Word: beckett
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Like Pindar to some lesser bard. Let me some sound advice award To Beckett: Stick thou to thy last, Reverence the masters of the past. And listen! O thou wayward Muse Who first let Beckett on the loose: Small habits, when pursued betimes, Soon reach the dignity of crimes. Michael Ryan...
...Lovers of the drama are indebted to your invaluable T.E. Kalem for finally concluding that the plays of Samuel Beckett are a "rum show." Would that he could convince producers, other members of his profession, little-theater boards of directors and, especially, the snobs of college drama departments that making the absurd absurd is absurd...
...frame, "tied up," as Hesse put it, "like a hospital bandage." A long loop of metal emerges from one corner, traces a wambling arc in the air, flops on the floor and creeps back into the opposite corner. It is articulately made but looks stumbling and impoverished, like a Beckett tramp. It still seems daring, but was vastly more so six years ago, when Minimalism still imposed its demands of geometry, scalelessness and high industrial polish on most new American sculpture...
...Without Words, in which Cronyn mimes the frustrations of a man lost in the desert who is variously tempted by water bottles that elude his grasp and ropes that foil his attempts to hang himself. The character is a kind of vaudeville Sisyphus, and one can thank Beckett for the small favor that the playlet lasts only ten minutes. Not I lasts 15. It is the seemingly final verbal spasm of a woman of 70 (Tandy) who recounts fragments of her life and concludes that even her suffering does not add up to much of anything. Only the woman...
Despite a querulous vocal pitch, Jessica Tandy endows these tiny marine skeletons of drama with shimmering glints of life, and Hume Cronyn brings a gusto to his roles that adds flesh to their bones. But their admirable efforts are largely wasted. Life is a rum show, Beckett keeps on telling us. So, alas, are his plays...