How It Is
by Samuel Beckett
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FROM 6 TO 21, JUNE 2026
PALAZZO DIEDO
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From 6 to 21 June 2026, the radical universe of Samuel Beckett will find an extraordinary celebration in Venice. Berggruen Arts & Culture and the theatre company Gare St Lazare Ireland present, in a world premiere, the live performance of How It Is, one of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s most enigmatic and linguistically groundbreaking novels.
An outstanding creative team for a total linguistic experience
Under the direction of the award-winning director Judy Hegarty Lovett, the work will come to life through a close-knit creative team that has spent more than ten years working together on this text, led by two performers of exceptional stature.
Conor Lovett, acclaimed actor of Gare St Lazare Ireland, is internationally recognized as one of the foremost and most profound interpreters of Samuel Beckett’s repertoire. Alongside him, Stephen Dillane — celebrated British actor, Tony Award winner, and global pop culture icon thanks to his role as Stannis Baratheon in the cult series Game of Thrones — brings his extraordinary artistic depth to Beckett’s prose.
Joining them is the company’s long-standing creative core: composer and sound designer Mel Mercier and lighting designer Simon Bennison, whose work transforms the text’s radical lack of punctuation into a striking sensory score.
Michael Craig-Martin’s site-specific visual project
Making the event a truly unique interdisciplinary experience is the involvement of Michael Craig-Martin (b. 1941, Dublin), invited by Hegarty Lovett to create a unique visual project within the historic 18th-century Venetian palace. An internationally renowned artist and influential teacher, Craig-Martin attended the company’s rehearsals at Palazzo Diedo, crafting with great sensitivity and mastery a site-specific installation in deep dialogue with Beckett’s subversive novel.
The work: beyond the limits of language
How It Is, Samuel Beckett’s final full-length novel (1906–1989), was first published in French in 1961 and in English in 1964. Divided into three parts, the text unfolds in short, punctuation-free paragraphs and tells the story of a solitary figure immersed in a landscape of mud and darkness, dragging a sack of tins and a can opener while repeating the words of a voice heard both inside and outside his head.
Through a compelling formal innovation that pushes language beyond its own limits, Beckett’s evocative novel marks a decisive turning point in the author’s literary style.
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Gare St Lazare Ireland are leading exponents of Beckett’s writing and here they stage the poetry and musicality of the work in a site specific setting combining art, music and literature as a language event.
