Happy Days

Happy Days Festival does Beckett and Brexit (1-6 August)

Soapbox on July 30, 2018, 1:58 pm

| Readers 729

Waiting for Godot on the border, billboards and cross-border chess: the 6th Happy Days International Beckett Festival takes stock ahead of Brexit. The first line of Samuel Beckett’s famous play reads: ”Nothing to be done“. The characters go round in circles, both verbally and physically, are disorientated, are forever waiting for something to happen but it never does. They want to move forward but instead remain fixed in the same spot. Sound familiar?

“I think that Northern Ireland needs great cultural events for an international audience”

Pete Baker on August 28, 2012, 2:20 pm

| Readers 53

The Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival makes the pages of the New York Times. From the New York Times article The Happy Days festival has a budget of £300,000 (about $474,400), of which the greatest part comes from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, with smaller contributions from London 2012 and the local Enniskillen council. “On the one hand, it’s a very tight budget for the diversity and scale of the program,” Mr. …

Oh les beaux jours!

Pete Baker on August 24, 2012, 3:06 pm

| Readers 57

As the Irish Times notes, the inaugural five-day Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival is under way. Launched yesterday by the Northern Ireland Tourism Minister, the DUP’s Arlene Foster, as part of the NI2012 “Our time, our place” programme. Funded by the NI Tourist Board, Arts Council of NI National Lottery funds, the London 2012 Olympic Festival, and Fermanagh District Council, it’s promising to be “the world’s first annual festival to celebrate the work and influence of Nobel Prize-winning writer Samuel …