Hannah Simpson – författare

Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness explores Beckett's representation of physical pain in his theatre plays in the long aftermath of World War II, emphasising how the issues raised by this staging of pain speak directly to matters lying at the heart of his work: the affective power of the human body; the doubtful capacity of language as a means of communication; the aesthetic and ethical functioning of the theatre medium; and the vexed question of intersubjective empathy. Alongside the wartime and post-war plays of fellow Francophone writers Albert Camus, Eugène Ionesco, Pablo Picasso, and Marguerite Duras, this study resituates Beckett's early plays in a new conceptualising of le théâtre du témoin or a 'theatre of the witness'. These are plays concerned with the epistemological and ethical uncertainties of witnessing another's pain, rather than with the sufferer's own direct experience. They raise troubling questions about our capacity to comprehend and respond to another being's pain. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework of extant criticism, recorded historical audience response, theatre and affect theory, and medical understandings of bodily pain, Hannah Simpson argues that these plays do not offer any easily negotiable encounter with physical suffering, pushing us to recognise the very 'otherness' of another being's pain, even as it invades our own affective sphere. In place of any comforting transcendence or redemption of endured pain, they offer a starkly sceptical, even pessimistic probing of what it is to witness another's suffering.

This book examines dramatic dialogue in English-language theatre, tracing verbal invention across four centuries from Shakespeare and Restoration comedy right up to contemporary English and American theatre.Published posthumously, this renowned theatre scholar's book considers English dramatic dialogue as exemplified in the verbal invention of particular plays. That invention is traced through puns, repetitions, adroit clichés, occasional neologisms, malapropisms, sound play and more or less recondite allusions.In eight chapters, Cohn offers close readings of monologue and dialogue in plays by William Shakespeare, William Wycherley, George Etherege, William Congreve, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Tom Stoppard, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepard, Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks. It’s a fascinating text, written with Cohn’s characteristic wit, warmth and lucidity, and offers both an authoritative introduction to theatre dialogue and a remarkable final addition to Cohn’s scholarly legacy.

Beckett’s plays have attracted a striking range of disability performances – that is, performances that cast disabled actors, regardless of whether their roles are explicitly described as ‘disabled’ in the text. Grounded in the history of disability performance of Beckett’s work and a new theorising of Beckett’s treatment of the impaired body, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance examines four contemporary disability performances of Beckett’s plays, staged in the UK and US, and brings the rich fields of Beckett studies and disability studies into mutually illuminating conversation. Pairing original interviews with the actors and directors involved in these productions alongside critical analysis underpinned by recent disability and performance theory, this book explores how these productions emphasise or rework previously undetected indicators of disability in Beckett’s work. More broadly, it reveals how Beckett’s theatre compulsively interrogates alternative embodiments, unexpected forms of agency, and the extraordinary social interdependency of the human body. Winner of the TaPRA David Bradby Monograph Prize, 2023.

Beckett’s plays have attracted a striking range of disability performances – that is, performances that cast disabled actors, regardless of whether their roles are explicitly described as ‘disabled’ in the text. Grounded in the history of disability performance of Beckett’s work and a new theorising of Beckett’s treatment of the impaired body, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance examines four contemporary disability performances of Beckett’s plays, staged in the UK and US, and brings the rich fields of Beckett studies and disability studies into mutually illuminating conversation. Pairing original interviews with the actors and directors involved in these productions alongside critical analysis underpinned by recent disability and performance theory, this book explores how these productions emphasise or rework previously undetected indicators of disability in Beckett’s work. More broadly, it reveals how Beckett’s theatre compulsively interrogates alternative embodiments, unexpected forms of agency, and the extraordinary social interdependency of the human body. Winner of the TaPRA David Bradby Monograph Prize, 2023.