The theatre workshops directed by Philip Zarrilli were one of this year’s innovations at the Malta Arts Festival.

One of artistic director Mario Frendo’s best ideas in the designing of this year’s theatre component of the Malta Arts Festival was to have workshops and a symposium attached to the performances presented by Odin Teatret and the Llanarth Group’s Beckett Project.

The only pity was that few leading practitioners of the theatre in Malta attended it as against many younger ones- Paul Xuereb

Philip Zarrilli, the brain and animator of the Beckett Project directed a six-day workshop for theatre beginners on “body, breath, activation and performance”. He was also the mainspring of a symposium, presented by the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts, on the subject of Performing Beckett.

Held in the main hall of the Chamber of Commerce, Valletta, it featured two distinguished academics from British universities in addition to Zarrilli himself and Jeinghsook Yoo of Llanarth Group, and it was chaired by Frank Camilleri, a Maltese senior lecturer at the University of Kent. Patricia Boyette and Alan Crook, who had performed in the Beckett plays, were also present and answered questions from the audience.

The symposium’s chief interest lay in its combination of an academic approach to Beckett and his works, and a practical approach to preparing to perform his works and the subtleties involved in performance.

Much of the presentation of Anna McMullan, professor at the University of Reading, lay in showing how the performing body was the be-all and end-all in Beckett’s plays, the full body itself with its vulnerability in the early plays, like Waiting for Godot, and an image of it in later plays like Not I or Rockaby. She discussed the problems facing the actor in plays like the last two, where the body is either absent except for a single organ or almost completely hidden under a full, traditional dress, with the voice taking over completely.

Another academic, Nicholas Till, professor at the University of Sussex, spoke on Beckett’s use of musical texts by canonical composers like Schubert in some of his plays, and, in two radio plays, of music and language being treated as characters in those plays. He reminded the audience that Beckett’s awareness that music never needs to be explicit is mirrored in his writing of the latter plays which the audience had been watching, and of Beckett’s use of silences in his plays, imitating the silences in much musical writing.

Zarrilli, a theatre practitioner and educator but also an author of works on performance theory and an expert on Eastern dance theatre such as kathakali, spoke on “consciousness at work and ‘at play’ in Beckett’s texts and in performance”.

The Korean actress and theatre theorist Jeungsook Yoo’s contribution was based on Beckett’s advice to his actors to use no colour in their performance of his work, relating it to the concept of ‘no-mind’ in East Asian philosophy. She and all the other members of the Llanarth Group present in Malta brought the symposium to a close as they commented on statements, or answered questions, from the audience.

This was a successful symposium. The only pity was that few leading practitioners in Malta attended it as against many younger ones.