Johnny Murphy (Estragon)
Johnny Murphy most recently played Estragon in Waiting for Godot at the Gate Theatre Dublin as part of the Beckett Centenary Festival and also at the Barbican Centre London as part of bite 06. He previously appeared in Waiting for Godot during the 1991 Beckett Festival at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, as well as during the 1996 Festival in the Lincoln Center, New York and BITE: 99 Festival at the Barbican Centre in London. He also appeared in Ohio Impromptu and Catastrophe as part of the Beckett Festivals.
He has also appeared at the Gate Theatre, Dublin in As You Like It, Arrah-na-Pogue and The Saints Go Cycling In. His other theatre credits include Buddleia at the Donmar Warehouse, London, I Do Not Like Thee, Dr Fell at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin Brothers of the Brush at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin Sive at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin and A Picture of Paradise, At Swim Two Birds and The Passion of Jerome at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin.
He starred in the hit film The Commitments. His other film credits include Angela’s Ashes, The War of the Buttons, Into the West, I Went Down and Fools of Fortune and Waiting for Godot. His television credits include Scarlett, Against All Odds and The Bill. He has also completed Two Gallants for BBC Radio.
Barry McGovern (Vladimir)
Barry McGovern first appeared at the Gate Theatre as Lucky in Waiting for Godot in 1972. He had previously played his first Beckett role, Clov in Endgame, while a student in UCD. Since then he has played Clov three times, most recently with the Gate as part of the Beckett Festival which toured to New York and London. In 1982 he played Vladimir in Ben Barnes’ Irish Theatre Company production of Waiting for Godot and in 1988 he played Estragon at the Gate. Since the first Beckett Festival in 1991 he has played Vladimir. Other Beckett roles include Willie in Happy Days with Rosaleen Linehan (directed by the late Karel Reisz) and Krapp’s Last Tape at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Trinity College. On radio he has played Henry in Embers, Fox in Rough for Radio II, directed All That Fall and presented a documentary on Beckett and Paris.
Recent theatre roles include Creon in Oedipus, Frank in Educating Rita, Kreon in Medea, Tobias in A Delicate Balance, Frank Hardy in Faith Healer, Boniface in Ariel, Scrooge in A Christmas Carol at the Gate, Peter Flynn in The Plough and the Stars, Polonius in Hamlet and Chorus in Seamus Heaney’s version of Antigone, The Burial at Thebes at the Abbey and Baptista Minola in the The Taming of the Shrew at the Project Theatre.
His TV work includes Giuseppe Conlon in Dear Sarah and Eamon de Valera in The Treaty. Films include Joe Versus the Volcano, Far and Away, Braveheart, The General and Waiting for Godot. Barry’s award winning one-man Beckett show I’ll Go On (from the novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable) which the Gate presented during the 1985 Dublin Theatre Festival has travelled worldwide. His complete recording of the novels produced by the Lannan Foundation and RTÉ is now available on www.rte.ie/shop .
Stephen Brennan (Lucky)
Stephen Brennan has worked extensively at the Gate Theatre since 1988, appearing most recently in New York in 2001 in two Harold Pinter plays, Landscape and A Kind of Alaska, which the Gate brought to the Harold Pinter Festival at Lincoln Centre. Other appearances with the Gate include the world premier of Conor McPherson’s Port Authority, which opened at the New Ambassador’s Theatre London before transferring to the Gate in 2001, as well as leading roles in An Ideal Husband, Private Lives, Twelfth Night, Our Country’s Good, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Waiting for Godot in Dublin, Seville, Chicago, Tralee, Kilkenny, New York, London and a five-week US Tour in 2001. He also appeared in Betrayal in the ’97 Pinter Festival in Dublin and Old Times as part of Pinter’s 75th birthday celebrations at the Gate in 2005. From a long list of highlights Present Laughter, Pride and Prejudice, She Stoops to Conquer, Art, Pygmalion, Jane Eyre, and Fagin in Oliver Twist stand out, along with title roles in Tartuffe and Cyrano de Bergerac.
He joined the Abbey Theatre for eight years in 1976 where he played more than sixty leading and supporting roles, including title roles in Hamlet and Hugh Leonard’s Da. He joined the National Theatre of Great Britain for a year in 1983 and other appearances include Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew and further title roles in Oedipus and The Life of Galileo. Films include Eat the Peach, Conspiracy of the Rings, Stolen Minds, The General and both Waiting for Godot and A Piece of Monologue for Beckett on Film. His television work includes El Cid for Granada, Ballykissangel for BBC, Father Ted for Channel 4, Mystic Knights for Fox Kids and Bachelor’s Walk for RTÉ.
Alan Stanford (Pozzo)
Alan Stanford has been a principal actor and director at The Gate Theatre for nearly 25 years. His work as an actor and director includes plays from Shaw to Shakespeare, from Ibsen to Ayckbourn. He has both appeared in and directed all the major plays of Oscar Wilde. His performances include Salieri in Amadeus, Astrov in Uncle Vanya, Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Herod in Wilde’s Salome. In The Gate Theatre’s Beckett Festivals in Dublin, New York, Toronto, Melbourne, London, and China, he performed in both Waiting for Godot and Endgame.
As a director he began his career at the Project Arts Centre where his productions included works by Shaw, Arbuzov, Grahame Greene, Brecht, Durrenmatt and Shakespeare. He was a co-founder and is current Artistic Director of Second Age Theatre Company for whom he has directed Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It. For the Gate Theatre, Alan has directed Romeo and Juliet, Tartuffe, Present Laughter, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, The Collection, Blithe Spirit, Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Weeping of Angels, Cyrano de Bergerac, An Ideal Husband, Arms and the Man, The Misanthrope, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Constant Wife and A Christmas Carol, as well as several of his own adaptations including Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Oliver Twist. His film and television work includes Educating Rita, The Irish R.M., The Treaty, The Hanging Gale, Moll Flanders, Kidnapped, The American and Animal Farm. He is a member of the Arts Council of Ireland.
Barry O’Connell (The Boy)
Barry O’ Connell most recently appeared at the Gate Theatre in Waiting for Godot as part of the Beckett Centenary Festival. He has also appeared at the Gate in A Christmas Carol. He is 13 years old and has been performing since he was 8 when he played Chip in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast at the Point. He currently attends the Independent Theatre Workshop. No stranger to title roles, he has played Oliver on two occasions in record breaking runs at the Tivoli Theatre and the Helix, Dublin. His television credits include The Den, The Late Late Toy Show and he was recently featured on the What’s The Story documentary for The Den on RTÉ television.
Walter D. Asmus (Director)
Walter D. Asmus first directed Waiting for Godot for the Gate Theatre in 1988 and did so again in 1991 as part of The Beckett Festival and in 2006 as part of the Beckett Centenary Festival celebrations. Waiting for Godot has been shown in Chicago, Seville, New York, Melbourne, Toronto, Beijing, Shanghai and has toured the US. He is a well-known German theatre director who worked with Samuel Beckett on many occasions for the stage and television from the time they first met at the Schiller-Theatre in Berlin 1974, and he became Beckett's assistant director on the famous production of Waiting for Godot which toured internationally.
He has directed all of Beckett´s plays internationally, including Waiting for Godot at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1978. His television work includes Footfalls, Rockaby and Eh Joe with Billie Whitelaw, and a French version of Waiting for Godot with Roman Polanski as Lucky. He also directed Footfalls for the Beckett Film Project. He was the co-director of the international Beckett festival "Beckett in Berlin 2000". In 2005 he directed the first Chinese production of Endgame in Mandarin in Shanghai. His adaptation of Beckett ´s novella First Love with Australian actor Lawrence Held was shown at the Writers` Festival in Sydney in May 2006. Also this year he directed Krapp´s Last Tape, Footfalls and Endgame for 7 Stages in Atlanta. He was a close friend of Beckett´s untll the writer´s death in 1989.
Louis le Brocquy (Costume and Set Design)
Louis le Brocquy is Ireland’s most distinguished living artist. Born in Dublin in 1916, he left Ireland and his grandfather’s business in 1938 to become a painter. Self-taught, he studied in museums in London, Paris, Venice and Geneva, then exhibiting the Prado collection during the Spanish civil war. In 1946 he began his long association with Gimpel Fils and settled in London, where he became a prominent member of a disparate group of painters that included Nicholson, Pasmore, Scott, Heron, Freud and Bacon. During this period he began to exhibit internationally, winning a major prize at the Venice Biennale in 1956. In 1958 he married the young Irish painter, Anne Madden and left London to work with her in the relative isolation of the French Midi. Following his discovery in 1964 of decorated Polynesian ancestral skulls in the Paris Musée de L’Homme, le Brocquy set out upon his long series of head images. Initially anonymous, these images later depicted specific artists such as Yeats, Joyce and Beckett. It was at the latter’s request that le Brocquy illustrated his valedictory book, Stirrings Still, and designed the set and costumes for Waiting for Godot.
Retrospective exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held in museums in the U.S.A., France, Belgium, Japan, Australia and Ireland and he is represented in numerous public collections including: Foundation Maeght, St. Paul; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshborn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Kunsthaus, Zurich; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Musée Picasso, Antibes and the Tate Gallery, London. The artist now lives and works in Ireland. Further information at www.lebrocquy.com.
Rupert Murray (Lights)
Rupert Murray was one of the most accomplished lighting designers and producers in Irish Theatre. He has over one hundred and fifty design credits around the world to his name. He worked extensively with the Gate Theatre for many years, his most recent designs including Waiting for Godot, Come and Go, Footfalls, Play and Catastrophe as part of the Beckett Centenary Festival celebrations in April 2006. Other designs for the Gate include Old Times and Betrayal for Pinter 75 - A Celebration, Poor Beast in the Rain, Many Happy Returns, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Crestfall, Jane Eyre, Dancing at Lughnasa and Juno and the Paycock. For the National Theatre he designed All My Sons, The Plough and the Stars, Ariel, Aristocrats, The Gigli Concert, Communion, The Shaughraun and Enlightenment. For Druid he designed The Good Father; for b*spoke Theatre Company, The Drunkard; for Rough Magic Galileo and The Taming of the Shrew; for Landmark Productions Skylight and The Goat. He was also the lighting designer for the international hit, Riverdance.
Rupert was Festival Director of the St. Patrick's Festival from 1995 to 1999 and was a key member of the team that transformed Ireland's national celebrations. From 1998 to 2003 he produced the opening ceremony for the Wexford Opera Festival. He was Creative Director and producer of the Opening Ceremony for the Special Olympics World Summer Games staged in Croke Park in June 2003 and was appointed Creative Director for all the entertainment and ceremonial events surrounding the hosting of the Ryder Cup in Ireland in 2006.
James McConnell (Lights)
James McConnell designed the lighting for Krapp’s Last Tape at BITE: 99 in the Barbican Centre, London and at the New Ambassadors Theatre in 2000. He worked as the assistant lighting designer on the original Beckett festival at the Gate in 1991 and since then has toured with the Beckett Festival to New York and the Barbican Centre, London. In 1997, he toured to the Melbourne Arts festival with Waiting for Godot, Endgame and I’ll Go On. In 2001 he was Associate Lighting Designer for the Pinter season curated by the Gate Theatre at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York. Most recently, he designed the lighting for Eh Joe at the Gate Theatre Dublin as part of the Beckett Centenary Festival last April and also for the revival of Eh Joe at the Duke of York Theatre in London’s West End in June of 2006.
