London, Spitalfields Summer Festival: Beckett's ‘Old Earth’

Samuel Beckett, famed for his strikingly negative approach in his stage play Waiting for Godot (1953), also has a string of prose and poetry in similar vein to his credit over the years. So it was that Spitalfields Festival came to commission Alec Roth to write music to accompany a performance of Beckett's ‘Old Earth’ from his prose work Fizzles written 1972–75. This received its world première at Spitalfields Summer Festival 2012, suitably housed in the stark dark space of The Village Underground, a disused warehouse resembling an abandoned railway tunnel in London's East End. Trying to find my seat in the dark, when I attended the first night, 15 June 2012, shadowy figures were already chanting what turned out to be verses from James Joyce's Ulysses as a fittingly mysterious, if unheralded, informal prologue. This was followed by drama directed by Jonathan Holmes, founder of Jericho House, with music by The Sixteen under their founder-conductor Harry Christophers.