Blogging Live from a Cave near Paris

 

I'm just outside Paris for a few days, helping adapt Jude: Level 1 into a stageplay for the Galway Arts Festival later this year. Very, very exciting. I'm working with Conor Lovett, the best Beckett actor of his generation, and Judy Hegarty Lovett, who directed him so brilliantly in the Gare St Lazare Players' production of Molloy, and indeed in the entire Beckett trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable).

Anyone who can adapt The Unnameable (fondly known even by many Beckett fans as The Unreadable) into totally gripping theatre can do anything.

We spend all day underground, in a cave cut into the chalk hillside. Looking up at the chalk-and-flint arches above us, as a heater slowly warms the dark space, I feel rather as early Christians must have in the catacombs, if they ever put on theatre. ("Waiting for God", now in its two thousandth triumphant year!)

Conor and Judy think the cave was probably built by the German army during World War II, perhaps as a bomb shelter, perhaps to store ammunition. (The Germans also placed a rather large gun on the nearby hill, a couple of hundred yards away, overlooking the Seine. Didn't work, the Allies made their first successful crossing of the Seine about two miles upriver from here.)

We've invited some people out to see Conor as Jude tonight, in the cave.  It'll be a short (55 minute) demo version, read rather than acted. Then we'll ask the audience for their responses, and suggestions.

Then we all go for dinner together. Theatre rocks! It's all talking and eating! Beats the shite out of sitting on your own, writing novels.