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"Waiting for Sauvignon Blanc: Pandemic reveals Samuel Beckett as the ultimate realist" Los Angeles Times | Charles McNulty

"The static world of Beckett’s plays invites us to move beyond the rushed pageantry of

our lives to peer into the unyielding facts of our existence. For those averse to stark

truths, this might seem like depressing material for the theater. But what could be

more life-giving than the perfection of form achieved by Beckett in plays that are

meticulously wrought by a theatrical composer whose unfailing ear for language is

matched by an unerring eye for gesture."

"It's not true that Beckett is shy, evasive, a philosopher of the ivory tower, a philosopher of despair. He's written about human distress, not human despair. Everything in his work ends with hope. Hope, hope, in everything he writes. I've never met a man with so much compassion for the human race. Joyce was the centre of attraction. He loved himself. He was the hub around which everything revolved. Beckett is the wheel that revolves around a hub." - Jack MacGowran

 "I think Beckett writes music. When I first received the text back in 2005, I saw a sheet of music: the three dots interrupting each phrase and sometimes reduced to two dots is like a crotchet versus a quaver, akin to musical notation. When you look at the very early draft of Footfalls he’s actually written a bar of music. I am led by that, I approach this work like a dancer. It’s always my starting point with this text."

 

 Interview with Lisa Dwan, BOMB Magazine

Beckett is lyrical, yet harsh. Precise, yet sensual. He more than any other writer of the twentieth century has brought poetry back to the theatre as something organic. The ancient devices of the rhetorician – paradox, balance, antithesis – are there in abundance, just as they are in Shakespeare. Yet Beckett’s speech has no pretension. It can always pass for the speech of ordinary men. - Peter Hall, Exposed by the Mask

"Touch Starvation is a Consequence of COVID-19's physical distancing" |Texas Medical Center

"In my opinion, Beckett's plays are probably best seen in (ahem) isolation, as each one is a beautifully honed, determined, focused world unto itself. While seeing lots together will raise awareness of the similarity between the plays, it may not help us to see how distinct his best work is, even within his own canon. I believe that his plays will continue to echo through time because he managed to articulate a feeling as opposed to an idea. And that feeling is the unique human predicament of being alive and conscious. Of course, it's a very complicated feeling (and it's a complicated idea), but he makes it look simple because his great genius, along with his incomparable literary power, was the precision and clarity he brought to bear in depicting the human condition itself. That he did it with great warmth, humour and moments of deep sadness, which are some of the most moving one could experience in the theatre, also speaks of his craft as a monumental playwright."

 

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