Oh My Godot… Ireland 70 years of Beckett and the renowned surrealist play in true style by marking it twice.
On the occasion of the Nobel winner’s birthday, his work will be reprised across April 12 and 13.
And then on Good Friday, April 18 and 19, to commemorate the Agreement that brought peace to the North.
In Enniskillen where the great playwright went to school.
Godot, famously described as a play where nothing happened twice was of course groundbreaking at the time.
And forced itself onto final year school syllabuses where students were glad to find a literature accessible and funny.
Pawn in the game
Check it out mate: The Beckett celebrations
Our friends in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, have put on a free programme which would have met with the old bespectacled dramatist’s approval and Vladimir and Estragon’s to
Building on ten years of success of the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival (2012 – 2022) OMG! will feature two upland theatrical performed readings, six in-conversation events and an immense town-sized game of chess.
Now if you hadn’t heard of The Happy Days International Beckett Festival then you’ll be glad you’ve visited here (obvs).
Written in his face: Samuel Beckett
The Festival specialising in deepening its literary heritage work on Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde within Enniskillen and Co. Fermanagh.
With both having attended school in Enniskillen sixty years apart.
Part of the landscape
Read up on it: Enniskillen
OMG! will be bookended by outdoor rural landscape performances of Waiting For Godot.
For which audiences will be taken by bus to secret locations, making their way through fields, meadows and hillsides to the performance sites.
A 3.5m Tree for Waiting For Godot sculpture by Sir Anthony Gormley, commissioned by Creative Director Seán Doran, will be installed at Little Dog mountain in County Fermanagh.
On the mornings of the two weekends, Oh My Godot! will celebrate Beckett’s chess-obsession by playing out twelve ceremonial chess moves across the streets of Enniskillen town.
Using a large, 32-piece sculpted bronze Beckett Chess Set by artist Alan Milligan and featuring the chess-related characters from ‘Waiting for Godot’.
Ireland’s fáilte is famous the world over and history records especially one Hospitable’s Hugh’s invitation in Fermanagh.
Hugh Maguire replied to his English visitor thus in 1539: ‘Your sheriff shall be welcome, but let me know his eric, that if my people should cut off his head I may levy it upon the country.’
That English visitor being Queen Elizabeth.
Poster boys and girls: With the Travel Circuit in Dublin
Perhaps best not look too closely then at her Tripadvisor entry or whether Eric ever did stay.
