He must go on

After college, the duo went to Paris and joined the Gare St Lazare Players, a semi-professional theatre company run by an American expat. After five years, they headed to London where they established the Irish branch of Gare St Lazare. The couple now live in Paris with their three children, but the theatre company is a touring one, with Hegarty directing and Lovett acting. Since 1995, Gare St Lazare Ireland has performed in 60 Irish venues and more than 25 countries, primarily with the plays and adapted prose of Ireland’s greatest modernist playwright.

Travelling the world spreading the gospel of Beckett is terribly romantic when you’re footloose and fancy free, but a little trickier as fortysomething parents. When we meet at a Dublin bar — Lovett is in Ireland for a Beckett summer school at Trinity College — his youngest daughter, Lux, 12, is sitting quietly in the corner with a laptop and headphones. Hegarty is in California and Lovett is here; fortunately, the children are on their summer holidays.

“They’ve been in the wings of all sorts of situations and places,” says the 46-year-old, placing his straw hat — more Joyce than Beckett — on an adjacent chair. “They get a buzz out of it — New York, who wouldn’t?”

The Lovetts have three shows in impressive venues there during October and November. It coincides with the Halloween break in French schools.

Gare St Lazare suffered a similar funding loss to many Irish counterparts when the Arts Council switched its focus from regular funding to project-by-project grants. The loss was “fundamental”, says Lovett, and meant that expansion plans had to be shelved.

Yet while the budget of Culture Ireland has almost halved in the past seven years, Gare St Lazare hasn’t been affected when it comes to international support. The New York trip has received a €5,000 grant, for example. The company being based outside Ireland hasn’t been an issue. As Lovett explains, they tend to tour the work within Ireland and then take it elsewhere.

Bringing Beckett to regional theatre isn’t quite the tough sell people might think. “They’re not swinging out of the rafters, I’m not pretending that,” says the actor. “In Tinahely [in Wicklow], I remember a guy saying to me, ‘We are so spoilt here. We had you guys tonight, Wednesday night we had one of the best known New York jazz trombonists, the week before we had [the poet] Michael Longley.’ There was a time when a lot more touring was going on.

“The reality is if you’re doing theatre and you don’t have a name off the telly, you’re relying on the name of the writer or the company. We definitely built a following over 20 years; there’d be a loyalty and there’d be people saying, ‘You have to see those guys — we saw them last time.’”

Lovett has thought about establishing himself as “a name off the telly”. He has worked outside Gare St Lazare — in RTE’s Charlie, a play with Druid and a recent stint on ITV series Endeavour, about Inspector Morse’s early years. But it is rare for him or Hegarty to move beyond Beckett.

“The tricky thing is if you became ‘a figure from the telly’ and people come to see you because of that, the next thing they’re saying, ‘I wasn’t necessarily counting on the philosophical comedy,’” Lovett laughs. “So I don’t know.”

Lovett, whose younger brother Louis is also an actor, believes theatre is going through a transition. In its heyday, before television, there was little competition. Now there are home-entertainment systems, high-tech cinema, streaming and the internet.

“At a certain point, people have to say, what can theatre do that cannot be done by other media? And should we then explore what the theatre has, which is a live human-in-the-room element?” he says. “In the old days, you wrote plays to deal with issues. We still do that today, absolutely, but if the issue is that important, you might think you’d get a wider audience on the telly.

“Coronation Street, EastEnders deal with immediate stuff that’s important to people’s lives. They don’t deal with big moral, philosophical questions, but movies [do]... We, ‘the theatre’, need to recognise what qualities only theatre has and concentrate on them. So that people will say, ‘Well, I can get that from the telly or the internet, but I can get this from the theatre — and that’s what I’m after.’”

Such reasoning suggests naturalistic, plot-driven theatre has to go. The world will never appear as real on stage as it does on screen. “You do look at a stage set where they’ve reproduced with incredible detail, say, a 1950s study in Pennsylvania, and you’re like, ‘OK . . . ’ I think it needs looking at,” says Lovett. “I’m not saying all that needs to be thrown out, but we need to talk about it.”

Beckett’s plays will survive the transition. His work has been adapted to screen but it’s never as good as viewing it in the flesh, on stage. “Take something like Not I,” says Lovett, referring to Beckett’s one-woman show in which only fast-moving lips are visible. “It’s very different on the screen to it floating up there in the dark, and us all in the dark.

“A lot of his stuff is three-dimensional installation. Any playwright writes a three-dimensional event that takes place in a time and space, but very often people just concentrate on the words, whereas Beckett very much wrote a blueprint for an event that occurs.”

People expect Lovett to be an expert in all things Beckett. While he knows the writing inside out, he doesn’t read the biographies, and has only dipped into the letters. “I feel that, as an interpretive artist, I need to deal with him as an artist,” says Lovett. “I can see in his works moments which may have been drawn from his life, but, for me, the experience is less than what he made of it in his writing.”

Gare St Lazare Ireland are artists in residence at Everyman, Cork, from September; garestlazareireland.com