Gavin Quinn, Artistic Director of Irish theatre company Pan Pan, spoke to David Hennessy ahead of their revival of Samuel Beckett’s Cascando at Jermyn Street Theatre in London.
The Irish theatre company Pan Pan are bringing a major revival of Samuel Beckett’s Cascando, directed by Pan Pan’s Artistic Director Gavin Quinn, to the London stage.
The piece will be reimagined as a site-specific immersive production through the streets around Jermyn Street Theatre.
Cascando is a play about the difficulties of endings.
Audiences dressed in dark cloaks and listening on headphones will follow Beckett’s curious figures out of the theatre and through the storied streets of St. James’s.
Samuel Beckett is known for classics such as Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape and Waiting for Godot.
Samuel Beckett’s plays have long held a special place at Jermyn Street Theatre.
Now globally renowned, Pan Pan reimagine his masterpiece as a promenade piece, directed by Gavin Quinn whose visionary Beckett productions have won a Herald Angel, Irish Times Theatre Awards, and international acclaim.
Gavin Quinn spoke to us about the forthcoming piece.
Are you looking forward to coming over to London with the show?
“Yeah, absolutely.
“We’ve haven’t had that many opportunities to perform in London before.
“It should be great.
“We don’t normally do outdoor work and it’s fun to be working outside for a change.”
Can you explain how the immersive nature of the piece works..
“The audience come to the Jermyn Street Theatre, they’re asked to wear a costume so it’s kind of a black cloak and then it’s almost as if they’re performing in a Beckett play.
“We bring them on a choreographical walk which is led so it’s a 30 minute piece which leaves the theatre and then goes around in a circuit and everybody is one behind the other and are given very simple instructions, so it’s bit like they’re acting in a Beckett play.
“They listen to the radio piece which is the piece he wrote in 1963 called Cascando and it’s part music, part words so it’s really kind of a real Beckett thing of investigating which is the more powerful medium, music or words?
“You get this kind of interesting experience then because you’re listening to it wearing the cloak, following somebody and you lose all sense of time and you just get immersed in this very poetic, simple text actually and it’s over before you know it so you’re back then at the Jermyn Street Theatre wondering what went on.”
Cascando was originally a radio play and this is how you’ve brought it to life..
“That’s it.
“Beckett, in his very dry way, called it a piece for radio, not a radio play so it’s very much an experimental audio thing.
“Basically it’s about the voice, it’s about the music.
“We did a new recording of it with new composition and the audience just go on a walk and listen to the piece and then you kind of all move together so the audience are also the people watching this strange line of 30 people clad in cloaks all moving in unison, there is another audience there just wondering what’s going on.
“It looks like a silent intervention.
“It looks like a kind of procession that goes through the streets.
“We’ve done it in all kinds of scenarios.
“We’ve done it in Washington Square Park in New York, we’ve done it in Enniskillen by rivers and forests and we’ve done it in city centres like Dusseldorf and in China so in any kind of environment it works but it’s different.
“Of course you’re sort of picking up the landscape around you so you sort of have these nice coincidences and it chimes where it needs to chime.”
What reactions do you get to it? I can imagine people really want to talk about it all after it’s done..
“They do, exactly that.
“So at the beginning of it, we obviously explain all this.
“The instructions are very simple because people are coming and they’re not sure what to expect so you have just got to keep it really clear and it’s more like, ‘Is everyone okay with this? It’s going to be 30 minutes long. We’re going to go out in costume, leave your bags behind, just commit to this’, even make a joke about ‘bowing your head a little bit so you look a bit depressed’ and then off and you’re away.
“You’re focused on the piece but you’ve also got this other landscape and everyone’s kind of hooded so you’re just walking around and you’re kind of in your own world so I think it’s a bit of a dream sort of scape.”
Do you get strange reactions from those who see it?
“Yeah, when we were in New York people were saying, ‘What are you protesting about?’
“And we said, ‘We’re sorry. We’re not protesting. It’s only a play’.
“And they looked a bit sad.
“They thought we were the supreme justices or something like that.
“So you get some strange comments.
“We’ve done it in Dublin as well around Temple Bar and one person said a very strange remark and said, ‘Is that cryptocurrency?’
“I don’t know where they got that leap of imagination but I guess people make kind of analogies to a religious procession or perhaps some kind of ritual because it’s 30 people moving together but essentially it’s just a way of intensely listening to the play and at the same time you’re moving with it.
“I guess people use headphones all the time and when you put on headphones and you’re walking down the street, everything becomes a film.
“This is a little bit different because you’re hooded and it’s just sort of like allowing people to really focus on the piece.
“It’s sort of taking time out of your day for 30 minutes and just really listening to this piece because we don’t normally do that.
“I guess years ago, we would have all maybe sat around the radio and we would have listened to the broadcast of the radio but now people more maybe put on the radio when they’re doing other stuff. They could be driving or they could be doing the washing up so this is kind of an intense way to listen to it really, I guess.”
You mentioned about the voice and the music, it was really an obsession of Beckett’s which was more powerful, wasn’t it?
“It was.
“I guess this whole piece is about what it means to write a story and he makes the point, are stories memory or are memories stories?
“It’s got that sense of you’re in the mind of Beckett, you’re in the mind of these characters and you kind of feel that intensity about every word that’s chosen.
“He plays this game.
“It’s almost like two valves. One is called the opener, the other is called music.
“It’s almost like he turns on the opener which words come out and then he closes the words and opens the other and then you get music so he’s sort of going first with words, then music and then he combines words and music so you’re kind of listening to this experiment.
“It’s called Cascando which is a musical term and it means the decrease of volume and the deceleration of tempo, so it’s all about tempo and rhythm.
“Beckett was very much about rhythm, very much about tone and tempo as well as meaning.
“There’s a mysterious character called Woburn that we kind of follow on a journey like any other, as Beckett would say.
“It’s sort of an image like any other which is quite typical of Beckett.
“He’s just trying to get you into the realm of the simple things like walking to an inn and walking back and that’s what the journey of the play is.
“And then the character the Opener is trying to figure out, ‘What is storytelling?’
“He seems to be a character who’s trying to figure out what to say and what the story is and it’s almost as if he takes language and he pulls it apart and pares it back to its very essence so you kind of fill in the gaps and you don’t really need to follow it as a narrative, it’s more like an experience.
“It feels like thoughts but very organised thoughts and all the radio plays that he wrote are all about, is it really happening or is he trying to theatricalise the mind?
“You hear certain words that have meaning and other ones you’re not quite sure but you don’t have to follow it in a kind of narrative way. You just have to experience just the music of the words, I guess.”
If Woburn’s journey is quite everyday, is the piece similar to Waiting for Godot in that it is concerned with the mundane and the beauty in it?
“Yeah, the opening line is, ‘I’m afraid to open but I must open, so I open’ which is very much Beckett.
“It’s almost like some of those shorter plays like Act Without Words or Act Without Words 2, it’s just about getting up in the morning, putting on your clothes, brushing your teeth, going back to bed.
“He’s into this cycle of life and these kind of rhythms that we get ourselves into: Walking to work, sitting at work, eating our lunch, coming back from work, going to bed.
“He’s into the ritual of everyday life and I guess he finds these very carefully chosen words which sort of echo maybe much bigger things but they’re sort of motifs and you kind of feel the time like life just ticking by.
“But it has a kind of meaning, I think in the tone.
“It’s not linear.
“He curates words.
“He puts words in as if they’re to stand alone and they have an impact so it’s going to be playing with language, I guess but it makes it sound like, maybe it’s, it’s difficult but actually the language is very simple.
“It’s all about the repetitive lives we lead and there’s kind of a feeling there at the end of it.
“You do get a sense of going on something and by physically walking through it, like the character Woburn, you do have a very strong response.
“He goes something like, ‘Right to sea, left to hills’ so we just imagine this very simple landscape that he’s walking through.
“It feels like a very simple story that’s told with great sort of weight.
“It’s just he had this very simple style, I guess.”
Is the lack of resolution something that some have trouble with?
“You enjoy the physical aspect of the experience, I don’t think you really worry too much about what it means or what the ending is.
“But there’s always a little bit of mystery involved in Beckett’s work.
“He doesn’t give too many clues but there’s also very simple imagery like having a boat with no oars.
“It’s a real feeling of just like someone has chosen some words and music which you listen to for a certain period of time and it’s like it has a very ethereal quality.
“I think somebody called it- I don’t know who did it- but called it like an invisible opera.
“It’s almost like a new genre.
“It’s not weighty or intellectual.
“It’s sort of like somebody has just said, ‘Listen to this’, and then you just do it. It’s kind of fun.”
You have done a number of Beckett plays since you launched Pan Pan, haven’t you?
“Yeah, we’ve done a few.
“We were always drawn to the radio plays because we thought it would be interesting to bring them into the public eye because obviously people wouldn’t really know about the Beckett radio plays unless maybe a few academics or a few aficionados so it was about sort of trying to find new ways to stage these radio plays without making them into a new play.
“And then we did actually end up doing a version of Endgame as well which was one of his two most famous plays which was obviously written for the stage.
“So over the years we’ve kind of dabbled in Beckett and it’s interesting when you have a chance to do a few of them and you realise that they can take a lot of treatment, they can take a lot of ideas because they are such finished pieces.
“They’re such kind of fine pieces, so enjoyable to work on.”
Weren’t you inspired to go into theatre by Beckett?
“When I was a teenager, I saw a production of Waiting for Godot in The Focus, the theatre off Baggott Street which is now gone.
“Like precocious teenagers, we didn’t understand it but we enjoyed it.”
There are always new revivals and new takes on Beckett’s work, what do you think it is about him that keeps him so relevant?
“I think Beckett still appeals maybe because it’s a great example of modernism, that it’s unique, it’s so universal, it’s so specific especially the imagery.
“I think the quality of the writing and just the excellence of the scripts is the reason why it comes back.
“Pinter comes back now and again but not as much as Beckett.
“It’s funny how some writers just keep on being remounted and there’s new seasons of their work.
“I would say probably Shakespeare, Chekhov, Beckett are the three most, it seems to be anyway, reproduced writers.
“All very different and all stood out in their time for different reasons but they’re the three you think of that are constantly revived and adapted.”
Jermyn Street Theatre is a venue that is known for putting on Beckett work and also Beckett inspired work..
“It’s a great area for doing the outdoor piece in and around that historic part of London.
“It should be good.
“I think it will be great.
“I think it will appeal to a London audience and it should be interesting to see how it looks on the street.
“I’m excited by that.”
Cascando is at Jermyn Street Theatre 2- 13 September.
For more information and to book, click here.
