Lisa Dwan, internationally acclaimed Irish actress, will give a talk entitled “Performing Beckett” on Friday, September 16 at 4:30 p.m. at the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street. Part of the 2016-17 Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University, the event is free and open to the public.

In “Performing Beckett,” Dwan will discuss her recent performances of Samuel Beckett’s plays, which have met critical acclaim and have sold out at venues from London’s Royal Court Theatre to New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music. Dwan’s one-woman show has featured three of Beckett’s works: Rockaby, Footfalls, and Not I. She has been performing Beckett since 2005 and was coached by Beckett’s muse, Billie Whitelaw, who collaborated with the author for 25 years and for whom he wrote some of his most experimental plays.

Internationally acclaimed Irish actress Lisa Dwan. Photo courtesy Lisa Dwan.

Lisa Dwan has worked extensively in theatre, film, and television both internationally and in her native Ireland. Her film credits include Oliver Twist, Tailor of Panama, and Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain. In 2012, she adapted, produced, and performed the critically acclaimed one-woman play Beside the Sea at the Southbank Centre and on tour, and starred in Goran Bregović’s Margot, Diary of an Unhappy Queen at the Barbican. She recently performed in Ramin Gray’s production of Illusions by Ivan Viripaev at the Bush Theatre. Originally from Coosan, Athlone, County Westmeath, Ireland, she currently lives in London.

The Fund for Irish Studies, chaired by Princeton Professor Clair Wills, provides all Princeton students, and the community at large, with a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, politics and economics not only of Ireland but of “Ireland in the world.”

Information about the Fund for Irish Studies can be found at fis.princeton.edu. Other events currently scheduled in the 2016-2017 series include:

• Brian Ó hAirt and Len Graham present “The Road Taken: Songs, Music and Dance from the Irish Tradition” on October 14
• Iarla Ó Lionáird, a 2016-17 Princeton Belknap Teaching Fellow in the Council of the Humanities, and Donnacha Dennehy, Assistant Professor of Music at Princeton, will discuss and perform excerpts from their new opera Hunger on November 18
• Philosoper Richard Kearney and artist/curator Sheila Gallagher present a multimedia talk, “Twinsome Minds: Recovering 1916 in Images and Stories” on December 9