Word: beckett
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...China's Cultural Revolution, before moving to the U.S. on a scholarship and, eventually, winning the National Book Award for his novel of a lovelorn Chinese army officer, Waiting. In his nonfiction debut, The Writer as Migrant, Ha Jin explores attempts by transplanted writers - among them Conrad, Nabokov and Beckett - to find connections between their adopted homes and native lands...
This true-life joke is repeated in Charlie Kaufman's film about a madly ambitious theater man, Synecdoche, New York. So people have been anticipating the death of one of the 20th century's most revered and mysterious playwrights - the near equal to his fellow Nobelist Samuel Beckett, with plays that achieved far more commercial success than Beckett's - for quite some time. Now they can stop. Pinter, who had long been ailing from cancer, died on Christmas Eve at 78. (See the top 10 plays and musicals...
...Homecoming (1966), Old Times (1971), No Man's Land (1975) and Betrayal (1971), Pinter radically altered and energized the traditional dynamic of the stage. It was no longer simply the place where people spoke; it was where not speaking could be far more suggestive, dangerous, theatrical, eloquent. Like Beckett, he renounced the flossy rhetoric of such postwar playwrights as Christopher Fry and Jean Anouilh for a back-to-basics starkness - a two-men-on-a-stage simplicity that Aeschylus would have admired. In its citation, the Swedish Academy said Pinter "restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space...
...reached an early maturity with his second full-length play, The Caretaker, which the Lord Chamberlain, the British censor, called "a piece of incoherence in the manner of Samuel Beckett" - unintentional high praise indeed. It's the tale of an old homeless man, Jenkins (played onstage and in the excellent 1963 film version by Donald Pleasance), who is brought to the home of the simple-minded Aston (Robert Shaw) and his conniving brother Mick (Alan Bates). Jenkins begins as the ratty interloper but becomes sympathetic by default as the brothers play their mind games. The plot fits the contours...
...Though it was not his final performance (he did Beckett's monologue Krapp's Last Tape from a motorized wheelchair at the Royal Court in 2006), the Nobel speech was the last great play of a man who knew the value of silence, the importance of speaking...