Belfast-based playwright Jane Coyle’s Both Sides is to receive its European première in Paris in a new production by the city’s Alchemy Theatre in May.
Originally staged in 2017 as part of Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, it is, says Coyle, “inspired by the works and spirt of Samuel Beckett, who spent most of his adult life in the French capital”.
Coyle also sees the Parisian première as “representing a squaring of the play’s circle” pointing to its first public reading at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris during the Commencez! Beckett Paris 2016 festival.
The split-focus play offers portraits of two women—one, young and down-at-heel watching life go by from the vantage point of a Parisian café, the other a once-glamourous woman in middle-age seeking refuge from her past in Nice. Both lives become intertwined as the burden of their troubling pasts return to haunt their present.
Two Irish actresses—Mia Leahy and Hannah Coyle—will be seen in the production directed by Nathalie Allison.
Both Sides plays at Le Pavé d’Orsay, Paris from May 3–5 and June 14–16.