Samuel Beckett's HOW IT IS To Have World Premiere At Venice's Palazzo Diedo
Stephen Dillane and Conor Lovett star, directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett with design by Michael Craig Martin.
Berggruen Arts & Culture and Gare St Lazare Ireland will present the WORLD PREMIERE production of How It Is by Samuel Beckett, directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett with design collaboration by artist Michael Craig Martin at Palazzo Diedo, Venice, from 6 to 21 June 2026.
Samuel Beckett's masterpiece How It Is is a live art event at Palazzo Diedo with celebrated actors Stephen Dillane and Conor Lovett, directed by award winning director Judy Hegarty Lovett, with sound design and composition by Mel Mercier and lighting design by Simon Bennison. This core team have collaborated for over 10 years working on one of Beckett's most enigmatic and linguistically stunning works, a novel without punctuation marks, blending form and content to create a language event.
Hegarty Lovett invited Michael Craig Martin (b. 1941, Dublin, Ireland), internationally recognized artist and influential teacher, to collaborate with the company at Palazzo Diedo realizing a unique design in the historic 18th century Venetian palazzo, which is now one of Venice's leading contemporary art centres. Craig Martin attended rehearsals, skillfully and sensitively creating a site-specific design sympathetic to Becketts subversive novel.
How It Is, the last full-length novel by Samuel Beckett (1906 – 1989), was first published in 1961 in French and in English in 1964. The three-part novel is presented in short unpunctuated paragraphs, telling the story of a lone figure in a landscape of mud and darkness who drags with him a sack of tins and a tin-opener repeating, as he journeys, the words of a voice he hears inside and outside his own head. In a compelling innovation of form that pushes language to its limits, Beckett's evocative novel marks a distinct departure in style for the author.
‘Beckett is one of those artists who comes along very rarely and changes everything. Like Picasso, Bob Dylan, Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf, they are artists with such skill, vision and commitment that they change the way we see the world,' said Conor Lovett, Gare St Lazare Ireland.
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