Arts Over Borders 2018 Brochure

‘Happy Days is democratising Beckett. Devoted fidelity to Beckett’s
vision works here. …this is brave programming’
FINANCIAL TIMES
‘(Happy Days) has become one of the most enthralling festivals in
the cultural calendar. One senses that Beckett himself, who once
wrote of ‘secret spaces where nobody ever comes’ and ‘sites of a
stirring beyond coming and going, of a being so light and free that
it is as the being of nothing’’, would have approved.
THE OBSERVER
‘Musicians, poets, actors, performers, artists, talkers, doers and
watchers celebrate his life and works on land and beneath the
ground; on water, by water and under soft rain. In this island town,
reflections and precipitation blur boundaries
between earth and sky’
THE OBSERVER
‘…artistic excellence of the highest order. Far from being a
po-faced affair, its programmes are laced with wit and some
degree of eccentricity’
THE STAGE
‘Happy Days is a festival filled with good surprises… (it) deserves
extra credit for reviving May B – a gem of European dance theatre
that deserves to be much more widely known’.
THE GUARDIAN
‘a festive and buoyant atmosphere that works strangely well with
Beckett’s famously dark, difficult and often mordantly humorous
oeuvre…an admirable balance between a focus on the writer’s own
pieces, and on other artistic events with associations to Beckett and
his work’.
NEW YORK TIMES
‘…must rank as the most paradoxical arts festival on Earth. A
chance to soul-search and sightsee at the same time. Can you have
your Beckettian cake and eat it? Once a year, I think, it’s allowed’.
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH