The Samuel Beckett Society

March 19, 2018March 14, 2018

Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real

Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real proposes writing as a mathematical and logical operation to build a bridge between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Samuel Beckett’s prose works. Arka Chattopadhyay studies aspects such as the fundamental operational logic of a text, use of mathematical forms like geometry and arithmetic, the human obsession with counting, the moving body as an act of writing and love, and sexuality as a challenge to the limits of what can be written through logic and mathematics. Chattopadhyay reads Beckett’s prose works, including How It Is, Company, Worstward Ho, Malone Dies and Enough to highlight this terminal writing, which halts endless meanings with the material body of the word and gives Beckett a medium to inscribe what cannot be written otherwise.

BBC Radio 4: Jess Thom on Beckett’s Not I

“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.”

March 14, 2018March 14, 2018

Getting ‘hands-on’ with Samuel Beckett at Trinity College Dublin

Trinity is a target destination for Beckett scholars because of the size and variety of original Beckett manuscripts held here. However, because of the physical fragility of the manuscripts (Beckett always used the very worst quality paper), few people get to handle the originals. This creates an obvious problem when it is considered that there is an almost indefinable, special ‘something’ to be experienced from being in the presence of an original artefact – think of Jane Austen’s spectacles or the Ardagh Chalice. Are our students being denied an experience which could be of signal benefit to them? All special-collections repositories share this tension between access and preservation but the issue has been thrown into high relief in the context of Trinity’s development of the Trinity Education Project, which seeks to encourage more original research among undergraduates.

March 12, 2018March 29, 2018

From Page to Stage: Beckett and Adaptation with Lisa Dwan

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.

March 5, 2018February 28, 2018

Druid presents Waiting for Godot (National Opera House, Wexford)

On a bare road in the middle of nowhere, two world-weary friends await the arrival of the mysterious Godot. While waiting, they speculate, bicker, joke and ponder life’s greater questions. As dusk begins to fall, two figures appear on the horizon.

Regarded as one of the most significant plays of the twentieth century, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett is a masterpiece that draws endless interpretations. Directed by Garry Hynes, Druid present a new production of this seminal work featuring members of the acclaimed Druid Ensemble: Garrett Lombard, Aaron Monaghan, Rory Nolan and Marty Rea.

March 2, 2018February 28, 2018

Beckett and the Media

Over the years, Beckett Studies have undergone multiple transformations: from early existentialist approaches to post-structuralist interventions, to performance-oriented studies, and genetic criticism. The last two decades have seen a surge in scholarship that probes the relations between Beckett and media technologies. This conference brings together some of the leading scholars who have focused on the nexus between Beckett and media while opening its doors to media theorists from outside of Beckett Studies who have a strong interest in his work.

February 28, 2018March 2, 2018

Beckett’s Play and The Old Tune to be Performed in Washington DC, April 2018

Arcturus Theater Company presents two more Samuel Beckett shorts together as an hour of evening entertainment

Play (1963) involves three lovers caught in a purgatorial love triangle. Rapid-fire, poetic verse conveys the characters’ frustration and desperation to be released from this eternal entrapment. We are proud to be collaborating with the esteemed international artist Rosemary Feit Covey who has provided awe-inspiring backdrops for this show. The actors are Greg Jones Ellis, Margeaux Martine, and Cristen Stephansky.

Play will be followed by a staged reading of the radio play, The Old Tune, Beckett’s 1960 interpretation of Robert Pinget’s play La Manivelle (The Crank). The readers are Kim Curtis and Phil Bufithis.

February 27, 2018February 27, 2018

British Sign Language Synopsis of Beckett’s Not I

“Deaf theatre maker Deepa Shastri offers a British Sign Language (BSL) synopsis for the Touretteshero and Battersea Arts Centre production of Samuel Beckett’s Not I. This video has no audio but has captions if required.”

February 26, 2018February 21, 2018

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.

February 23, 2018February 21, 2018

Beckett’s Faces: Samuel Beckett Research Group in Gdańsk

The main theme for the 2018 seminar is Beckett’s Faces: the multifariousness of his artistic, semantic and critical legacy confronted with the specificities of the 21st century humanities, especially literary and theatre studies, arts, and philosophy around the world. The seminar provides ground for discussing Beckett as faced with other artists and thinkers. We are open to proposals that confront Beckett with his contemporaries, or pursue those who are inspired by his work. Tracing the masters of the past that are reflected in his work is yet another option. The form of the seminar should enable us not only to explore similarities and differences between individuals but also to depict broader historical and geographical perspectives. We are particularly interested in unusual frameworks that may contribute to the present understanding of how to contextualize Beckett.