Word: krapp
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...Though it was not his final performance (he did Beckett's monologue Krapp's Last Tape from a motorized wheelchair at the Royal Court in 2006), the Nobel speech was the last great play of a man who knew the value of silence, the importance of speaking...
...friend, who passed it along to others until it landed in the hands of Stephanie Hunziger in Frankfurt, who's been my German agent ever since. She arranged for a production of it--in German--in West Berlin in 1959, on a double bill with Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. The reviews were favorable, word traveled to New York, and in January 1960 some people put it on in New York, where it ran for 311/42 years...
...shut up. The women, reminiscent of Beckett's Dublin youth, chatter on about postnuclear sunlight (Happy Days) or adulterous affairs (Play)--what's Gaelic for yenta? The men ponder the efficacy of torture (Rough for Theatre II, What Where), the memory of a mother's last days (Krapp's Last Tape, Footfalls). Their dialogue often sounds like bumper stickers for the clinically depressed: "Can there be misery loftier than mine?" asks Hamm in Endgame. But it is also savagely, and savingly, comic. As Beckett knew, all hope is comic. So is the search for meaning. So too, perhaps, is writing...
...homeland. Beckett tortured actors--burying them in hillsides or trash cans, reducing them to mouths or silence--and loved them too, by writing roles so concentrated, in settings so austere, that the performance is the play. And here some wonderful actors (Rosaleen Linehan in Happy Days, David Kelly in Krapp's Last Tape, Barry McGovern in Godot and Endgame) made two weeks of wonderful theater...
Beckett's images have transfixed countless theatergoers, who watched the tramps in Godot wait for a savior who never comes, or heard the old man in Krapp's Last Tape review recorded fragments of his life as he murmurs, over and over, "Spool," or shared the haplessness of the elderly couple in Endgame as they face the end of the world while encased in trash cans. Beyond his own art, Beckett shaped the vision of countless others. They emulated, if never equaled, his simplicity of means, philosophical daring and ability to engage vast ideas in tiny trickles of closely guarded...