China, Ireland celebrate 100th anniversary of Samuel Beckett's birth
Artists from China and Ireland on Friday celebrated the centenary year of the birth of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett.
Irish artists staged a segment of Beckett's best-known work, "Waiting for Godot", in the Central Academy of Drama (CAD), China's foremost institute of dramatic study and practice.
The embassy of Ireland donated series of books on Beckett to the CAD.
Liu Libin, deputy director of the CAD, said working with the Irish artists enriched their understanding of Beckett, whose works have been staged in China since the 1970s.
Sarah Jane Scaife, an Irish expert on Beckett, described the playwright's works as "universal", which could be interpreted differently according to the cultural background.
"I believe that China's unique culture will enlarge the understanding of Beckett and his works," said Scaife.
Beckett, who is considered as one of the most influential writers of the 20th Century, was born in Dublin on April 13, 1906 and died in Paris on Dec. 22, 1989. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.
In April this year, the Festival of Samuel Beckett's Works opened in Shanghai and "Waiting for Godot" was staged in the form of a Chinese opera during the festival.
Source: Xinhua
29 December 2006
01 December 2006
Pinter's last triumph
The combination of two great playwrights has stunned London audiences.
THE old man rose painfully as the performance ended. The applause built slowly from a single clap of hands to a tumult. Harold Pinter, playwright and actor, weakened by the years and by illness, had just performed Krapp's Last Tape, by his friend and fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett.
"It is beyond acting," said Gillian Hanna, an actress in the audience at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs. "There is something about the coming together of this particular piece and this performance that took me somewhere else." That place, she said, with a bleakness that might be expected, was "an icy steppe" or an apocalypse.
It was not just the sparseness or the long, brooding silences that prompted a degree of rumination in the audience at this hot-ticket run of only 10 performances. (The £25 [$62] tickets for the performances, which end tonight, were reportedly being offered on eBay at seven times their face value.) Pinter is now 76, and has battled cancer of the esophagus. He said last year that he would not write any more plays, so there was an inevitable sense of valediction.
"Given Harold's recent health problems, there's a coming together here that's more than just a performance," said one member of the audience during a brief question-and-answer session with the director, Ian Rickson, after the show. "There's a moment of theatre history coming together here." The production had borne out his point.
Pinter sat in an electric wheelchair for his performance as Krapp, a 69-year-old man revisiting a tape recording he had made at 39, rising from it only to acknowledge the audience's applause at the end.
"Perhaps my best years are gone," the voice on Krapp's tape intones in the closing moments of this one-man, one-act play, first produced in 1958, which probes the interstices of memory. "But I wouldn't want them back."
That, too, found an echo in the auditorium. Sitting in the audience was Henry Woolf, 76, a school friend of Pinter's and a fellow actor who commissioned Pinter's first play, The Room, in 1957 and who offered his own critique with wry melancholy. "What I felt was a great sadness at the leaking of my own life into the eternal drainpipe, and Harold's, too, of course," he said.
The production, part of the program for the Royal Court Theatre's 50th-anniversary season and for the centenary celebration of Beckett's birth, has been hailed by British reviewers both as a triumphant final hurrah for Pinter and as a lean and compelling performance by an actor-playwright whose own plays draw heavily on broken language, pauses, silence.
In The Guardian, Maev Kennedy called it "one of the most anxiously awaited events in the theatrical calendar, the coming together of the two masters of the speaking silence and the pregnant pause". In his session with the audience Rickson said the piece was so powerful that sometimes, when it ends, "there's just silence".
He had, he said, eschewed parts of the original script that show Krapp gorging on bananas. "This is the first 'yes, we have no bananas' version," he said, speaking from a set strewn with boxes of tapes where Krapp has hurled them. The wheelchair remained behind Krapp's desk like a sentinel.
It was "an artistic decision", Stephen Pidcock, a spokesman for the Royal Court, said.
Rickson asked rhetorically, "Were we serving Sam by taking the bananas out?" He then offered a wry answer: "Harold said he had a conversation with Sam, and Sam said it was OK."
Rickson called Pinter's effort in performing the play "heroic".
The two men rehearsed on afternoons from 2.30 to six o'clock for four weeks. Audiences, Rickson said, had been "awed" - a mood caught by reviewers.
Last year Pinter's health forced him to deliver his Nobel acceptance speech in a video recording that showed him sitting in a wheelchair as he unburdened himself of a passionate tirade against US foreign policy, saying; "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them."
His health this year seems more robust.
"Pinter's stoic bravery in putting on this remarkable show shines through; he sits and moves around in a wheelchair from necessity," Nicholas de Jongh wrote in The Evening Standard. At the end, he added, Pinter "walked out unsteadily but his crucial place in modern theatre is secure".
In The Times, Benedict Nightingale bemoaned the excision of the bananas but said that "in every key respect this is surely a performance that would have delighted Beckett".
Famously, the most frequently repeated stage direction is that Krapp should brood, and, Nightingale wrote, Pinter does so "with an intensity that signals the loss of hope, self-contempt and an inner bleakness that lets up only when he hears his 39-year-old self remembering a dreamy moment with a loved one in a boat that rocks 'gently, up and down and from side to side"'.
"And all along Pinter makes you feel the gravity, the meticulousness, the sheer power of his endeavour," Nightingale wrote. "This is an old man's last-gasp search for a meaning he knows he'll never find."
by Alan Cowell in The New York Times
THE old man rose painfully as the performance ended. The applause built slowly from a single clap of hands to a tumult. Harold Pinter, playwright and actor, weakened by the years and by illness, had just performed Krapp's Last Tape, by his friend and fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett."It is beyond acting," said Gillian Hanna, an actress in the audience at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs. "There is something about the coming together of this particular piece and this performance that took me somewhere else." That place, she said, with a bleakness that might be expected, was "an icy steppe" or an apocalypse.
It was not just the sparseness or the long, brooding silences that prompted a degree of rumination in the audience at this hot-ticket run of only 10 performances. (The £25 [$62] tickets for the performances, which end tonight, were reportedly being offered on eBay at seven times their face value.) Pinter is now 76, and has battled cancer of the esophagus. He said last year that he would not write any more plays, so there was an inevitable sense of valediction.
"Given Harold's recent health problems, there's a coming together here that's more than just a performance," said one member of the audience during a brief question-and-answer session with the director, Ian Rickson, after the show. "There's a moment of theatre history coming together here." The production had borne out his point.
Pinter sat in an electric wheelchair for his performance as Krapp, a 69-year-old man revisiting a tape recording he had made at 39, rising from it only to acknowledge the audience's applause at the end.
"Perhaps my best years are gone," the voice on Krapp's tape intones in the closing moments of this one-man, one-act play, first produced in 1958, which probes the interstices of memory. "But I wouldn't want them back."
That, too, found an echo in the auditorium. Sitting in the audience was Henry Woolf, 76, a school friend of Pinter's and a fellow actor who commissioned Pinter's first play, The Room, in 1957 and who offered his own critique with wry melancholy. "What I felt was a great sadness at the leaking of my own life into the eternal drainpipe, and Harold's, too, of course," he said.
The production, part of the program for the Royal Court Theatre's 50th-anniversary season and for the centenary celebration of Beckett's birth, has been hailed by British reviewers both as a triumphant final hurrah for Pinter and as a lean and compelling performance by an actor-playwright whose own plays draw heavily on broken language, pauses, silence.
In The Guardian, Maev Kennedy called it "one of the most anxiously awaited events in the theatrical calendar, the coming together of the two masters of the speaking silence and the pregnant pause". In his session with the audience Rickson said the piece was so powerful that sometimes, when it ends, "there's just silence".
He had, he said, eschewed parts of the original script that show Krapp gorging on bananas. "This is the first 'yes, we have no bananas' version," he said, speaking from a set strewn with boxes of tapes where Krapp has hurled them. The wheelchair remained behind Krapp's desk like a sentinel.
It was "an artistic decision", Stephen Pidcock, a spokesman for the Royal Court, said.
Rickson asked rhetorically, "Were we serving Sam by taking the bananas out?" He then offered a wry answer: "Harold said he had a conversation with Sam, and Sam said it was OK."
Rickson called Pinter's effort in performing the play "heroic".
The two men rehearsed on afternoons from 2.30 to six o'clock for four weeks. Audiences, Rickson said, had been "awed" - a mood caught by reviewers.
Last year Pinter's health forced him to deliver his Nobel acceptance speech in a video recording that showed him sitting in a wheelchair as he unburdened himself of a passionate tirade against US foreign policy, saying; "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them."
His health this year seems more robust.
"Pinter's stoic bravery in putting on this remarkable show shines through; he sits and moves around in a wheelchair from necessity," Nicholas de Jongh wrote in The Evening Standard. At the end, he added, Pinter "walked out unsteadily but his crucial place in modern theatre is secure".
In The Times, Benedict Nightingale bemoaned the excision of the bananas but said that "in every key respect this is surely a performance that would have delighted Beckett".
Famously, the most frequently repeated stage direction is that Krapp should brood, and, Nightingale wrote, Pinter does so "with an intensity that signals the loss of hope, self-contempt and an inner bleakness that lets up only when he hears his 39-year-old self remembering a dreamy moment with a loved one in a boat that rocks 'gently, up and down and from side to side"'.
"And all along Pinter makes you feel the gravity, the meticulousness, the sheer power of his endeavour," Nightingale wrote. "This is an old man's last-gasp search for a meaning he knows he'll never find."
by Alan Cowell in The New York Times
The evidence
We where supposed to meet at The Hub.
"The Hub", she said, I can still hear it well.
Now - and ever! - I don't know what she ment by that.
"Meet me at The Hub", overlooking the outside from the window. I was just amazed and could not find reason to ask what was she talking about.
And then she left.
And the only thing I've got now - almost at the end! - is that, The Hub.
I'm gazing through Centaurium Phive, my heart is aching, shaping out bruises, maybe someone there can help me. Maybe "The Hub" is just around the corner and I can finally meet her.
One hundred years passed and I'm still gliding up her voice. Crafting the infinite with detail. From planet to planet.
That's all I have dwelling and scratching down my whole life through the remains of my last memory. The only left to tell.
And I just don't know how to.
"The Hub", she said, I can still hear it well.
Now - and ever! - I don't know what she ment by that.
"Meet me at The Hub", overlooking the outside from the window. I was just amazed and could not find reason to ask what was she talking about.
And then she left.
And the only thing I've got now - almost at the end! - is that, The Hub.
I'm gazing through Centaurium Phive, my heart is aching, shaping out bruises, maybe someone there can help me. Maybe "The Hub" is just around the corner and I can finally meet her.
One hundred years passed and I'm still gliding up her voice. Crafting the infinite with detail. From planet to planet.
That's all I have dwelling and scratching down my whole life through the remains of my last memory. The only left to tell.
And I just don't know how to.
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