A press release from Cambridge University Press: Derval Tubridy’s Samuel Beckett and the Language of Subjectivity is the first sustained exploration of aporia as a vital, subversive, and productive figure within Beckett’s writing as it moves between prose and theatre. Informed by key developments in analytic and continental philosophies of language, Tubridy’s fluent analysis demonstrates how Beckett’s translations¬––between languages, genres, bodies, and genders––offer a way out of the impasse outlined in his early aesthetics. The primary modes of the self’s extension into the world are linguistic (speaking, listening) and material (engaging with bodies, spaces and objects).
Read MoreTransdisciplinary Beckett: 4th Samuel Beckett Society Annual Conference, 2018
The Fourth Beckett Society Conference will take place in Mexico City, on 7-10 November 2018. ‘Transdisciplinary Beckett’ is especially interested in recognising the role that radio, television, theatre, music, the arts, sciences, and technologies play in Beckett Studies.
Samuel Beckett is a precursor in the creation of transdisciplinary works. He travelled between languages [English-French-German], genres [narrative, poetry, theatre, essay], and media [radio, television, cinema]. His work has been studied and applied across different perspectives and disciplines, ranging from literature, philosophy, and media, to political sciences, music, and contemporary art practices. Carrying out a transdisciplinary approach allows us to re-conceptualize Beckett as an author who found in different technologies and electronic languages new ways to think about our present time.
Read More
Eimear McBride on Beckett’s Development as a Writer
“Of all I’ve read in my life, and all that’s yet to come, what’s going to count? How much of it has changed me? How much has even marked me? How much has done both but I don’t know it yet? Readers get to make these discoveries in the privacy of their own heads. Writers must make them in public and then wear them in their back catalogues for as long as they have a readership who cares.”
Read More
New Production of Morton Feldman & Samuel Beckett’s Words and Music
An assembly are a group dedicated to experimental and contemporary music, installation, and performance.
Their first event of 2018 sees a rare performance of one of Feldman’s final works, ‘Words and Music’, a collaboration with one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, Samuel Beckett. Originally conceived as a radio-play, this 40-minute piece exhibits two of the 20th century’s greatest artists at their creative peak. Haunting fragments of text and sound gently discourse and overlap in an intimate meditation on themes such as love, age, and truth.
Read More
Judy Hegarty Lovett on Interpreting Samuel Beckett
Victoria Myers talks to Judy Hegarty Lovett about her work with Gare St Lazare Ireland
Read More
Toronto Production of Krapp’s Last Tape is “rich and resonant”
J. Kelly Nestruck: “Nasmith’s performance is exquisite – the pathos not overplayed, the humour stinging but still funny. When he holds a peeled banana in his mouth, it is the epitome of the word “absurd.” When he listens intently and then gets lost in memory, you see that boat moving gently, up and down, and from side to side.”
Read More
Bringing Beckett’s How It Is to the Cork stage
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.”
Read More
Samuel Beckett: Style Icon?
Here at the Samuel Beckett Society, we’re not sure what to make of Robert Armstrong’s recent piece in the Financial Times about the end of the male style icon. Armstrong is wistful for a simpler time, when male celebrity figures were supposedly emulated and celebrated for their sartorial choices. What do you think? Does Beckett’s dress code influence the way we think about him as a writer and public figure? Or are these things irrelevant to the books and plays that we love?
Read More
Battersea Arts Centre stages Not I, starring Jess Thom
The production will run from 28 February to 17 March 2018. Visit the Battersea Arts Centre website for more information. If you are a member of the Samuel Beckett Society, you can also read a recent review of the Thom production in The Beckett Circle.
Read More
Stephen Dillane praises Cork actors for Beckett adaptation
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.”
Read More
The Samuel Beckett Society 