Liverpool is set to host the Beckett: Unbound 2024 festival, a multi-arts event dedicated to the works of Samuel Beckett, curated by actor Adrian Dunbar. The event will see four specially commissioned productions come together across various venues, one of which will feature inmates from HMP Liverpool. The event takes place in The Reservoir in Toxteth and is set to transfer to Paris.
The event follows the work of confinements previously presented in their 2022 festival, Beckett: Confined 2022, a project co-curated by Dunbar and Nick Roth for the University of Liverpool Institute of Irish Studies, dedicated to the same theme. Speaking of the new project, Dunbar said, “After lockdown, the confined theme worked so well for audiences and it also worked well for Beckett. Now that we’re post-Covid, we can open it up and look at other aspects of Beckett’s work.”
The festival will see Dunbar’s production of the dark comedy All That Fall take to the atmospheric site of the former Park Hill reservoir in Toxteth. The play was written for radio and exploits the format to its full potential; the team behind the original sound effects went on to create the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Dunbar will have the actors onstage but out of sight of the audience, who will listen to a string quartet playing Schubert’s Death and the Maiden in the dark.
Other highlights of the festival include a French-language staging of La Dernière Bande (Krapp’s Last Tape) starring Denis Lavant, who previously starred in Holy Motors. The event will be played out over various venues and culminates in a free concert of six contemporary theatre and dance productions.
Beckett: Unbound 2024 is set to run from 30 May to 7 June and is curated by Dunbar, a student of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London who became involved with the Happy Days – Enniskillen international Beckett festival in 2012. He subsequently directed productions of Beckett’s Catastrophe
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