Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- The Remains of the Modern and the Exhaustion of Thematics: An Introduction
- Theory Matters
- Texts Matter
- Performance Matters
- 9 ‘That's the Show’: Beckett and Performance
- 10 Reinventing Beckett
- 11 Staging Beckett: Voice and/in Performance (Company, What Where and Endgame)
- 12 Beckett and the ‘Idea’ of Theatre: Performance Through Artaud and Deleuze
- 13 Greying the Canon: Beckett in Performance, Beckett as Performance
- 14 ‘I think this does call for a firm stand’: Beckett at the Royal Court
- Index
10 - Reinventing Beckett
from Performance Matters
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- The Remains of the Modern and the Exhaustion of Thematics: An Introduction
- Theory Matters
- Texts Matter
- Performance Matters
- 9 ‘That's the Show’: Beckett and Performance
- 10 Reinventing Beckett
- 11 Staging Beckett: Voice and/in Performance (Company, What Where and Endgame)
- 12 Beckett and the ‘Idea’ of Theatre: Performance Through Artaud and Deleuze
- 13 Greying the Canon: Beckett in Performance, Beckett as Performance
- 14 ‘I think this does call for a firm stand’: Beckett at the Royal Court
- Index
Summary
‘I don't know whether the theatre is the right place for me anymore.’ (Beckett)
… the bourgeoisie will recuperate [the avant-garde] altogether, ultimately putting on splendid evenings of Beckett and Audiberti (and tomorrow Ionesco, already acclaimed by humanist criticism). (Roland Barthes, ‘Whose Theater? Whose Avant-Garde?’)
Samuel Beckett's creative life (and personal life, for that matter) was marked by a series of transformations and reinventions. In the process of re-making himself, over and again, from donnish academic to avant-garde poet, from Joycean acolyte to post-Joycean minimalist, from humanist to post-humanist, perhaps, most certainly from poet to novelist to playwright, to theatre director, Beckett was simultaneously reinventing every literary genre he turned his attention to. In the midst of remaking narrative in the wake of the Second World War, for example, he began simultaneously the reinvention of theatre, writing the ground-breaking (but still unproduced) Eleutheria between Molloy and Malone meurt, and En attendant Godot between Malone meurt and L'Innommable. Almost as soon as he began to experience some recognition, most notably in the theatre, however, he began to recoil from it as well, as if it represented a threat, the desired attention he had struggled so hard to achieve barbed with threats to his art (and even perhaps to his self-image). Enthusiastic about his anti-boulevard play, Eleutheria, and eager for its publication and performance, for example, he would finally repudiate it, withdrawing it from publication after the staging of Godot, finding it in later years impossible either to revise or to translate even for his long-time publisher, Barney Rosset, refusing again to have it published, at least in his lifetime, and finally, if fundamentally by proxy, prohibiting any staging, apparently in perpetuity. It was, however, a play central to Beckett's theatrical reinvention as it, almost literally, swept the stage clear of both boulevard and naturalistic debris and so bared the stage for what would become, in English, Waiting for Godot.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Beckett MattersEssays on Beckett's Late Modernism, pp. 175 - 202Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017