    Production photos by Pascal Victor/ArtComArt except bottom right, by Ernesto Rodrigues Agencia Estado |
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ABOUT BECKETTBeckett was a perfectionist, but can one be a perfectionist without an intuition of perfection? Today, with the passage of time, we see how false were the labels first stuck on Beckett – despairing, negative, pessimistic. Indeed, he peers into the filthy abyss of human existence. His humour saves him and us from falling in, he rejects theories, dogmes, that offer pious consolations, yet his life was a constant, aching search for meaning. He situates human beings exactly as he knew them in darkness. Constantly they gaze through windows, in themselves, in others, outwards, sometimes upwards, into the vast unknown. He shares their uncertainties, their pain. But when he discovered theatre, it became a possibility to strive for unity, a unity in which sound, movement, rhythm, breath and silence all come together in a single rightness. This was the merciless demand he made on himself – an unattainable goal that fed his need for perfection. Thus he enters the rare passage that links the ancient Greek theatre through Shakespeare to the present day in an uncompromising celebration of one who looks truth in the face, unknown, terrible, amazing … - Peter Brook |
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PERSPECTIVES“Man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be devoid of purpose,” said Nietzsche, and he took it for granted that his readers would grasp the implication: in reality man just is devoid of purpose. The trouble is that while one can assent to that intellectually it is almost impossible to assent to it emotionally—which, of course, is what the aphorism says. Yet for the writer who truly does so, what is there left to do? To embody his insight in a work of art is to deny it even as he asserts it, since art means form and form means purpose. That has been the problem Beckett has struggled with from the beginning of his career. Gabriel Josipovici, reviewing Waiting for Godot |
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| B. – I speak of an art turning from [the plane of the feasible] in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.D. – And preferring what?B. – The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.Samuel Beckett, “Three Dialogues” | |
| The farther [Beckett] goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, way outs, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and more he grinds my nose in the s**t the more I am grateful to him.Harold Pinter, letter to a friend | |
| The opening line of [Come and Go,] ‘When did we three last meet?’ recalls, of course, the meeting of the three witches in Macbeth. But Beckett’s three women look back on an unfulfilled past, as well as forward to a doomed future—their own rather than that of any other person in the drama. No particular period of past time is alluded to, although with their rather precise, archaic mode of speech and the somber uniformity and muted colouring of their drab costumes they seem like middle-class ladies from the recent past. Their names, Flo, Vi and Ru recall flowers (Flora, Violet and Rue), the latter reminding one of Ophelia’s madness scene with Laertes in Hamlet. Superficially they may make us think of the Three Graces as they link hands, but, more precisely, they resemble in appearance the three mothers in Fritz Lang’s ‘M’, a film much loved by Beckett.James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull |
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| The “more” is not just for the voice. [It’s] for the rocking as well. You want the “more.” The “more” is to get the rocking. I want to be rocked. I want to be lulled, because who is doing the rocking? Your memory. Your Mom. . . . the “more” is: I want to be rocked, by the voice and by the chair. I want to be rocked to sleep, rocked off to sleep, by this memory. The memory is going to rock me off. So you’re asking, the baby is saying, “Do this to me, don’t stop.” And it is getting a little bit less able, your voice—you—are being a little bit less able to do that each time.Alan Schneider, directing Billie Whitelaw in Rockaby | |
| Economy—concentration upon essentials—is one of the hallmarks of supreme artistry. Throughout his life as a writer Beckett has striven to reach the utmost degree of economy and density. Dramatic forms of presentation tend to be more economical than mere narrative, for here the images, which need to be described in discursive prose, can be made concrete and instantly perceptible on the stage. Drama of the kind Beckett writes is poetry of concrete, three-dimensional stage images, complex metaphors communicable in a flash of visual intuitive understanding.Martin Esslin, “A Theatre of Stasis” | |
| SAMUEL BECKETT was born in 1906 in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, to a middle-class Protestant family of comfortable means. He attended the prestigious Portora Royal School and Trinity College, where he excelled in French and Italian, then taught briefly at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. There he moved in the circle of artists and writers around James Joyce and began writing prose and poetry. He traveled widely in Europe in the 1930s—including Germany under the Nazis—and ultimately settled in Paris for the rest of his life. In 1946, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his work with the French Resistance.Feeling that WW II had wasted his precious time and energies, Beckett withdrew into creative seclusion afterwards, producing a torrent of astonishingly powerful and original prose, including the introspective, formally challenging, darkly hilarious novel trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable.These books—written in French, in which Beckett said it was easier to write “without style”—were ignored or dismissed when they appeared, then later hailed as paradigm-changing masterpieces and literary landmarks.Beckett first turned to drama as a break from the novel-writing he considered his real work, but it soon became much more than a sideline. The international success of Waiting for Godot—his play about two tramp-like characters filling time while waiting for someone who never comes, premiered in 1953—made him a public figure and ensured his continued involvement in theater despite his shyness and distaste for publicity. He went on to refine his dramatic vision in Endgame, Happy Days, Krapp’s Last Tapeand other plays that featured similarly derelict, castoff characters trapped in starkly desolate and symbolic situations. These works permanently altered the Western world’s perception of the nature and purpose of dramatic art. Beckett received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.After the 1960s, Beckett pushed his exploration of theatrical minimalism still further. His later plays, such as Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu and Not I, are masterpieces of concision: short, intimate, starkly metaphorical works in which punctiliously sculptured stage images are juxtaposed with flows of words that bear richly ambiguous relationships to the images. In the same period, he experimented with precisely delineated, mysteriously cyclical movement patterns in works such as Come and Go, Footfalls and What Where. Beckett died in 1989, widely considered the 20th century’s greatest dramatist. |
