Dead Centre's BECKETT'S ROOM to play at Warwick Arts Centre in only UK dates

Photo credit: Kyle Tunney

Warwick Arts Centre will present the UK premiere of Beckett's Room from 4-7 December, a startlingly new and innovative production by Dublin-based theatre company Dead Centre.

Beckett’s Room tells the story of the apartment in Paris where famed Irish writer Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot, Endgame) lived with his partner Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil during the Second World War.

A play without performers, the audience listen through headphones and gaze upon the apartment where a story unfolds as voices, footsteps and laughter are heard, typewriters keys move, a coffee cup is raised, a wardrobe is opened, doors slammed - but the absence of bodies on stage focuses us intently on their stories.

The production considers Samuel and Suzanne’s place within the French Resistance, questioning the price of artistic freedom in times of censorship, and what it means to stand up to a totalitarian regime. But it also speaks to us about the millions of other lives across Europe which were changed by conflict.

This is a biography of a room, and an invitation to bear witness to a world as it disappears.

Featuring the voices of Brian Gleeson (Mother!, Peaky Blinders) as Beckett and Barbara Probst (Missions) as Suzanne, the work has been co-commissioned by Irish Arts Center and Warwick Arts Centre. The production received its world premiere at Dublin Theatre Festival in 2019, where it was greeted by a raft of four and five star reviews. The Coventry shows are the only UK performances.

Dead Centre’s Co-Artistic Director Bush Mouzarkel said: “Exploring Beckett’s life as a young writer in Paris during the war has been an international journey, with many supporters and collaborators along the way. The twist of telling an engaging and thrilling theatrical story, to an audience who can hear the disembodied voices of characters they cannot see, is an interpretation we like to think may have amused Samuel Beckett himself.”

For more information and to book tickets, please click here.