In the Stygian darkness of a bare room, a table on a low platform with a light hanging overhead starts to emerge. Then a door briefly opens at the back of the space and the figure that has entered and sat down at the table also begins to emerge. When the stage lighting goes on, this tableau out of a Bacon painting sharpens and we can properly scrutinise the man. He is played by Stephen Rea, who has arrived from Dublin in a Landmark production of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, written in 1958 and directed by Vicky Featherstone. Rea is now almost a decade older than the protagonist, a Read more ...

Modernism is us. Today. For the past two decades plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter – which once upon a time bewildered their audiences and gave critics apoplexy – have become big West End hits. The avant-garde is now commercial. The incomprehensible is our reality.How so? By casting celebrity stars in the main roles, and emphasizing the humour. So the current revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – which premiered in Paris in 1953 and then got a London production a couple of years later – features Ben Whishaw, a national treasure since he voiced Paddington in the film series, Read more ...

Dance First takes its title from a line in Samuel Beckett’s most famous work Waiting for Godot. “Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards,” says the tramp Estragon of Pozzo’s slave Lucky, who then proceeds to do both in a typically absurd Beckettian way.The Irish writer’s bleak worldview often manifested itself in slapstick comedy and nonsense, but you wouldn’t know it from James Marsh’s tasteful film, another biopic following his The Theory of Everything (2014) about Stephen Hawking, and the less successful portrait of round-the-world yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, The Mercy (2017 Read more ...

Like all great art, Samuel Beckett's works find a way to speak to you as an individual, stretching from page to stage and on, on, on into our psyches. This happens not through sentimental manipulation or cheap sensationalism, but through the accrual of impressions, the gathering of memories, the painstaking construction of meaning. Rarely far from view on the London stage, Beckett has two seminal one acts on view briefly in London before touring to Bath. Upon hearing the shoes of May (Charlotte Emmerson) in his 1976 Footfalls pace out the nine steps back and forth as we learn of the Read more ...

Hotels in fiction can serve as places of desolation or discovery; as escape hatches, or else punishment blocks. In her third novel, Eimear McBride channels this ambivalence but annexes it to another sub-genre - the narrative of life on the road, with all its detours and disorientations. Captured at intervals, from her thirties to her fifties, McBride‘s protagonist picks up the tangled threads of a woman’s life. In a sense, this work follows on from the stricken childhood conjured in her remarkable debut, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and the youthful passion and misery evoked in its Read more ...

It’s been a turbulent few months for Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, with a substantial cut in funding from Creative Scotland last October, followed by the (unrelated) announcement that Mark Thomson, artistic director since 2003, would step down at the end of the current season. The appointment of Scottish playwright and theatre maker David Greig as his successor from June 2016 has been roundly applauded, and then there’s the small matter of the theatre’s 50th anniversary season, which kicks off this month amid much fanfare with two eminent Scottish actors in what’s probably the 20th century’s Read more ...

In a peculiarly Beckettian development, the creative team of this Sydney Theatre Company production spent several weeks of rehearsal waiting not for Godot, but for their director. Tamás Ascher – who spotted the casting potential of Uncle Vanya co-stars Hugo Weaving and Richard Roxburgh for the 1953 absurdist classic in which nothing happens, twice – was eventually forced to withdraw, leaving company director Andrew Upton to work within the set already developed by Ascher and designer Zsolt Khell.That striking monochromatic set places the action in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, blasted tree Read more ...

For those who never saw Samuel Beckett’s favoured performer Billie Whitelaw on stage as indomitable, buried-alive Winnie, peculiarly happy days are here again with another once-in-a-generation actress facing what Dame Peggie Ashcroft called “a ‘summit’ part”, the female equivalent of Hamlet. Juliet Stevenson makes you think not so much “what a great performance” as “what a towering masterpiece of a play” – and how often do star interpretations even of the big Shakespeare roles prompt that kind of reaction?This is, in short, the works: 90 plus minutes of perfectly modulated near-monologue in Read more ...

Waiting For Godot is one of those plays which even those who have never seen know something about. “A tragicomedy in two acts,” as Beckett's subtitle described it, in which two tramps in bowler hats blether on about boots and a bloke who never appears, and where, in Irish critic Vivian Mercer's immortal words, “nothing happens twice”. And if they know nothing else about it, they surely can quote the play's most famous line: "We give birth astride of a grave."Now comes Simon Dormandy's “reimagined” version aimed at a younger audience. Out go the bowler hats and in come baseball caps, one of Read more ...

In many ways, the darkness is the most memorable aspect of this production. It's so deep and all-encompassing that your eyes start to play tricks on you, seeing spots of light and shadow where there is only blackness. Because of this, when Lisa Dwan's mouth is slowly illuminated eight feet up on the stage, it's easy to dismiss it at first as just another trick of the dark. The only light in the theatre seems to emanate from the mouth itself, as it begins to gasp before tumbling into the breakneck stream of consciousness monologue that is Beckett's Not I.First performed at the Royal Court by Read more ...

It begins with a tall, thin man walking out of light and into darkness. There is much that remains murky in Barry McGovern’s adaptation of this novel by Samuel Beckett, written between 1941 and 1945 when Beckett, who had worked for the Resistance, was in the South of France on the run from the Nazis, and not published until nearly a decade after its completion. Like his later dramatic works, it is preoccupied with profound existential questions – the inconsequentiality of being, the endless groping for meaning – reduced to the simple, immediate and human: the everyday made extraordinary.This Read more ...

Samuel Beckett recalled sinking into a "whirl of depression" while writing All That Fall. Audiences at this production - those, that is, who have managed to score a ticket for this short, sold-out run - are unlikely to emerge into Jermyn Street in a similarly gloomy frame of mind.Apart from the exceptional nature of the evening - a rarely seen piece and a superlative cast in an intimate, up-close, 70-seater setting - All That Fall is revealed here as a bawdy, bucolic comedy, and a perversely life-affirming one full of marvellous one-liners, even if they are, of course, also spiked with grim Read more ...