This Summer sees a festival and celebration of Beckett crossing transnational boundaries, as Beckett: Unbound 2024 takes place in Liverpool and Paris. The brainchild of actor Adrian Dunbar and composer Nick Roth, the festival builds on the success of Beckett: Confined 2022, once again partnering with The University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies and The Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. Tracing Beckett’s closings and undoings of space across disciplines, locations and environments, the 2022 festival explored the writer’s ‘politics of confinement’ amidst the highly-charged aftermath of the global pandemic. Beckett: Unbound 2024, promises an exploration of the writer’s wild fascination with communication and technology’s traversal of time and distance, across a programme of theatre, music, film, dance, photography, and discussion.
Included will be several world premières of commissioned new works, including renowned Irish choreographer Liz Roche’s Sentient, composer Kevin Volans’ Quad and performer Simon Roth’s Mouth. The theatre programme features three settings of some of Beckett’s major works – Not I, All That Fall and Krapp’s Last Tape.
The Liverpool leg of the festival runs from 30 May to 2 June with full programme and booking details available here. The Paris performances take place 5-7 June with details available here.
The Samuel Beckett Society 