In the popular café Chez Prune, beside the Canal St-Martin, on a warm spring evening, my attention is caught by a group of people sitting around a table on the terrace. They are an arty-looking bunch, regulars here and, clearly, friends of many years standing. One of them, a man in his sixties perhaps, is especially picturesque. He appears overweight, engulfed in a maroon velour cloak, on his head a grubby embroidered fez, on his face a pair of dark glasses held in place by gaffer tape.
Laughter and loud farewells ring out as he prepares to take his leave. His friends stand to make way for him and he propels himself away in stately fashion, on an ancient wheelchair which, until now, has been covered by the cloak, his hands dexterously working the pedals.
I watch, fascinated, and am struck by the similarity to the imperious character of Hamm in Beckett’s play Endgame. Suddenly, I realise how many of Beckett’s strange, enigmatic characters may have sprung out of people he observed on the Paris streets, during his years in the city.
And so was born Both Sides.
It began life as a monologue, entitled Me Here, Me. It is spoken by a troubled young woman, who comes, in search of normality, always to the same café, as and when her limited finances allow. Her circumstances are unhappy, desperate even, but the real and imagined lives of the people she observes from her window seat offer her some vestiges of hope and redemption.
The first draft of the script was read by the young Belfast actress Hannah Coyle at the inaugural Commencez! Beckett Paris Festival in 2016 and, subsequently, at the Paris Fringe.
Audience reactions encouraged me to write a companion piece. Set in a bar in Nice and entitled Before Before, its central character is Estelle, a middle-aged woman, who resorts to alcohol and unsuitable men to assuage the damaged inflicted by her turbulent life. Alongside Coyle’s downtrodden younger woman, Libby Smith performed with panache, bringing years of stage experience and lashings of old school Riviera glamour, tinged with world weariness, to the role.
The two monologues came together as a single play with a double-sided perspective, both echoing with Beckett’s spirit and cryptically poetic narrative style. Two women, two lives, two stories, separated yet connected. Stella and Estelle. Who are they? What secrets do they share?
Both Sides premiered in The Dark Horse café-bar during Belfast’s 2017 Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. It was subsequently performed in cafés and bars, at literary festivals and writing schools, in arts centres and theatres across Ireland, gaining friends and follower amongst those both familiar with and entirely new to the works of the great Irish writer who had inspired it.
Now it has come home, in a fresh, sensitively reworked version by director Nathalie Allison for the Paris-based, international company Alchemy Theatre.
Coyle, who has lived in the city for the past nine years, returns to the role, bringing touching, whey-faced resignation to bravely struggling Stella. Limerick-born Mia Leahy actress delivers a fabulously blousy, flirtatious Estelle, beginning her evening revels on a note of flighty humour, only to disintegrate into despair as the drink takes hold. Together they make a profoundly moving pairing.
Allison has interwoven the two monologues to produce, not exactly a dialogue, but an integrated stream of consciousness, ebbing and flowing between the two women. They may occupy the same space – the gallery of the handsome Pavé d’Orsay in Beckett’s old stamping ground in the 7th arrondissement – but are detached, oblivious to and utterly removed one from the other.
Capacity audiences of all ages are silenced by the intimacy of two fine actors, sitting amongst them, sharing their stories at close quarters. They speak afterwards of a powerful theatrical experience, hugely enhanced by the cabaret setting and atmospheric surroundings.
And for this writer, the deeply satisfying feeling of watching a precious play transported so effectively to the place of its birth, in respectful homage to Beckett and his enduring, evergreen literary legacy.
Both Sides @ Le Pavé d’Orsay, produced by Alchemy Theatre, Paris – May/June 2024
The Even Hand 