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.”
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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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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?
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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.
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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.”
Read MoreOxford University Press: “[James McNaughton’s] Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath explores Beckett’s creative responses to the Irish civil war and the crisis of commitment in 1930s Europe, to the rise of fascism, and the atrocities of World War II. Grounded in archival material, the volume reads in Beckett’s letters and German Diaries his personal response to propaganda he saw leading to war, and illustrates his creative work’s intimate engagement with specific political strategies, rhetoric, and events.
Deep into literary form, syntax, and language, Beckett reflects ominous political and historical changes, and satirizes aesthetic and philosophical interpretations that overlook them. He burdens aesthetic production with guilt for how imagination and language, theatre, and narrative parallel political techniques, the aspiration to both effect atrocity and cover it up. This book develops new readings of Beckett’s early and middle work up toThree Novels and Endgame.”
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“Cambridge Scholars Publishing is pleased to announce the publication of Samuel Beckett and Europe: History, Culture and Tradition, edited by Michela Bariselli, Niamh M. Bowe and William Davies.
Drawing on the diverse critical debates of the ‘Beckett and Europe’ conference held in Reading, UK, in 2015, this volume brings together a selection of essays to offer an international response to the central question of what ‘Europe’ might mean for our understandings of the work of Samuel Beckett. Ranging from historical and archival work to the close interrogation of language and form, from the influences of various national literary traditions on Beckett’s writing to his influence on the work of other writers and thinkers, this book examines the question of Europe from multiple vantage points so as to reflect the ways in which Beckett’s oeuvre both challenges and enlivens his status as a ‘European writer’.”
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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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Marion Rankine (TLS): “In Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee, Arthur Rose draws on the long history of such challenges to authority. There is, he argues, a literary kind of cynicism that is both theoretically rich and necessarily alienating; it is also inherently paradoxical.”
Read MoreLithub has published an extract from the Nobel laureate’s essay on Beckett. The essay appears in a new collection of Coetzee’s work, entitled Late Essays: 2006-2017.
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The Samuel Beckett Society 