Latest news with #SamuelBeckett
Irish Examiner
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
'Wicked sense of humour': John Minihan on photographing Gary Oldman in Krapp's Last Tape
'There is no Memory in Beckett. Even Krapp's Last Tape has no memory in the usual sense of associated recall, but rather, a mechanical process set in motion by a jar or vibration: the closing of or opening of a door.' - William S Burroughs, The Adding Machine Samuel Beckett knew the essence of theatre is that an actor is present in the flesh on the stage in a way in which he is not on the screen. Academy award winner Gary Oldman returned to the UK stage after a 37-year hiatus in April of this year to perform Samuel Beckett's one-act play, Krapp's Last Tape, at the York Theatre Royal. For over 50 years I have been photographing Beckett plays: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days and Krapp's Last Tape. All played with an array of actors from Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Billie Whitelaw, John Hurt, Michael Gambon, Max Wall, Pierre Chabert, Barry McGovern, Stephen Rea and Robert Wilson. They all bring their own exuberance to the roles they play. Trying to define Krapps Last Tape is like well trying to define the overall dramatic works of Samuel Beckett - it's complex yet simple, ever evolving and wildly addictive. Gary Oldman in Krapp's Last Tape. Picture: John Minihan When I heard last November that Oldman was doing Krapp's Last Tape, I knew that I wanted to see and photograph him. He's an actor with a wicked sense of humour. I knew he would bring something special to the part in a work that's Beckett's most approachable stage play and my favourite to photograph. Krapp is a sentimental 69-year-old listening to his 30-something voice on a spool from his archive, looking back regretfully upon a life lived in which he sacrificed love to artistic ambition. We see Krapp onstage in an old white collarless shirt, and black waistcoat in which he keeps his pocket-watch and a banana. I told Gary about the time I photographed Max Wall who played Krapp at the Riverside Studios in London in 1987, bringing his own brand of music-hall humour and relishing the word 'spool'. 'Spoool,' he crooned. I was in the dressing room with Max where he started eating the banana; staff were dispatched to get another banana before the show could start. Music-hall humour is strewn through the world of Samuel Beckett, and the plays often benefit in performance from a less reverent attitude than is usually the case. It's becoming harder to photograph plays in the West End of London. I was invited to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London in 2024 to see Waiting for Godot. The producers could not have been more helpful, but they had their own photographer doing the stills for newspaper publicity and reviews. Back in the day there was always a photo call for the main theatre photographers in London. I knew Douglas H Jeffrey, the doyen of theatre photographers who I first met when I was an apprentice in the Daily Mail darkroom in 1962. Douglas supplied Fleet Street's newspapers with beautiful black and white photographs of shows in the London's West End. He loved theatre, always wore a beret and an artist smock with pockets to hold film and lense. He was never interested in being interviewed about his work. I remember he photographed the playwright Joe Orton in 1967 only months before he was murdered in Islington by his partner Kenneth Halliwell. Gary Oldman played Orton in the film, Prick Up Your Ears, in 1987. My friend Adrian Dunbar, who has directed Beckett in Ireland, London and Paris, was in York for nearly a week supporting Gary in rehearsals of Krapp's Last Tape. I met Gary with Adrian, and the pair were happy, laughing and joking. They go back as actors to the early 1970s to the Royal Court in London and the RSC. Listening to them, it could have been a scene from Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot. John Minihan's image of John Hurt in Krapps Last Tape in 1998. I was also relishing the opportunity to go back to the beautiful city of York which hosted its first Beckett Festival in June 2011. I had an exhibition of my Beckett photographs at York University together with a range of world-class writers like the Nobel laureate JM Coetzee, who I photographed outside the door of York Minister. The event also featured a performance by the renowned Gare St Lazare players with Cork actor Conor Lovett performing his arresting adaptions of Samuel Beckett's short stories, First Love and The End. I loved being back in York with Adrian and meeting Gary and his photographer wife Giselle and their children. The show is dedicated to John Hurt and Michael Gambon. The production team even used the same recorder that those great actors used for their shows at Dublin's Gate Theatre. Samuel Beckett would, I believe, have given the nod to Gary Oldman who seemed to have found his perfect home. Dublin-born photographer John Minihan has been based in West Cork for many years. As well as capturing famous images of the likes of Princess Diana, Edna O'Brien, and Francis Bacon, he also took several photographs of Samuel Beckett Read More Barry Keoghan and Nicola Coughlan provide star power for Fastnet Film Festival in West Cork
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
John Fletcher obituary
My father, John Fletcher, who has died aged 87, was an academic and literary critic best known for his work on Samuel Beckett. He helped demystify the Irish playwright to generations of scholars with A Student's Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett, which he co-wrote with his wife and literary collaborator, my mother, Beryl. John discovered Beckett as an undergraduate, after his brother gave him a copy of his novel Molloy. John found it heavy going at first but persevered and ultimately decided to study Beckett for his master's thesis at Toulouse University. His studies moved him closer to Beckett's orbit in Paris and an opportunity to meet the playwright came in 1960, when the wife of a theatre director who had staged Waiting for Godot for the first time in France offered to introduce him. Beckett invited John to his flat on the understanding that 'I can't discuss my work, and I never do …' and got on so well with him that at the end of the meeting Beckett lent him a typescript of his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. It was the start of a long friendship and correspondence lasting until Beckett's death. John collaborated with Raymond Federman to produce the first Beckett bibliography, Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics (1970), which became a landmark in Beckett studies. John was born in Barking, Essex (now east London), to Roy Fletcher, who worked at the Ford plant in Dagenham, and Eileen (nee Beane), who had been a telephonist before marriage. When Roy, who had been a technical civil servant in the Aeronautical Inspection Directorate during the second world war, was seconded to the Control Commission for Germany in 1945, John boarded at King Alfred school, in Plön, in Schleswig-Holstein. After the family returned to Roy's home town of Yeovil, John attended the grammar school there. He won an exhibition to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he graduated in languages and philosophy in 1959. He had fallen in love with France as a sixth former, and returned there to do a master's and doctorate (written in French) at Toulouse. It was there that he met Beryl, who was studying in Montpellier on a year abroad, and they married in 1961. They stayed in France while John completed his PhD, then returned to the UK in 1964 for him to take up a lectureship at Durham University. In 1966 he moved to the newly founded University of East Anglia as a senior lecturer and soon after professor, where he established the French department and worked until early retirement in 1998, when he and Beryl moved to Canterbury, Kent. From the mid-1980s, John and Beryl had started doing literary translation work together. Their translation of The Georgics, by Claude Simon, won the 1990 Scott Moncrieff prize. In retirement, John continued to work on translations, his last major work being Voltaire: A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary, which he translated for an Oxford World's Classics edition (2011). Beryl died in 2021. John is survived by two sons, Edmund and me, a daughter, Harriet, and six grandchildren.
The Guardian
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Happy Days review – Pamela Rabe gives an aching performance in Samuel Beckett's unrelenting play
The character of Winnie in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days was described as a 'summit part' akin to Hamlet by Dame Peggy Ashcroft, one of the earliest Winnies. Only a daring actor would attempt the role: essentially a 90-minute monologue of looping, repetitive prose, and a prescriptive list of stage directions encompassing pauses and facial expressions. All while buried in earth – first from the waist, then the neck. But the rewards of scaling this mighty peak are extraordinary; it's hard to think of a more intriguing female character on stage, or a better scaffold for technical and emotional virtuosity. Who is Winnie? Beckett stipulates that she's 'about 50'; she's married to the taciturn Willie – who is seen sporadically on stage with her, generally crawling. She's well-educated, judging by her literary references. Her daily routine is dictated by a bell, for reasons undisclosed. She is at all times partially buried, in a scorched mound of earth in an unbroken landscape, for reasons undisclosed. The sun is hellish, the bell is relentless, and her helpmate seems thoroughly unhelpful. Despite this, she persists. She keeps talking; she recalls her youth; she counts her blessings. Keeps herself tidy. Beyond this, her psychology is contested territory. Is she stoic? Heroic? Pathetic? Deluded? There are myriad ways to play Winnie, and myriad ways – as an audience – to read her. Pamela Rabe's Winnie, immured in Sydney Theatre Company's Wharf stage for the next five weeks, seems pretty well broken by the time we meet her. Beckett writes his heroine's performance as a kind of tragic clowning routine: peppered throughout her monologue are the stage directions 'smile on' and 'smile off', as Winnie switches abruptly between the bright, cheery mask of extreme optimism, and a more doubtful, melancholic and even pained persona. In this production, co-directed by Rabe with veteran lighting and set designer Nick Schlieper, this oscillation between contrasting moods and affect is more muted. Rabe is not convincingly bright; you don't get the sense that Winnie really buys into the fantasy of an imminent 'happy day' – or that she truly experiences the moments of relief written into the script. It's an aching performance that speaks of a woman repeatedly bopped on the head by life, driven gradually downwards into her earthy confinement. Rabe gives in to full-throated anguish in the course of the play; her Winnie weeps. When she scolds Willie (played here by the wonderful Markus Hamilton, perhaps a little too young and vital to convincingly conjure the broken Willie) resonant notes of bitterness and contempt hint at their unhappy history. But without the light and shade, the play is tougher viewing – and less satisfying for an audience, who doesn't experience the full arc of Winnie's journey as we watch her mask progressively slip off. There are fewer laughs in this production, too. Beckett's play has comedy as well as tragedy, and Rabe has great comic sensibilities as an actor – which shine through in several glorious moments – but many opportunities for comic relief are lost. At these times, the theatre can feel uncannily quiet. Similarly, Beckett's language – described by many actors and directors of this play as inherently musical in its rhythms and repetitions – is muted, with Rabe's delivery of lines leaning naturalistic. This adds to what is overall an oppressive atmosphere; beyond occasional bursts of music from a wind-up music box and Winnie singing, there's no sound track. The design feels similarly airless, with Schlieper – taking set and lighting duties – presenting the most claustrophobic version of Beckett's prescription for a 'trompe-l'oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance'. The backdrop is a flat, unmodulated monotone, and the stage space is enclosed in a dark box. Beckett's 'expanse of scorched grass' is rendered as a dull grey and slightly gritty papier-mache-like surface. Winnie and Willie's universe is thoroughly devoid of contextual references, and thoroughly drab. In the second act, the directors boldly disregard Beckett's direction for an unchanged setting, instead turning down the lights and casting the stage in an inky blue wash, with only Rabe's face spotlit, and protruding from the earth mound in which she is now almost entirely buried. It's a gorgeous and striking tableau – peak Schlieper – though this aesthetic 'cool change' arguably undercuts Beckett's intimations of an interminable cycle of repeating days. Overall, this is a tough space to exist in for the show's run-time. Perhaps appropriately so – Beckett is not big on consolation – but this production may struggle to bring first-timers or sceptics of his work along for the ride. Happy Days is at Wharf 1 theatre, Sydney Theatre Company until 15 June.
Daily Maverick
06-05-2025
- General
- Daily Maverick
Sadly, the will to live – and live well – isn't always ours to choose
Life expectancy in any given country says a lot about how its society values, supports and nurtures its people. Before you were born, you were dead – no one we can imagine wasn't void of feeling, of thought, of senses, existing only in a state of nothingness, inside a silent void. After death, we're all headed to that same insensate, unconscious destination of non-being, properly referred to as inexistence. I think this is reason enough to make the most of the short time – a little more than half a century for most of us – that we get to spend on this planet as cognisant, conscious beings. But certain groups of our species, guided by religious belief and hoped-for after-life destinations, may hold back and decide to live guardedly, as they await a paradise they're taught is just beyond the grave. Whether this gives them comfort or not, it is their absolute right. But for those who acknowledge that this might be a one-off stab at living, there's an urgency to live the half-century we've got fully: to love, dance, fall, then get up; for this is, much more than just living, a unique experience. As Samuel Beckett advised us: 'Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' We get one shot at being alive. But time doesn't always let us choose how or how long we live. Circumstance, chance, suffering often get in the way. The body or the mind sometimes fails us. Disease intrudes. Yet even within those constraints we must strive to remain sentient – noticing sunlight through tree leaves, reacting to laughter or the wild beating of a lover's heart. As one streetwise aphorism puts it: 'Life's a bitch, and then you die.' Its origin is hazy, but the line found a place in Nas's 1994 classic, Illmatic. Looking at life expectancy worldwide tells us a lot about how we live and sustain ourselves in different countries. According to Wikipedia's longevity chart by country, Hong Kong tops the list at 86 years. Japan follows at 85. France ranks 12th at 83, while the US lags, at number 55, with just 79 years. South Africa is at 66 years and Lesotho trails near the bottom at 57 years. Healthcare is a key driver of these numbers: the poorer the system, the shorter the lives. But that's not the only factor: diet, physical activity, education, environment, political stability and social support all play vital roles. Which raises the question why the US – often called the richest country in the world – is far behind other high-income nations in life expectancy. Even with gun violence set aside, there are serious systemic flaws in the US, which spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country, yet its system is among the least efficient. It's largely privatised, expensive and befuddling. Millions are uninsured or underinsured, forced to delay or forgo essential care. Preventive medicine is often overshadowed by costly, treatment-heavy approaches. Chronic health issues such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease are rampant, driven by ultra-processed foods and sedentary lifestyles. The US also falls behind in social protections: minimal maternity leave, costly childcare, inadequate housing and limited education support. In these fields, Europe is quite ahead, offering stronger foundations for long-term health. These disparities point to a broader need for systemic change. Addressing public health crises requires not only better access to nutritious food and more active living, but also comprehensive social policies that support families to reduce stress and promote equity. The US model, with its emphasis on individual responsibility, could benefit from integrating some of the social safety nets found in European systems. Ultimately, a healthier population begins with policies that prioritise wellbeing in all stages of life. In the end, life expectancy is more than just a number – it reflects how a society values and supports its people, especially its most vulnerable. We do not get forever – no one does. For many, there isn't even fair, let alone far. Yet there's enough money to go around, if only it wasn't being hogged by the top 1% (in most countries). Low-income countries like Lesotho can't even boast a functioning health system. Sickness prevails and often inspires the poet: ' When I wake, this is what I tell myself: / I belong to this, to all the ghosts present / in the DNA. Diabetes, / an ancient Greek consort, sweeps through the halls // of my body.' (From the poem Type 2 by Sjohnna McCray.) We are programmed to die. Sorry to burst your bubble. The clock is ticking and there are no exceptions, not in the plant and animal kingdoms. Those who practise community-inspired humanity inherit from their forebears the capacity to be altruistic. Those who practise humanity that's based on religious dogma often cherry-pick the naturally meaningful bits and discard the mindless smiting and lapidation often mentioned as punishment for adultery, homosexuality, disobedience and so on. They, too, do know right from wrong without needing dogma. We have come this far as a species in large part because of selflessness and generosity. They're wired into us. One could argue that greed isn't. Greed is a short circuit in the system. The day we realise that no one has to go without medical care, or live under a bridge, or eat from a dumpster, even as others take 10-minute joy-rides into space at billions of rands per jaunt, we will have arrived at maturity as a species. As things stand, there remain many long ways we have yet to come up, babe. DM Rethabile Masilo is a Mosotho poet from Lesotho who lives in Paris, France. Life By Rethabile Masilo When at peace, feeling like the best of your body, it is impossible to imagine some muscle twitching, wrecked by the increase in years, a shoulder loose every time you run for the bus, God inching nearer with each tremor of the hand, though it will not be till the lungs draw dust in and your voice rasps, as in a hopeless dream, that you will understand how evil all of this is, after a ligament has waned and atrophied. And if ever the flank gives, you pray for release from terror that makes you recall past acts, and you ask your family to find the courage to bring Doctor Death to your bedside. You don't like the urine balloon tied to your waist. You never wanted to die with tubes up your nose. Besides, how cruel it is to let somebody rot, when they used to wear their body so sensual? 24 hours By Rethabile Masilo The hand of my mother holds nothing now, except the past, this is what a child must accept. I touch the lumps of her finger-joints and rub balm in, moving from one to the next and feeding the spaces in there. I tell my father I know he's in the room. I tell him to stay with us forever. My mother says she sees her son and grandson as well, holding hands on account of having had to share a grave. Today has been a day of miracles. Mme drank her porridge with the good hand and finished it, then read from her bible a little, her eyes moistening where Jesus asks his father why he has forsaken him so. But it is time for her nap, so, she sleeps, till I get back from town and turn the knob on her TV set, adjust the volume, and leave to go pound some meat to serve with lepu. She watches the evening news. The days are usually the same. The doctor comes sometimes for a quick check-up. 'We are proud of her,' he likes to say, as if we were supposed to harbour some kind of shame.
Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Krapp's Last Tape review — Stephen Rea is compelling throughout
Samuel Beckett's stage directions are densely detailed, but every actor does their Krapp their own way. Gary Oldman's current York production has his Krapp sitting listening to recordings of himself in an attic study crammed with bookish rubbish. Here at the Barbican in London, in a show first seen in Dublin last year, Stephen Rea is a rumpled figure in a mess-free monochrome vault. A stray banana skin or obtrusive tin of audio tape? He chucks them merrily into the darkness next to the sharp rectangle of light he occupies. He needs to check a word in his dictionary? He walks up a shaft of light upstage, then through a black door that slides open with Star Trek swishness. Same words, same costume of white
