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The essays in this book, first published in 1975, suggest how best
to approach Beckett, how to read him, how to get closer to the
concrete experience offered by this most concrete of writers. It
aims to bring out the full diversity of Beckett's art as dramatist
and story-teller. His astonishing flexibility and inventiveness is
stressed throughout, either in studies of single novels, or from
the whole range of the fiction and stage drama, or from the
experiments in other media: the solitary film, the radio plays.
Beckett's bilingualism, one of the strangest aspects of his
Proteanism, is examined through a comparison of the French and
English texts of some of his stage plays. The emphasis of the
essays is literary rather than philosophical: they explore
narrative and dramatic processes, the strange partial transitions
between them, the fine relations of form and feeling which Beckett
aims at through whatever medium he is using, and his humaneness,
expressed through the many nuances of his humour. The shorter
fiction and the later writings also receive close attention.
The essays in this book, first published in 1975, suggest how best
to approach Beckett, how to read him, how to get closer to the
concrete experience offered by this most concrete of writers. It
aims to bring out the full diversity of Beckett's art as dramatist
and story-teller. His astonishing flexibility and inventiveness is
stressed throughout, either in studies of single novels, or from
the whole range of the fiction and stage drama, or from the
experiments in other media: the solitary film, the radio plays.
Beckett's bilingualism, one of the strangest aspects of his
Proteanism, is examined through a comparison of the French and
English texts of some of his stage plays. The emphasis of the
essays is literary rather than philosophical: they explore
narrative and dramatic processes, the strange partial transitions
between them, the fine relations of form and feeling which Beckett
aims at through whatever medium he is using, and his humaneness,
expressed through the many nuances of his humour. The shorter
fiction and the later writings also receive close attention.
This study provides a European perspective on the drama of Yeats
and of the Irish playwrights - Wilde and Synge, O'Casey and Beckett
- who share in the achievement of creating a modern 'drama of the
interior'. Professor Worth traces in particular the influence of
Maeterlinck, examining his 'static drama' in some detail. A
dominant theme is the importance of total theatre techniques to the
playwrights of the interior from Wilde in Salome to O'Casey in
plays like Cock-a-Doodle Dandy. Yeats is seen as the great pioneer,
assimilating inspiration from the French, with Arthur Symons as
guide, from Synge, from Gordon Craig and from the No drama, and
evolving a modern technique for a drama of complex
self-consciousness."
This is part of a series of books that explores the work of
dramatists. This particular book looks at the lasting appeal of
Sheridan and Goldsmith's comedies, showing how they operate on a
profound imaginative level and draw on their author's experiences
as Irish wits on an English scene. Their dramatic technique's are
examined in relation to physical features of the 18th century
stage. A chapter on sentimental comedy relates plays such as Hugh
Kelly's "False Delicacy" to the balance of irony and sentiment in
Goldsmith's "The Good Natur'd Man" and Sheridan's "A Trip to
Scarborough". The continuing freshness of the comedy of mistakes,
masks and harlequin-like role playing which the two playwrights
draw from the operatic and theatrical conventions of their day is
illustrated by comparison with modern productions.
In this uniquely personal account of Samuel Beckett's theatre, Katharine Worth draws on a wealth of remarkable material - her own work producing and directing productions of Beckett's plays, often with leading actors such as Patrick Magee, but also with students; the experience of watching other productions; her successful adaptation of Beckett's novella, Company, for the stage; and conversations and correspondence with Beckett himself. Among the critical insights into his theatre that she brings to bear is the closeness to common experience of the life-journeys undertaken on Beckett's stage.
In this uniquely personal account of Samuel Beckett's theatre, Katharine Worth draws on a wealth of remarkable material - her own work producing and directing productions of Beckett's plays, often with leading actors such as Patrick Magee, but also with students; the experience of watching other productions; her successful adaptation of Beckett's novella, Company, for the stage; and conversations and correspondence with Beckett himself. Among the critical insights into his theatre that she brings to bear is the closeness to common experience of the life-journeys undertaken on Beckett's stage.
First published in 1903, Where There Is Nothing was never reprinted
in the author's lifetime. It lost its place in collected editions
of Yeats's plays to a new version, The Unicorn from the Stars, in
which Lady Gregory had a major share. There has long been a need
for an edition of Where There Is Nothing to restore to general view
an interesting play which, unusually for Yeats, has a modern
setting, a middle-class hero, and a predominantly naturalistic
technique. Yeats gave various reasons for abandoning the original
play. Perhaps one he did not mention was his doubt whether its open
and direct style and modem Irish background might not identify the
author too closely with the visionary central character, Paul
Ruttledge. Many of Yeats's deepest preoccupations are reflected in
Paul's pursuit of his apocalyptic vision: he abandons a life of
bourgeois comfort for hard freedom among the tinkers, follows a
religious life in a monastery, and finally dies a martyr at the
hands of a mob who cannot understand his ecstatic message: "Where
there is nothing, there is God." The drastically revised version,
The Unicorn from the Stars, changes the period and social milieu
and introduces new characters and plot complications which bear the
marks of Lady Gregory's distinctive style. Both plays are included
in this volume to allow comparison of the plays themselves and to
throw light on the characteristic methods of these two preeminent
playwrights.
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