“Jess Thom is a founding member of Touretteshero, a theatre company that celebrates the inherent creativity and humour in Tourette’s. She is taking on Samuel Beckett’s Not I, a rapidly delivered monologue spokenby a character called Mouth. Jess explains why the text captures her own experience of living with Tourette’s and her mission to make theatre more accessible.”
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On Wednesday 21 March, the Beckett community at the University of Reading welcomes acclaimed actor Lisa Dwan to discuss the process of adapting Beckett’s prose for the theatre. In her 2016 performance of No’s Knife at London’s Old Vic theatre, Dwan confronted both the challenges and the possibilities of adapting Beckett’s prose for performance by a female actor in her staging of excerpts from Texts for Nothing. This discussion of Beckett and adaptation with Lisa Dwan will be followed by a Q&A session.
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Victoria Myers talks to Judy Hegarty Lovett about her work with Gare St Lazare Ireland
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Colette Sheridan: “It is going to be a verbatim performance. But is it very grim? After all, the narrator exists in the mud-dark and ends up in solitude after the other creature disappears. The text has drawn comparisons with Dante’s image of souls gulping mud in the Stygian marsh of the Inferno.”
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The Irish Examiner: “[Stephen Dillane] is in Cork to rehearse for How It Is, a production of Samuel Beckett’s little-known 1962 novel. It has been adapted by Gare St Lazare Players, the Irish theatre company who have been to the fore in interpreting and performing the writer’s work for almost two decades.”
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BBC Radio 4: “Business guru Sir Gerry Robinson was born in Ireland but moved to England in his teens, and he chooses Samuel Beckett, another Irishman who lived away for much of his life – in Paris. Gerry, a late convert to Beckett’s plays, loves him because he’s accepting of the human condition: that we’re all locked in this repetitive pattern. We don’t want to keep on doing the same thing over and over again, but we do. Presenter Matthew Parris is also joined by Jim Knowlson, who was a personal friend of Samuel Beckett for 19 years, and is his authorised biographer. He reveals that Beckett was far from the dour gloomy figure of popular imagination, and was in fact very good company – as long as you didn’t interrupt him when he was watching the rugby on the telly on a Saturday afternoon. Producer Beth O’Dea.”
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In a 2016 interview for BOMB Magazine, Lisa Dwan and Walter Asmus talk to Michael Coffey about their collaboration on Beckett’s late plays
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“[A]ny attempt to get a handle on Beckett takes you to into interesting territory—to classical music, Irish history, Continental philosophy, World War II, abstract painting, the French language. For a quiet man his interests were voracious. Beckett scholarship has ranged far beyond those seminal early essays by Maurice Blanchot and Theodor Adorno and the studies by Ruby Cohn and Lawrence Harvey. Now, with James Knowlson’s authorized biography, the recently released four volumes of letters, and the digital manuscript project going on in Antwerp, the study of his works is vibrant all around the world.”
Read MoreAuthor Lydia Davis was drawn to the simplicity of Beckett’s work at an early age. From: Eat, Drink & Be Literary: Lydia Davis. Moderated by Deborah Treisman.
Read MoreCambridge University Press: “In this interview with Emilie Morin, author of Beckett’s Political Imagination, we discuss what prompted Emilie to write a book on Beckett’s politics, and why Beckett traditionally is not considered to be a political playwright. Emilie also explains how Beckett’s political outlook is reflected in his writing, and she tells us what has surprised her the most when researching for this new book.”
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The Samuel Beckett Society 