Beckett
Patricia Cumper
When I lived in the Caribbean in my twenties, one of the books I found at the bottom of the remaindered bin of Kingston’s largest book shop was Theatre of the Absurd by Martin Esslin. I read it without any real sense of its context but there was something about its central idea that struck a chord with me. Perhaps it was living in a society where death and violence were part of everyday life, perhaps it was my own rather bumbling efforts at understanding existentialism that made it remarkable. Esslin talked a great deal about Waiting for Godot. Nearly 20 years later I sat in a Read more ...
graeme.thomson
So this is Christmas, a time to seek comfort in traditional nourishment both culinary and cultural. In Edinburgh, the King’s Theatre has been home to mainstream panto - the equivalent of serving up a hearty turkey with all the trimmings – since time immemorial, which leaves the capital’s other theatres jockeying for position. What to do? Hedge all bets and aim for different-but-not-too-different, or raise the stakes and try something more adventurous altogether?This time of year tends to produce a bit of hit and a whole lot of miss. Last year the Lyceum disappointed with a sluggish, dull-as- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A play could be written about, or for, Michael Gambon's fingers, and perhaps Beckett's 1958 Krapp's Last Tape is it. I've seen this solo piece many times, most recently in a studio theatre rendition from Harold Pinter that opened a window on to his own mortality and won't quickly be forgotten. But what Gambon brings to the table - well, desk - is the abiding sense of a man struggling for his share of the light amidst darkness at the very moment that his powers may be slipping away. Or are they? Only those fingers know for sure.Indeed, during the opening passages of Michael Colgan's production Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The wait is over. Less than six months after dramatic literature's defining tramps departed the West End, here are Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) back again, with some new faces to flesh out Beckett's eternal verities about that grievous but also grimly funny thing we call life. Roger Rees has joined Ian McKellen to make up a double-act whose vaudevillian tendencies intensify the more these two abject fellas face down the void. The truly startling news, though, is the added jolt afforded the evening by the arrival of Matthew Kelly as a seriously searing Pozzo: a capacious performance Read more ...
james.woodall
Beckett is less forbidding now than he might have seemed when he was alive, and certainly when his work was first performed. Over the last two decades, crueller and darker plays than his have been written, though none have matched his lyric ingenuity and his pained, sometimes devastating irony remains unsurpassed. Can Endgame, the bleak successor to Waiting for Godot and perhaps the oddest dramatic masterpiece of the 20th century, still hurt us? And what, I feel it legitimate to ask, might lie behind a desire to revive it in the West End?For Simon McBurney of Complicite, never shy of a tough Read more ...