A novel event to mark the sixtieth anniversary of Samuel Beckett’s wedding to Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil is to be held in Folkestone, where the original ceremony took place. Running each day from 4-9 June, what is described as ‘an outdoor promenade event’ will include three specially commissioned works from Helen Oyeyemi, Rupert Thomson and Eimear McBride…
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The 2021 Beckett Brunch will take place on-line from Trinity College Dublin this Saturday, April 24, following its postponement last year, The bi-lingual event, founded and co-ordinated by Dúnlaith Bird since its inception, has been held in Paris until now and has always aimed at attracting as broad an audience as possible. In keeping with…
Read MoreThe conference Beckett and Italy, originally scheduled for last year, will now take place virtually on 24-26 May from “Sapienza” Universita di Roma. It will feature keynotes from Enoch Brater, Annamaria Cascetta, Carla Locatelli, John McCourt, Margaret Pfister and Dirk Van Hulle, as well as a special showing of two films by S. E. Gontarski.…
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The death has been announced of Anne Atik, author and close friend of Samuel Beckett’s. Along with her husband, the painter Avigdor Arikha and her two daughters, Alba and Noga, the family were frequent hosts to Beckett in their home in Paris. Her book How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett (1991) recounts the…
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On 12 February, Cal Revely-Calder began his critique of the current state of Beckett studies by allowing readers of the Times Literary Supplement to drop their jaws at the bad behaviour that can go on at academic conferences. The essay made its revelation broadly in the name of ‘care’ – care for the work of an author…
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Clockwise from top: Katherine Wess, Nadia Louar, Jonathan Basile, and Brenda O’Connell As with all events in the recent calendar, the annual MLA convention has had to be reconfigured to accommodate the inability of attendees to travel and present. However, given that all papers will now be delivered remotely, there is a greater opportunity for…
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Inside this issue The second issue of the Beckett Circle to be posted in the time of pandemic bears the scars of the community’s endurance of uncertainty and loss. As performance, in its normal sense has disappeared, we hear from practitioners Sarah Jane Scaife and Cathal Quinn about their attempts to overcome the restricted environment.…
Read MoreA call for papers for the first ever wholly online Beckett conference. Samuel Beckett and the Anthropocene will take place at/from Trinity College Dublin on 4-5 December, 2020. Full details further cfp details are available here and the participation application can be found here. Confirmed Keynotes are Prof. Anna McMullan (University of Reading) and Prof.…
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“This issue covers performances in the US (among them the Happy Days Renaissance Theaterworks production in downtown Milwaukee and Richard Sullivan Jr.’s Waiting for Godot in Providence, RI), Australia (Mark Byron reviews the Red Line Productions’ staging of Krapp’s Last Tape at the Old Fitz Theatre in Sydney), London, Paris and Dublin. We have rich resources to rethink the Beckett oeuvre in the context of contemporary music, as the Farmleigh Music and Arts festival and the What is the Word… concert organised by Benjamin Dwyer at the Centre Culturel Irlandaise in Paris show. A panel on the Battle of Ideas Festival at the Barbican, the role played by Beckett in shaping the “Fail Better” series of the Poet in the City at Wilton’s Music Hall in London, and an account of number of symposia keep demonstrating Beckett’s continuous cultural importance…”
— Extract from the joint President’s Address from Daniela Caselli (sitting president) and Laura Salisbury (president elect).
Read MoreFor a limited period, the publisher ASP is offering 3 for the price of 2 on their range of companion volumes to modules in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. At present, there are eight titles in this series and have proved to be invaluable for all those engaging with the project. To avail of the…
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The Samuel Beckett Society 