Word: beckett
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
ENDGAME is Samuel Beckett at his best, conjuring his bleak, entropic universe out of the simple words and incessant pauses of characters struggling to stay alive while "something is taking its course." The problem with performing Beckett is to evoke this sense of futile (but constant) struggle while not losing the attention of an audience which has come, not to be plunged into a sense of futility, but to be entertained. The Mather House production of Endgame succeeds admirably in solving this problem...
...Nell, and especially Paul Kleinman as Nagg do fine caricatures of senile old people. The only weak member of the cast is Montague Gammon as Clov. In general his Clov expresses only a whining weariness with everything about his life. However (and here again is the difficulty with acting Beckett) whining weariness can grate on an audience unless it manages to be expressive of meaning beyond sheer weariness. Gammon is not quite able to convey this, and as a result his characterization occasionally becomes tiresome...
...Kalem's review of Waiting for Godot [Feb. 15] was extraordinarily cogent, searching and just. Confronted with Beckett's grim, masochistic hopelessness, your reviewer felt impelled to cite history's obvious lesson: man has never stopped, only suffered interruptions, in his advance to a more humane world. This is reality...
...brooding melancholy. They are the unofficial patron saints of English, and it is these saints of the word whom the distinguished Irish actress Siobhan McKenna is honoring in a superior one-woman show called Here Are Ladies. Selections for the off-Broadway program are drawn from Yeats and Synge, Beckett and Joyce, as well as others; they all mirror women as seen through Irish eyes...
...SAMUEL BECKETT struck upon the primary purpose of art in the twentieth century when he observed that "we always find something to give us the impression we exist." Art, facing an increasingly fragmented epoch growing less certain of itself, must maintain a running struggle to illuminate "impressions" of human existence from artist to audience. Sometimes, these impressions merely state the quiet yet dramatic fact of human existence, like the paintings on the walls of Spain's Altamira caves, or else they can boldly declare individual existence with the sincerity of a Roman bust...