Word: beckett
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...problem of the 19th century was the death of God," say France's existentialist intellectuals. "The problem of the aoth century is the death of man." Most of the writings of 50-year-old, Paris-dwelling Irish Expatriate Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot) are opaque obituaries of humanity. Written in a kind of Joycean code, they are further complicated by a neo-Cartesian quest for identity, the logic of which runs: "I cannot think and do not know, therefore I am-or am I?" In his play Waiting for Godot, this intellectual razzle-dazzle bewildered theatergoers, delighted highbrows...
...short, and Homo sapiens, of course) and his wife, who worry about whether their teen-age son will pass some sort of exam. Another is about a farm family that happens to bury a mule. Even though Malone becomes Saposcat temporarily, these episodes dribble into nothingness in keeping with Beckett's conviction that life is essentially nonsense...
Castaway's Vision. Such vitality as this strange and fitful novel possesses comes from Beckett's images of defeat, e.g., a bum transfixed on a city bench, a dog too weak to follow his master's steps, and from his hero's sometimes poignant inability to cope with events or comprehend reality: "I say living without knowing what it is. I tried to live without knowing what I was trying. Perhaps I have lived after all, without knowing." As a craftsman, Beckett tries to convey the chaotic by means of the incoherent, and fails. He possesses...
...season's most creative new play was British Writer Enid Bagnold's witty, elegantly savage The Chalk Garden. Even more finely tempered was Tiger at the Gates, Jean Giraudoux's humanely ironic lament for the Trojan and all subsequent wars. Audiences might argue whether Samuel Beckett's puzzling, plotless Waiting for Godot was profound art or a mere philosophic quiz show; less arguable was the neatness of its writing, the desolation of its mood. In Lillian Hellman's sharp adaptation, Jean Anouilh's The Lark proved a lively stage piece; under Tyrone Guthrie...
...Broadway production is enormously the richer for Comic Bert Lahr's brilliant playing of the more confused of the two tramps. He endows the role with a clown's wistful bewilderment, evocative capers and broad but beautifully precise touches of comedy. Far more than Beckett, Lahr suggests all dislocated humanity in one broken-down man. Others in the cast, however competent, seem a little too studied grotesque or Middle European in style. None the less, Godot has its own persistent fascination. For once in a way, at least, in a theater rife with pointless hurry-scurry, they distinctly...