Colgan for the Beckett on Film production of Catastrophe, with Mamet directing and Pinter playing the role of the tyrannical Director in Beckett's text. In a programme note, Colgan teased out the lines of connection and influence between the three. But the BPM project also bore a title: "The Relish of Language." Some argued that this was a strange way to describe playwrights who may have foregrounded language but who went for the most spare and unadorned prose possible. But, as Krapp demonstrates in Beckett's play, the relish of language may well be a matter of 'fundamental sounds', as when he draws out the sound of "Spooool" with audible relish, and the language of all three playwrights demands a musical precision in its interpreters. The festival afforded Colgan the opportunity to stage a full production of Pinter's last play, Celebration, having previously mounted an all-star reading and a filmed version. The Mamet, Boston Marriage, was uncharacteristically an all-female trio. But inviting as these productions were (all the more when entrusted to such outstanding young directors as Wayne Jordan and Aoife Spillane-Hinks), the greatest interest was occasioned by the two Beckett offerings: a stage(d) version of Beckett's 1940s novel, Waif, and a fresh production of Endgame. The former featured another young director, Tom Creed, but its solo performer and adapter of the prose text was Barry McGovern, returning to the terrain he so revealingly first explored in the 1980s with his staging of the prose trilogy as I'll Go On. Endgame's direction was entrusted to Alan Stanford, an outstanding Hamm in the past and the Gate's chosen interpreter of Pozzo; Stanford has moved increasingly into direction in recent years (Shakespeare, Shaw, Wilde, Pinter) but this was his first Beckett.
In fashioning a dramatic script from Watt, McGovern's adaptation adhered to the narrative contours outlined in the book: the journey of the title...