As part of the After Beckett : Festival Beckett/Not Beckett taking place in Bordeaux from 9-11 December 2026, this latest Beckett Brunch invites reflections, creative responses, and short papers on contemporary engagements with and rewritings of Samuel Beckett’s work, over thirty-five years after his death. This event will particularly engage with translation as a process of transmission, with new plays inspired by Beckett, and with questions of canon, heritage, and creation.
Following the spirit of the previous Brunches and its founder Dúnalith Bird, created to bring together research and creation in a collaborative (and croissant-filled!) environment, we encourage proposals from academics, doctoral students, translators, practitioners, playwrights, playwrights, performers, and artists whose work engages with these questions of transmission, rewriting, and creation “after Beckett”. Presentations may take the form of a critical reflection, an account of an artistic creation or production, or a piece of creative research, and we welcome other original engagements with the themes of this festival.
Proposals for interventions of 10 minutes maximum, may consider
- The transmission of Beckett’s work on stage
- Rewritings, translations, and contemporary theatrical adaptations of Beckett’s texts
- Beckett and new drama
- Collaborative pedagogies and practices in relation to Beckett’s dramatic works
Proposals, of 200 words maximum, as well as a short biographical note (100 words maximum), should be sent to Pascale Sardin and Dúnlaith Bird before September 6th 2026.
During the festival, KOIMETE will present their interpretation of Not Beckett, an ensemble of five new short plays in French. These plays, written by femme-identifying and non-binary playwrights of diversified Irish descent, offer innovative reappropriations of Beckett’s dramatic work. The playwrights both engage with the aesthetics, themes, and forms of Beckett’s work, and move away from them, allowing new, contemporary voices to emerge, speaking, to paraphrase Come and Go, both of “the old days,” and “of what comes after”.
The Samuel Beckett Society 