{"title":"“Work-in-Progress”","authors":"Celia Graham-Dixon","doi":"10.1163/18757405-03501010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757405-03501010","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Deriving from the original 1976 theatre production, the 1990 television version of Footfalls has garnered little to no critical attention in and of itself. Seeking to redress this omission, this article argues that Footfalls on screen is a crucial document of the original production and introduces aesthetic and affective qualities that enhance our understanding of the play. Working with a DVD copy of a VHS recording of the play from its original broadcast on television, this article parses out the relationship between the spectral materiality of this recording and the ideas of spectrality, authorship and subjectivity that are central to the play.","PeriodicalId":53231,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd''hui","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83599605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“You Know What She Died of, Mother Pegg? Of Darkness …”","authors":"Dúnlaith Bird","doi":"10.1163/18757405-03501007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757405-03501007","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the Shannon Scheme, which involved the construction of the largest hydroelectric dam in Europe from 1925, and the subsequent Rural Electrification Scheme (RES) not just as defining projects of the modern Irish State, but as social watersheds of the twentieth century that had a complex and wide-ranging influence on artists including Seán Keating and Samuel Beckett. The article considers the intertwining of art and electricity in the artistic responses to the Scheme and the RES, Irish electrification’s political and social resonances, and the extent to which Beckett’s plays, particularly Endgame, can be read as ‘electric’ works.","PeriodicalId":53231,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd''hui","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88715507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beckett sa Chreig: Laethanta Sona","authors":"Sarah Jane Scaife","doi":"10.1163/18757405-03501011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757405-03501011","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article provides a short introduction to a theatre project entitled Beckett sa Chreig: Laethanta Sona (Beckett in the Rock: Happy Days), which breaks the boundaries of the traditional ‘Beckett space’. The project was a collaboration between the landscape, language and people of Inis Oírr, Samuel Beckett and Company SJ, and involved Mícheál Ó Conghaile’s translation of Happy Days into Irish (as Laethanta Sona) and its performance by Bríd Ní Neachtain. The set, built by local stone masons, was immersed in the landscape of Inis Oírr, the westernmost island of Ireland, arising sculpturally from the flaggy rock of a stone field, surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean.","PeriodicalId":53231,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd''hui","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78520344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Uaigneas","authors":"Olan Andrew Stephens","doi":"10.1163/18757405-03501006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757405-03501006","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay is a reflection on the Irish word uaigneas, often translated into ‘loneliness’ or ‘solitude’, but closer in meaning to ‘away-from-ness’ or ‘without-ness’ (my own translation). Considering the impact of Beckett’s settings and subjects on my performance practice as an artist and musician working within the Irish landscape and with the Irish language, and thinking about rurality as a possible site for performance, I reflect on the possibility that within the Irish language and Beckett’s writing there are similarly embodied and spectral experiences of place.","PeriodicalId":53231,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd''hui","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80774755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beckett’s Spectral Presences","authors":"Emilie Morin","doi":"10.1163/18757405-03501003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757405-03501003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Spectrality remains a key motif and metaphor in Beckett’s writing; many of his wandering and destitute creations seem on their way towards another kind of life, uncomfortably close to death, and remarkably close to the spirit world. This article outlines some of the paradoxes that surround Beckett’s relation to the ghost as a dramatic device; it emphasises how uneasily Beckett’s work sits within the tradition of the ghost play, and unravels some of the preoccupations and interests shaping Beckett’s treatment of dialogues with the dead.","PeriodicalId":53231,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd''hui","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88469576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Bodily Haunting","authors":"Hannah Simpson","doi":"10.1163/18757405-03501009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757405-03501009","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The woman’s wordless scream in Not I and Happy Days acts as a spectral-yet-embodied rendering of unspoken and apparently unspeakable sexual trauma. If trauma symptomology is itself a form of bodily haunting—the past intruding into the present—the wordless scream performs this phenomenon on Beckett’s stage, as a disruptive return of the repressed through the body itself. This essay explores how the performed scream returns embodied trauma to embodied expression in Not I and Happy Days, emphasising the voice as a simultaneously spectral yet profoundly corporeal force. It then examines the potential therapeutic effect of the scream in performance, drawing on a range of actor testimonies.","PeriodicalId":53231,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd''hui","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88833068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Site as Archive in Company SJ’s The Women Speak","authors":"C. Duane","doi":"10.1163/18757405-03501008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757405-03501008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article focuses on Company SJ’s The Women Speak as performed at the National Ballroom, Dublin, in 2015, and explores how a space, including through social relations and through its position in a cultural landscape, can function as a form of archive when utilized as the site of a theatrical performance. The article investigates how Company SJ’s site-specific production (which features performances of Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby and Come and Go) functioned as a kind of archive, an archaeological record of human interaction, which was framed by the scenographic design to prompt and draw on the audience’s embodied responses.","PeriodicalId":53231,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd''hui","volume":"276 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85692902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stops and Starts","authors":"Alicia Nudler","doi":"10.1163/18757405-03501005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757405-03501005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape in the context of Argentinian post-dictatorship theatre. I offer a brief history of Beckett’s influence on theatre in Argentina together with a summary of the performance history of his plays, and I reflect on the ways in which they have been interpreted in Argentina’s recent history. This contextualization enables me to focus on the figure of Krapp and discuss the stops and starts that Krapp performs while playing and recording his tapes. By examining Krapp’s archive, the article engages in a discussion about individual and collective memory: I draw attention to the play’s resonances in relation to the political processes unfolding in Argentina today, where archives are of vital importance in recovering from the social trauma of the last dictatorship.","PeriodicalId":53231,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd''hui","volume":"216 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82728237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beckett et l’art minimal américain","authors":"Pascal Mougin","doi":"10.1163/18757405-03501013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757405-03501013","url":null,"abstract":"Résumé On ne peut comprendre l’importance majeure de l’œuvre de Beckett dans l’art contemporain sans revenir sur la réception de l’écrivain par les « néo-avant-gardes » américaines des années 1960 – l’art minimal en particulier –, qui marquent le moment inaugural, précisément, de l’art contemporain. Beckett fournit alors aux artistes ainsi qu’aux critiques qui les défendent une référence essentielle dans leur tentative de repenser la notion d’œuvre d’art et l’expérience esthétique contre les fondamentaux du modernisme tel que les conçoit Clement Greenberg. Pourtant, Beckett lui-même n’a semble-t-il jamais participé aux débats sur le minimalisme américain ni seulement évoqué les artistes new-yorkais. Et pour cause : les artistes de son temps qui l’intéressent sont tous des peintres de l’expressionnisme abstrait, autrement dit le courant moderniste contre lequel se positionne la nouvelle avant-garde new-yorkaise. Le hiatus est donc profond entre les références artistiques de l’écrivain et les artistes qu’il a lui-même inspirés. On s’intéressera ici à ce moment originel, qui reste largement ignoré par la critique française, ainsi qu’aux différentes lectures qui, rétrospectivement, en ont été proposées par la critique anglo-américaine des vingt dernières années.","PeriodicalId":53231,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd''hui","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135957374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}