Ends and Odds

At the Daily Telegraph Jane Shilling reviews Old Earth, an intriguing collaboration between Jericho theatre company and The Sixteen, performed at the Spitalfields Festival last week. 

She writes,

"The world premiere of Old Earth, given by theatre company Jericho and the singers of Harry Christophers’s ensemble, The Sixteen, brings together four short prose texts by Samuel Beckett with specially commissioned music by the composer Alec Roth. Beckett composed his “Fizzles”, a cycle of eight short prose pieces, between 1960 and 1972. All but one were in French, under the title “Foirades”, and later translated into English by the author. (In both languages the titles convey overtones of humiliating failure.)


The collection of fragments depicts the struggle of a character restlessly poised – apparently at the point of death – between memory and forgetting, reaching for a connection between the past and the present which remains perpetually just beyond his grasp.

Beckett stretches language to the point of syntactical disintegration as he depicts the spirit wandering in a purgatorial wilderness before returning to places where the memory of former happiness can be dimly discerned in disjointed images of once familiar scenes."

You can read the rest of the review here.

For a far less impressed response try Guy Dammann at The Guardian. 

"Struggling in low light to find my seat, I noticed the ushers were all muttering to themselves, as if simultaneously afflicted by the same madness. "Ashes to ashes" was the reply to my inquiry about the whereabouts of seats E14 and 15."

Read the rest of this review here.