Oh My Godot! - theatre up a mountain

Oh My Godot!, which continues this coming weekend, takes place in-and-around Enniskillen, where Ireland’s Nobel Laureate Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) went to school. Inspired by Beckett's masterpiece Waiting for Godot and the Good Friday Agreement, Oh My Godot! features rural theatrical performances, in-town in-conversations - and an immense, Enniskillen-sized game of chess.

Last Saturday, audience members caught the OMG! bus before being dropped off at a secret location and before making their way through fields, meadows and hillsides to Little Dog mountain, where Sir Antony Gormley's 3.5m Tree for Waiting for Godot sculpture made clear that something was afoot. Before long, two NI actors - Conor Grimes (Vladimir) & David Pearse (Estragon) emerged to meet two ROI actors - Andrew Bennett (Pozzo) & Tadgh Murphy (Lucky) for a truly unique rural performance suffused with a special atmosphere.

Presented by the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival, Oh My Godot! continues this coming Good Friday, 18th April, and Easter Saturday, 19th April, with performances on the limestone plateau of the UNESCO Global Geopark Marble Arch Caves. The cast include two English actors – Alex Jennings (Vladimir) & Malcolm Sinclair (Estragon) - and two Irish actors - Lorcan Cranitch (Pozzo), with the actor playing Lucky to be revealed on the day. FREE tickets and full information are at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/oh-my-godot-77538636473

While not a political event, OMG! mirrors the structure of the Good Friday Agreement, bringing together actors, writers and artists from both cultural traditions in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain. It explores the role of cultural and creative heritage in places of conflict and how they may be involved with forgiveness, recovery from trauma and the imaginative regeneration of communities.

Directed by notable quotations from Waiting for Godot, OMG!’s programme of six Themed Local Conversations will involves the wider Northern Ireland community in conversations with visiting writers, actors and speakers. Writers, including Palestinian author Banu Abu Zuluf (Project Research Fellow at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth) and Dublin-based Ukrainian Oleska Zdoravetska will meet in Enniskillen to discuss some of the most urgent situations in our world today.

The play’s opening line, ‘Nothing to be done’, along with its response, ‘…be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything’, will inspire a four-way discussion, chaired by Fermanagh based writer Carlo Gebler, between two writers from Northern Ireland, Jan Carson and Eoin McNamee, and one each from the Republic and Great Britain: Jane Clarke and Alex Clark. This event will begin at 6pm on Good Friday, the time of the signing of the GFA, and will be followed at 8.30pm with a Beckett Birthday Bash in Blakes bar, Enniskillen, marking the time of the writer’s birth at 8.48pm.

On the mornings of both days, Oh My Godot! will celebrate Beckett’s chess-obsession by playing out twelve ceremonial chess moves across the streets of Enniskillen town, using a large, 32-piece sculpted bronze Beckett Chess Set by artist Alan Milligan and featuring the chess-related characters from ‘Waiting for Godot’.