Katharine Worth - Böcker

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. The book focuses on the power that Beckett's theatre has to fascinate us with the ordinary small experiences of life as well as its great mysteries. The strange life-journeys taken on his stage are seen to be the universal journey; the endless story-telling about it a process we all engage in. The critical discussion highlights the unique fusion on Beckett's stage of cosmic scenery and humorous individualism. It takes in at one end influential forerunners such as Maeterlinck, Yeats, and Dickens and at the other the lively contemporary performances, sometimes controversial, that testify to the enduring human appeal and magnetism of Beckett's plays and stage fiction.

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. The book focuses on the power that Beckett's theatre has to fascinate us with the ordinary small experiences of life as well as its great mysteries. The strange life-journeys taken on his stage are seen to be the universal journey; the endless story-telling about it a process we all engage in. The critical discussion highlights the unique fusion on Beckett's stage of cosmic scenery and humorous individualism. It takes in at one end influential forerunners such as Maeterlinck, Yeats, and Dickens and at the other the lively contemporary performances, sometimes controversial, that testify to the enduring human appeal and magnetism of Beckett's plays and stage fiction.

Each generation needs to be introduced to the culture and great works of the past and to reinterpret them in its own ways. This series re-examines the important English dramatists of earlier centuries in the light of new information, ew interests and new attitudes. The books will be relevant to those interested in literatire, theatre and cultural history, and to threatre-goers and general readers who want an up-to-date view of these dramatists and their plays, with the emphasis on performance and relevant culture history.This book explores the reasons for the deep and lasting appeal of Sheridan's and Goldsmith's comedies, showing how they operate at the profound imaginative level and draw on their author's experience as Irish wits in an English scene. Their subtle dramatic techniques are examined in relation to physical features of the eighteenth-century stage. A chapter on sentimental comedy relates to 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 from modern productions. These have helped to illuminate the psychological truth and social awareness underlying the sparkling surfaces of Sheridan's and Goldsmith's classic comedies.

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.