Enniskillen
William Cook celebrates the life and work of Samuel Beckett
I’m standing in a ruined monastery on a little island in Lough Erne, listening to the actress Anna Nygh reciting the stark spare prose of Samuel Beckett. It’s early in the morning, and the island is cloaked in mist. There are a few dozen of us standing here, all listening. There’s no one else in sight, only a few sheep on a damp hillside. No one, apart from Anna, makes a sound.
I’d been to Enniskillen before and I’d heard all about Happy Days, an annual celebration of the life and work of Samuel Beckett. Beckett came from Dublin but he was educated here in Enniskillen, at Portora Royal School (now called Enniskillen Royal Grammar) and in 2012 the Irish impresario Sean Doran had the bright idea of mounting a festival in Enniskillen in his honour. Rather than just staging his plays in theatres, Doran found all sorts of quirky venues: church halls, masonic lodges, even the spectacular Marble Arch Caves in the hills above the town. The festival was a great success, and it’s now a perennial institution, attracting visitors from all over Ireland, and beyond.
The events that everyone raves about are these Beckett recitals at dawn and dusk, in this abandoned monastery on Devenish Island, a few miles by boat from Enniskillen. I was here last night, and returning here this morning I’m not sure which is more magical – being here at sunrise or sunset.
On the boat back into town, looking forward to my Ulster Breakfast, I get talking to that great actor Adrian Dunbar (Anna’s husband), who was born and raised in Enniskillen. Adrian’s father was a carpenter who died young, just after Adrian went away to drama school. His family still live here and he still spends a lot of time with them. He has a fierce affection for his hometown, but growing up here in the 1970s, at the height of The Troubles, wasn’t easy. We’re in Northern Ireland, but only just – the border is a few miles away.
Happy Days is the name of one of Beckett’s bleakest plays, and in Enniskillen it’s also a title tinged with sadness, for Fermanagh’s county town has had more than its fair share of sorrows. Oldies will need no reminding of the most horrific event in its history, when the IRA detonated a bomb beside the war memorial on Remembrance Sunday, killing eleven mourners and injuring more than sixty. A new community centre now stands where the bomb went off. The grieving Tommy on the war memorial is now circled by eleven doves.
Thirty long years later, the scars of that atrocity endure – but since then something unusual and rather wonderful has happened. Unlike a lot of towns in Northern Ireland, Enniskillen was never stridently sectarian (the two communities always rubbed along together relatively well) and after that calamity, Unionists and Nationalists