How It Is (Part Two) at the Coronet Theatre

With its peeling balustrades and meticulously preserved late-Victorian architecture providing the atmospheric intimacy for which this venue is renowned the world over, the Coronet Theatre’s cavernous auditorium is the perfect space for the long-awaited second instalment of director Judy Hegarty Lovett’s production of Samuel Beckett’s last full-length prose work, How It Is (the second stand-alone part of a three-part staging).

Lighting designer Simon Bennison’s muted spotlights refract upon the array of shining percussion instruments filling the otherwise bare stage. The pared-back production reinforces the audience’s focus on Conor Lovett and Stephen Dillane’s arresting performance, which moves around the percussion set up onstage. Drawing their own interpretations from the fatalistic weight of Beckett’s prose, Lovett and Dillane are by turns nihilistic, ruminatory, tragicomic and sentimental as they recount the bizarre plight of Beckett’s nameless narrator. The performance shifts between the actors throughout: one moment Dillane, arms and legs comically splayed against the staircase bannister, is recounting his violent conditioning of his ill-fated comrade Pim (beside him “in the dark, the mud, for vast stretch of time”),  the next, descending noiselessly from the opposite side, Lovett takes over, pivoting the audience’s attention and allowing Dillane to melt into the shadows. The ambiguity of Beckett’s work leaves the performance open to interpretation and continually eludes any audience expectations. The actors wander throughout the space, stopping and starting, returning to favourite attitudes, pausing for an onstage tea break, earnestly addressing the theatre and at the same time eliciting the feeling they are unaware of being observed at all. 

That the auditorium is in the round perfectly suits both the meandering use of the space and the sonorous accompaniment of the Irish Gamelan Orchestra. Led by musical director Mel Mercier, the ensemble plays the intricate instruments of Gita Nuswantara (which loosely translates from Sanskrit to “songs of home”). These intricately tuned percussion instruments – bronze gongs, metallophones, a wooden flute and an elegiac two-stringed fiddle, forged by a Javanese gongsmith in the Sukoharjo region of Central Java – are played in three or four interludes, each in a slightly different but always minor key. The result is a haunting, incantatory accompaniment that complements Lovett and Dillane’s spellbinding performance of a work that continues to defy convention and refute categorisation – an ambiguity this production leans into, to its merit.

Lauren Devine
Photo: Clare Keogh

How It Is (Part Two) is at the Coronet Theatre from 20^th April until 7^th May 2022. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.