The Samuel Beckett Society and Bordeaux Montaigne University are pleased to announce that we will offer 4 ‘Ruby Cohn Travel Bursaries’ of the value of £300 each to Early Career Researchers wishing to attend the annual conference in Bordeaux in May 2020.
Read MoreSamuel Beckett Society Membership Offer
If you join the Samuel Beckett Society with a one-year subscription any time between now and April 2020, you will receive up to three months of free access to the Society’s exclusive content. This offer ends in April 2020.
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Alvin Epstein, Theatre Director and Actor Associated With Beckett’s Work, Dies at 93
“Alvin Epstein, a classical stage actor and director who appeared in the Broadway premiere of “Waiting for Godot” and went on to become widely known for his mastery of that and other plays by Samuel Beckett, died on Monday in Newton, Mass. He was 93.
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Mr. Epstein’s acting career ranged across the Greeks, Shakespeare, Pirandello and the occasional musical, but Beckett was always at its core. He played the slave Lucky, who delivers a 700-word monologue, in the first Broadway staging of “Godot,” Beckett’s groundbreaking existentialist work.
Although Mr. Epstein never met Beckett — he did talk to him by telephone — he came to know that playwright through his words. “Alvin knows the material so well, it gives him the confidence — the courage, really — to do what’s right,” Charlotte Moore, who directed “Endgame” at the Irish Rep, said in an interview with The Times in 2005. “He doesn’t hit anything with a hammer, because he doesn’t have to.”
— The New York Times
Read More“New York, NY – 5 December 2018 – The Modern Language Association of America has announced the winner of the eleventh Modern Language Association Prize for a Bibliography, Archive, or Digital Project. The prize will be presented to Mark Nixon, of the University of Reading; Dirk Van Hulle, of the University of Antwerp; Pim Verhulst, of the University of Antwerp; E. Magessa O’Reilly, of Memorial University; and Vincent Neyt, of the University of Antwerp, for the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org).”
Bob Nasmith Reprises Role in Krapp’s Last Tape
Press Release: “After a sold out run and two sold out extensions in 2018, Award Winning Actor, Bob Nasmith is back, tackling Samuel Beckett for a remount of Singing Swan and VideoCabaret’s critically acclaimed production of Krapp’s Last Tape October 4-21 at Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace.
On his birthday, Krapp records a reel-to-reel tape of annual reminiscences, and forces himself to review a long life and face the diminishing future. Beckett’s rare mix of humour and tragedy are incarnated by iconic Canadian actor Bob Nasmith, founding member of VideoCabaret, Emeritus Board Member of Theatre Passe Muraille and recent recipient of the Toronto Theatre Critics Lifetime Achievement Award.”
Read More“This skillful demonstration of the disease known as being alive, as diagnosed by a master playwright, is one I would recommend to any actor, student of literature or fan of tragedy and comedy. [Bill Irwin’s] On Beckett, which was conceived and staged by Mr. Irwin as an (almost) one-man show, carefully peels back the skin on an actor’s fascination with, and interpretation of, its title subject.”
Beckett’s Breath: Anti-Theatricality and the Visual Arts
Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett’s later writings, and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The book attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett’s Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism.
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