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'Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful.' This
line, from the play, was adopted by Jean Anouilh, to characterize
the first production of "Waiting For Godot" at the Theatre de
Babylone, in 1953. He went on to predict that the play would, in
time, represent the most important premiere to be staged in Paris
for forty years. Nobody acquainted with Beckett's masterly black
comedy would now question this prescient recognition of a classic
of twentieth-century literature.
Subtitled 'A tragicomedy in two Acts', and famously described by
the Irish critic Vivien Mercier as a play in which 'nothing
happens, twice', En attendant Godot was first performed at the
Theatre de Babylone in Paris in 1953. It was translated into
English by Samuel Beckett, and Waiting for Godot opened at the Arts
Theatre in London in 1955. 'Go and see Waiting for Godot. At the
worst you will discover a curiosity, a four-leaved clover, a black
tulip; at the best something that will securely lodge in a corner
of your mind for as long as you live.' Harold Hobson, 7 August 1955
'I told him that if by Godot I had meant God I would have said God,
and not Godot. This seemed to disappoint him greatly.' Samuel
Beckett, 1955
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Happy Days (Paperback)
Samuel Beckett
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R394
R324
Discovery Miles 3 240
Save R70 (18%)
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In Happy Days, Samuel Beckett pursues his relentless search for the
meaning of existence, probing the tenuous relationships that bind
one person to another, and each to the universe, top time past and
time present. Once again, stripping theater to its barest
essentials, Happy Days offers only two characters: Winnie, a woman
of about fifty, and Willie, a man of about sixty. In the first act
Winnie is buried up to her waist in a mound of earth, but still has
the use of her arms and few earthly possessions--toothbrush, tube
of toothpaste, small mirror, revolver, handkerchief, spectacles; in
the second act she is embedded up to her neck and can move only her
eyes. Willie lives and moves--on all fours--behind the mound,
appearing intermittently and replying only occasionally into
Winnie's long monologue, but the knowledge of his presence is a
source of comfort and inspiration to her, and doubtless the
prerequisite for all her "happy days."
Published in French in 1961, and in English in 1964, How It Is is a
novel in three parts, written in short paragraphs, which tell
(abruptly, cajolingly, bleakly) of a narrator lying in the dark, in
the mud, repeating his life as he hears it uttered - or remembered
- by another voice. Told from within, from the dark, the story is
tirelessly and intimately explicit about the feelings that pervade
his world, but fragmentary and vague about all else therein or
beyond. Together with Molloy, How It Is counts for many readers as
Beckett's greatest accomplishment in the novel form. It is also his
most challenging narrative, both stylistically and for the
pessimism of its vision, which continues the themes of reduced
circumstance, of another life before the present, and the
self-appraising search for an essential self, which were
inaugurated in the great prose narratives of his earlier trilogy.
she sits aloof ten yards fifteen yards she looks up looks at me
says at last to herself all is well he is working my head where is
my head it rests on the table my hand trembles on the table she
sees I am not sleeping the wind blows tempestuous the little clouds
drive before it the table glides from light to darkness darkness to
light Edited by Edouard Magessa O'Reilly
The present volume gathers all of Beckett's texts for theatre, from
1955 to 1984. It includes both the major dramatic works and the
short and more compressed texts for the stage and for radio. 'He
believes in the cadence, the comma, the bite of word on reality,
whatever else he believes; and his devotion to them, he makes
clear, is a sufficient focus for the reader's attention. In the
modern history of literature he is a unique moral figure, not a
dreamer of rose-gardens but a cultivator of what will grow in the
waste land, who can make us see the exhilarating design that thorns
and yucca share with whatever will grow anywhere.' - Hugh Kenner
Contents: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, All That Fall,
Acts Without Words, Krapp's Last Tape, Roughs for the Theatre,
Embers, Roughs for the Radio, Words and Music, Cascando, Play,
Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time,
Footfalls, Ghost Trio,...but the clouds..., A Piece of Monologue,
Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht und Traume, What
Where.
Performed across the globe by some of the world's most iconic
performers, Samuel Beckett's indelible masterpiece remains an
unwavering testament of what it means to be human. From an
inauspicious beginning at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone in
1953, followed by bewilderment among American and British
audiences, Waiting for Godot has become of the most important and
enigmatic plays of the past fifty years and a cornerstone of
twentieth-century drama. As Clive Barnes wrote, "Time catches up
with genius ... Waiting for Godot is one of the masterpieces of the
century." The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men
waiting for someone--or something--named Godot. Vladimir and
Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own
consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry,
dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind's
inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett's language pioneered an
expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post-World
War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and
beautiful allegories of our time.
Molloy is Samuel Beckett's best-known novel, and his first
published work to be written in French, ushering in a period of
concentrated creativity in the late 1940s which included the
companion novels Malone Dies and The Unnamable. The narrative of
Molloy, old and ill, remembering and forgetting, scarcely human,
begets a parallel tale of the spinsterish Moran, a private
detective sent in search of him, whose own deterioration during the
quest joins in with the catalogue of Molloy's woes. Molloy brings a
world into existence with finicking certainties, at the tip of
whoever is holding the pencil, and trades larger uncertainties with
the reader. Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is
midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight.
It was not raining. Edited by Shane Weller
Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969;
his literary output of plays, novels, stories and poetry has earned
him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our
time."Endgame," originally written in French and translated into
English by Beckett himself, is considered by many critics to be his
greatest single work. A pinnacle of Beckett's characteristic raw
minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human
essence in the face of approaching death.
Written in French and first performed at the Théâtre du Bablyone
in Paris, in 1953, En attendant Godot was subsequently translated
by Samuel Beckett into English as Waiting for Godot. It was
performed at the Arts Theatre in London in 1955, and first
published by Faber in 1956. To mark the centenary of Beckett's
birth and the fiftieth anniversary of its original publication,
Faber are now publishing for the first time a bilingual edition of
this great masterpiece. Subtitled 'a tragicomedy in two acts', and
once famously described by the Irish critic Vivian Mercier as a
play in which 'nothing happens, twice'. Waiting for Godot is also a
play that was written twice. Here, on facing pages, the reader can
watch it unfold simultaneously in two languages.
'Malone', writes Malone, 'is what I am called now.' On his
deathbed, and wiling away the time with stories, the octogenarian
Malone's account of his condition is intermittent and
contradictory, shifting with the vagaries of the passing days:
without mellowness, without elegiacs; wittier, jauntier, and
capable of wilder rages than Molloy. The sound I liked best had
nothing noble about it. It was the barking of the dogs, at night,
in the clusters of hovels up in the hills, where the stone-cutters
lived, like generations of stone-cutters before them. it came down
to me where I lay, in the house in the plain, wild and soft, at the
limit of earshot, soon weary. The dogs of the valley replied with
their gross bay all fangs and jaws and foam...
Happy Days was written in 1960 and first produced in London at the
Royal Court Theatre in November 1962. WINNIE: [ . . .] Well anyway
- this man Shower - or Cooker - no matter - and the woman - hand in
hand - in the other hands bags - kind of big brown grips - standing
there gaping at me [...] - What's she doing? he says - What's the
idea? he says - stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground -
coarse fellow - What does it mean? he says - What's it meant to
mean? - and so on - lot more stuff like that - usual drivel - Do
you hear me? He says - I do, she says, God help me - What do you
mean, he says, God help you? (stops filing nails, raises head,
gazes front.) And you, she says, what's the idea of you, she says,
what are you meant to mean?
Edited by J. C. C. Mays Murphy, Samuel Beckett's first novel, was
published in 1938. Its work-shy eponymous hero, adrift in London,
realises that desire can never be satisfied and withdraws from
life, in search of stupor. Murphy's lovestruck fiancee Celia tries
with tragic pathos to draw him back, but her attempts are doomed to
failure. Murphy's friends and familiars are simulacra of Murphy,
fragmented and incomplete. But Beckett's achievement lies in the
brilliantly original language used to communicate this vision of
isolation and misunderstanding. The combination of particularity
and absurdity gives Murphy's world its painful definition, but the
sheer comic energy of Beckett's prose releases characters and
readers alike into exuberance.
In Waiting for Godot, two wandering tramps, Vladimir and Estragon,
wait by a lonely tree, to meet up with Mr. Godot, an enigmatic
figure in a world where time, place and memory are blurred and
meaning is where you find it. The tramps hope that Godot will
change their lives for the better. Instead, two eccentric travelers
arrive, one man on the end of the other's rope. The results are
both funny and dangerous in this existential masterpiece.
Edited by Paul Auster, this four-volume set of Beckett's canon has
been designed by award-winner Laura Lindgren. Available
individually, as well as in a boxed set, the four hardcover volumes
have been specially bound with covers featuring images central to
Beckett's works. Typographical errors that remained uncorrected in
the various prior editions have now been corrected in consultation
with Beckett scholars C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski.
"A man speaking English beautifully chooses to speak in French,
which he speaks with greater difficulty, so that he is obliged to
choose his words carefully, forced to give up fluency and to find
the hard words that come with difficulty, and then after all that
finding he puts it all back into English, a new English containing
all the difficulty of the French, of the coining of thought in a
second language, a new English with the power to change English
forever. This is Samuel Beckett. This is his great work. It is the
thing that speaks. Surrender." -- Salman Rushdie, from his
Introduction
The Unnamable - so named because he knows not who he may be - is
from a nameless place. He speaks of previous selves ('all these
Murphys, Molloys, and Malones...') as diversions from the need to
stop speaking altogether. But, as with the other novels in the
trilogy, the prose is full of marvellous precisions, full of its
own reasons for keeping going. ...perhaps the words have carried me
to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my
story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, will be
the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the
silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
This book contains the English and French texts and a complete
record of the genesis of each. Besides CommentC'est How It Is,
O'Reilly has included L'Image and an excerpt from Comment C'est
that was published later inanother volume.
Samuel Beckett directed Krapp's Last Tape on four separate
occasions: this volume offers a facsimile of his 1969
Schiller-Theater notebook. Professor Knowlson writes that in these
notes 'we see Beckett simplifying, shaping and refining, as he
works towards a realization of the play that will function well
dramatically. The material reveals a flexibility and openness of
approach often considered alien to Beckett's ways of working in the
theatre.' The Schiller notebook also contains some of the most
explicit analysis by Beckett of his own work ever revealed. The
revised text incorporates many of the changes Beckett made in the
1969 Schiller production, as well as subsequent changes in later
productions. Professor Knowlson worked closely with Beckett over
these revisions - and deviations from the original are noted and
explained in detail.
This volume completes the publication of this series of notebooks,
the plays in question being Play, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Footfalls,
That Time and What Where. Professor Gontarski brings his own
experience as a director to editing this book, which provides a
continuing revelation of the playwright's approach to the staging
of his work. To these 'shorter plays' Samuel Beckett devoted the
same care and attention to the details of textual revision and
stagecraft as he did to the full-length works, and this book
contains revised texts prepared on the same editorial basis as
before.
This volume brings together three of Nobel Prize winner Samuel
Beckett's major short stories and thirteen shorter pieces of
fiction that he calls "texts for nothing." Here, as in all his
work, Beckett relentlessly strips away all but the essential to
arrive at a core of truth. His prose reveals the same mastery that
marks his work from Waiting for Godot and Endgame to Molloy and
Malone Dies. In each of the three stories, old men displaced or
expelled from the modest corners where they have been living bestir
themselves in search of new corners. Told, "You can't stay here,"
they somehow, doggedly, inevitably, go on.
Includes:
"The Expelled"
"The Calmative"
"The End"
Texts for Nothing (1-10)
Coming after Charles Krance's edition of Company and of Ill Seen Ill Said (Beckett 1996), this is the third volume of Samuel Beckett's Complete Bilingual Works. Like those volumes, this one presents twin English and French texts and a complete record of the genesis of each one. This volume will serve primarily as a research tool in two areas: comparative study of Beckett's English and French texts, along with the study of the genesis of those texts.
This is the last of three volumes of collected shorter prose to be
published in the Faber edition of the works of Samuel Beckett -
which already includes a volume of early stories (The Expelled/The
Calmative/The End/First Love) and of late stories (Company/Ill Seen
Ill Said/Worstward Ho/Stirrings Still). The present volume contains
all of the short fictions - some of them no longer than a page -
written and published by Beckett between 1950 and the early 1970s.
Most were written in French, and they mostly belong within three
loose sequences: Texts for Nothing, Fizzles and Residua. The
edition also includes two remarkable independent narratives: From
an Abandoned Work and As The Story Was Told. All of these texts,
whose unsleeping subject is themselves, demonstrate that the short
story is one of the recurrent modes of Beckett's imagination, and
occasions some of his greatest works. ... he would like it to be my
fault that words fail him, of course words fail him. He tells his
story every five minuts, saying it is not his, there's cleverness
for you. He would like ti to be my fault that he has no story, of
course he has no story, that's no reason for trying to foist one on
me...
It was as a poet that Samuel Beckett launched himself in the little
reviews of 1930s Paris, and as a poet that he ended his career.
This new selection, from Whoroscope (1930) to 'what is the word'
(1988), describes a lifetime's arc of writing. It was as a poet
moreover that Beckett made his first breakthrough into writing in
French, and the Selected Poems represents work in both languages,
including the sequence of brief but highly crafted mirlitonnades,
which did so much to usher in the style of his late prose, and come
as close as anything he wrote to honouring the ambition to 'bore
one hole after another in language, until what lurks behind it - be
it something or nothing - begins to seep through.' Also included
are several of Beckett's translations from contemporaries -
Apollinaire, Eluard, Michaux, Montale - in versions which count
among his own poetic achievements. Edited by David Wheatley
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Murphy (Paperback)
Samuel Beckett
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R403
R333
Discovery Miles 3 330
Save R70 (17%)
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Murphy, Samuel Beckett's first published novel, is set in London
and Dublin, during the first decades of the Irish Republic. The
title character loves Celia in a "striking case of love requited"
but must first establish himself in London before his intended
bride will make the journey from Ireland to join him. Beckett
comically describes the various schemes that Murphy employs to
stretch his meager resources and the pastimes that he uses to fill
the hours of his days. Eventually Murphy lands a job as a nurse at
Magdalen Mental Mercyseat hospital, where he is drawn into the mad
world of the patients which ends in a fateful game of chess. While
grounded in the comedy and absurdity of much of daily life,
Beckett's work is also an early exploration of themes that recur
throughout his entire body of work including sanity and insanity
and the very meaning of life.
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