Lessness: The Journey So Far

Olwen Fouéré first attempted Lessness over a decade ago with the intention of it never being staged. But the compelling nature of Beckett's text drew her to it once again. Written in 1969, Samuel Beckett's Lessness, known as Sans in it's original French version, is a short prose in which he used random permutation to order sentences. It's a complex piece. However, as many of the reviews confirm, Olwen Fouéré and her collboarators Kellie Hughes and Sarah Jane Shiels deliver an adaptation that is both persuasive and soothing - and leaves you wanting more.

Lessness, a Galway International Arts Festival and The Emergency Rooms co-production, had it's world premiere at The Barbican's International Beckett Season in June 2015. Audiences were pleasantly surprised and delighted with Fouéré's intense hit of Beckett. The Guardian's Lyn Garnder review noted, "Fouéré both skewers us with her gaze and seems to be looking into her own soul. The effect is of something both external and also entirely internal, without and within."

Galway was the next stop. Olwen Fouéré is no stranger to Galway International Arts Festival's audiences. Previously she performed the award-winning 'riverrun' as part of Festival 2014 and audiences were back in 2015 to get a glimpse of the compelling actor. It was no surprise that Lessness was a sell-out. The Irish Times' Peter Crawley described the performance: "Fouéré’s voice, all but unmodulated, allows the words to retreat, surge or stack, letting pictures materialise and dematerialise. That’s in line with a fractured text that lets the past and future concertina into “issueless” origins and the blank expanse of “endlessness”." Padraic Killeen from the Irish Examiner said, "Fouéré and her colleagues have not merely ‘staged’ the Beckett text, but can evoke such rich inter-texts as these, is in itself a wonderful feat."

Lessness opens tomorrow night, Wednesday 28 January, at the Project Arts Centre Dublin. Tickets are still available from here.