Word: beckett
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Dress rehearsals are rarely reviewed. But this one in Paris was extraordinary theater in its own right: Samuel Beckett collaborating as director with his friend of many years, Irish Actor Jack MacGowran, in a two-hour, one-man performance called Beginning to End, assembled from Beckett's novels and cemented together with passages of his poetry, radio and stage plays. The two have extracted from Beckett's life work the single figure of the Beckett tramp, Fool without his Lear. Now the tramp was confronting his maker in rapt concentration. Intense and difficult listening: this Beckett, like...
...next evening, MacGowran, now alone, was able with Beckett's music to still even the inimitable rudeness of a Parisian first night. He did it by a bravura demonstration of Beckett's simplest quality, often obscured by reverence for his profundity: namely, that he is another of the great Irish compulsive talkers. There is a necessary element of the barroom cadger in a role like MacGowran's. Suddenly a bony hand grips the listener's forearm, the bleary eye comes close, the words begin...
...Watt, Embers, Krapp's Last Tape and Waiting for Godot, but no seams show. There is an incident with a white horse, another with a girl, both long ago. There is an anecdote about two old men, deep trouble, silent snowy night, also long ago. The present, for Beckett's tramp, seems a stretch of shingle beach, or a corner in Caliban's cell. There is an outrageously shaggy story about the arrangement of 16 pebbles in four pockets, which grows with mad logic from the very gleam with which MacGowran first so casually confides the notion...
MacGowran's cunning anthology of Beckett is at root the celebration of man's fear and lust for death. "Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringlv. The gravedigger puts on the forceps," or, "Oh I know I too shall cease and be as when I was not yet . . . Often now my murmur falters and dies and I weep for happiness as I go along and for love of this old earth that has carried me so long and whose uncomplainingness will soon be mine...
Died. Arthur Adamov, 61, Russian-born playwright of the absurd; by his own hand (an overdose of barbiturates); in Paris. As a young author, writing to expose his "anguish, masochism, perversions and preoccupations," Adamov turned out plays (La Parodie, 1947; L'Invasion, 1949) that earned him ranking with Beckett and lonesco as a founder of the theater of the absurd. His best-known work was 1955's Le Ping-Pong, an angry indictment of man's dehumanization by machines. "Life is not absurd," he finally admitted. "It is difficult, just very difficult...