Word: beckett
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Each time a Samuel Beckett play has a world première, the world turns a deeper shade of black. Once his people were hopefully waiting for Godot; later they crouched in garbage cans in Endgame; Krapp was moribund while listening to his last tape; then in Happy Days, the female lead kept sinking deeper and deeper into a mound. Now Beckett's characters have gone all the way to hell in a play called Play, which has just opened in West Germany...
Solemn Zeal. Unlike Sartre's No Exit, where hell becomes a perpetuation of emotions suffered in life, Beckett's Play presents its posthumans as essentially bored, driven solely by an excessive urge to repeat themselves, as they gradually spill out what proves to be a conventional story about a man, his wife and his mistress. The urge is so strong, in fact, that the second half of the play is a verbatim recapitulation of the first half. Nonetheless, at the opening night curtain, a scattering of hisses and boos was obliterated by eager applause...
Most of these plays are comedies of horrors, but all of them, in strange and curious ways, beat with a quivering sense of present-day life. The wave of off-Broadway excitement and support for such playwrights as Beckett (Krapp's Last Tape) and Genet (The Balcony) made possible the precarious on-Broadway beachheads of Pinter (The Caretaker) and Ionesco (Rhinoceros). Genet, who is less an absurdist than a perversely erotic symbolist poet of the theater, is a perfect example of the kind of playwright Broadway will still not touch, to its considerable loss. His The Blacks, now well...
...down-to-the-Villagers. But what was fundamentally wrong with the play remains fundamentally wrong in the film it is not life, it is not art, it is not interesting. Philosophically, it is an uninspired restatement of Waiting for Godot; esthetically, it is just a drop in the Beckett...
Nevertheless, the Neo-Realists are serving a purpose in trying to re-examine dreary literary habits, to rework the weary forms, the traditional plots, to stand time on its head and cut capers-as Ionesco, Beckett and Gelber have done in the theater. Whatever results finally, readers at least can be grateful that Neo-Realism's Big Three have discarded as outworn one increasingly obnoxious habit of the standard novelists. They do not bother to describe sex in morbid detail. That alone, if it catches on, could set the novel ahead ten years...