No End to Enderby
Graham Eatough and Stephen Sutcliffe
To mark the 100th birthday of Manchester-born Anthony Burgess this year, artist Stephen Sutcliffe and theatre director Graham Eatough collaborate to explore the writer’s series of Enderby novels in a new film, No End to Enderby.
Burgess’ alter ego, the poet named Enderby, has been described as the writer’s greatest character. This filmic adaptation of the first and last chapters of the series spotlights the cultural figure of the artist and probes ideas of authenticity and posterity.
The first film, Inside Mr Enderby, tells the story of a school trip from the future to visit the fictional poet Enderby in his 1960s bedsit and offers a darkly comic study of the stark reality of a living, struggling artist compared to the stale posterity of the set-text poet. The second film, The Muse, follows Paley, a young literary historian of the future, who travels to a parallel universe in order to meet Shakespeare and establish if, and how, he wrote all the plays attributed to him.
This ambitious commission draws together Graham Eatough’s ongoing exploration of theatricality in the creation of meaning in contemporary culture with Stephen Sutcliffe’s interest in British literary and popular culture of the 1960s and 70s and his preoccupation with the self-doubt of the artist.
The film proposal was awarded the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award in 2015 and has been jointly commissioned by the Whitworth, The University of Manchester, Manchester International Festival and Glasgow International 2018, and co-produced with the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester. It has received funding from the National Lottery through Creative Scotland, further support from Outset Scotland, and developed in partnership with LUX / Artists' Moving Image.
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Artist Talk: Graham Eatough and Stephen Sutcliffe
17 August, 6pm
Free, no need to book
No End to Enderby artists Graham Eatough and Stephen Sutcliffe will be joined in conversation with Dr Andrew Biswell, Director of International Anthony Burgess Foundation, to discuss their new 2-part film that plays tribute to Manchester literary hero Anthony Burgess.
