Eh Joe:
Showing @ Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh until Sat 31 Aug @ 17:00

Embers:
Showing @ King’s Theatre, Edinburgh until Sun 25 Aug @ 19:00

I’ll Go On:
Showing @ Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh until Sat 31 Aug @ 21:00

First Love:
Showing @ Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh until Sat 31 Aug @ 19:00

This season’s most anticipated show and the one that sets the tone is undoubtedly the Atom Egoyan directed Eh Joe with Michael Gambon. Like all the plays, Eh Joe was originally written for another medium – TV, and Egoyan holds onto its technical origins whilst managing to make it a theatrical experience.

Spending most of the play sitting silently on a bed Gambon’s Joe is taunted by the conjured voice of Penelope Wilton. It’s the voice of an old lover and an old guilt he’s been hoping to keep out. Filmed live with his face projected in cinematic close up, Gambon shows all the pain, longing and recalled desire of a man reaching the end of life with nothing but regret to dwell on. If acting is reacting, then this is a true tour-de-force. Every blow Wilton’s voice lands on, his psyche is played out to powerful effect by the slightest twitch of the mouth or flicker of the eye. The publicity hyperbolically proclaims Eh Joe as the greatest half hour of theatre you will ever see. Whilst that might be difficult to justify, it is without doubt an experience that imprints itself deeply in the mind.

Pan Pan Theatre’s Embers is also a play that takes place inside the head of its protagonist – literally – as the voices emanate from inside a giant skull on the stage. Henry, like Joe, is tortured by past events and lost opportunities with the voice of a past love acting as conscience. Originally a radio play Embers, despite the set, lighting and sound effects, hasn’t entirely escaped its origins and its power lies mainly in the sonorous mesmerising sound of Andrew Bennett and Ní Mhurí’s voices which pull you into their world.

There’s a sense of disquiet and morbidness about both the pre and post interval sections of this performance

Whilst the location for Embers and Eh Joe is within what Beckett would call the napper, both I’ll Go On and First Love, although equally streams of conciseness, are more like to be buttonholed by a loquacious stranger. Following last year’s Watt, Barry McGovern brings I’ll Go On to the festival, stitching together parts of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable into a cohesive and satisfying piece of theatre. There’s a sense of disquiet and morbidness about both the pre and post interval sections of this performance, but there’s also a clear change of tone as the bewildered rambling of the early section gives way to something more bitter the closer to the grave we come.

First Love was written as a novella in 1946 and is clearly an early work Beckett’s. He was so unsatisfied with it, he pulled it from publication not allowing it again in collections until 1970. Its flaws are there to be seen and it can be construed as a prototype for the characters found in his later novels. It still has the fingerprints of his mentor and friend James Joyce in its style and unlike his most famous works, it has a linear structure. That’s not to say it’s without charm or flashes of what was to come in the next few decades. Peter Egan’s performance as the unreliable narrator is enjoyable, although it takes a few minutes to get used to the slight Irish brogue he adopts. The play still contains the mixture of demotic, arcane and sesquipedalian language that we’ve come to expect from Beckett, but after the deeper pleasures of the other productions it’s a featherweight piece.

Beckett is the poet of the over-examined life. His characters leave no stone of their existence unturned and these plays provide examples of why we continue to find his obsessive, haunted creations so fascinating.

Showing as part of the Edinburgh International Festival 2013