Oh My Godot (OMG!)

About

This Easter, a new event will begin in and around Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, where Ireland’s Nobel Laureate Samuel Beckett went to school.  Oh My Godot! (OMG!) takes its inspiration from a single work, Waiting for Godot, and its structure from the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.  Beckett was born on Good Friday 13 April 1906.
 
Building on ten years of success of the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival (2012 – 2022) OMG! will feature two upland theatrical performed readings, six in-conversation events and an immense town-sized game of chess.
 
While not a political event, OMG! will mirror the signatory structure of the Good Friday Agreement, specifically bringing together writers and artists from both cultural traditions in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain. It will explore the role of cultural and creative heritage in places of conflict and how they may be involved with forgiveness, recovery from trauma and the imaginative regeneration of communities. 
 
OMG! will be bookended by outdoor rural landscape performances of Waiting For Godot, for which audiences will be taken by bus to secret locations, making their way through fields, meadows and hillsides to the performance sites.
 
OMG!’s programme of six Themed Local Conversations will be directed by notable quotations from Waiting for Godot and curated to involve the wider Northern Ireland community in conversations with visiting writers, actors and speakers.
 
The play’s opening line, ‘Nothing to be done’, along with its response, ‘…be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything’, will inspire a four-way discussion, chaired by Fermanagh based writer Carlo Gebler, between two writers from Northern Ireland, Jan Carson and Eoin McNamee, and one each from the Republic and Great Britain: Jane Clarke and Alex Clark. This event will begin at 6pm on Good Friday, the time of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, and will be followed at 8.30pm with a Beckett Birthday Bash in Blakes bar, Enniskillen, marking the time of the writer’s birth at 8.48pm.
 
On the mornings of the two weekends, Oh My Godot! will celebrate Beckett’s chess-obsession by playing out twelve ceremonial chess moves across the streets of Enniskillen town, using a large, 32-piece sculpted bronze Beckett Chess Set by artist Alan Milligan and featuring the chess-related characters from ‘Waiting for Godot’.