Word: krapp
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...None did so more persistently and penetratingly than Samuel Beckett, the Irish-born writer whose death was revealed last week in his adopted city, Paris, where for decades he lived in an apartment overlooking the exercise yard of a prison. In such plays as Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape; in novels, including Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable; in verse and essays and the script for a wordless Buster Keaton film, Beckett distilled despair...
Through the '40s, Beckett kept writing, shifting, for reasons he never explained, from English to French as the language in which he created. He remained obscure until a spectacular burst from 1951 to 1953, in which Godot and three novels appeared to acclaim. The plays Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days followed by 1960. Thereafter he produced fewer and fewer, shorter and shorter, bleaker and bleaker pieces but never quite lapsed into the ultimate despair of artistic silence. His last work, Stirrings Still, a fiction of less than 2,000 words, was published in March...
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...