Changed Title

An update ahead of our fourth speaker of the term, Gaby Hartel. Instead of the pre-circulated title she will now be speaking on Beckett and Peter Handke, under the new title:

"Point on a walk" – Writing and Walking with Beckett and Handke. A sketch.

I hope to see you there!

Seminars 2013

I'm pleased to announce the speakers for this year's seminar series, which continues to be open to all and free to attend. Held in the New Seminar Room in St John's College, Oxford, every Tuesday at 5.30.

I look forward to seeing you there!

23 April Dr Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (University of Oxford)
“Beckett's Evolutionary Vision”

30 April Dr Yoshiki Tajiri (University of Tokyo)
“The pseudocouple and sexuality – Rereading Mercier and Camier”

7 May Professor David Pattie (University of Chester)
“The Arrival of Godot: Beckett, British Theatre and the 1950s”

14 May Dr Gaby Hartel (Berlin)
Out of the Dark or From the Visual World? Non-Iconic Sounds in High Modernity`s New Aurality and Samuel Beckett’s Use of the Radio.

21 May Dr Katherine Weiss (East Tennessee State University)
“The (Dis)appearing Body in Beckett's Stage Plays”

28 May Professor Chris Ackerley (University of Otago, NZ)
“Monadic Consciousness: from The Unnamable to Endgame”

4 June Mr Jonathan Heron (Artistic Director, Fail Better Productions,
& IATL Fellow, University of Warwick)
“‘what do you take me for, a something machine?’: the 1964 National Theatre production of Play (and some new experiments in 2014)” 

11 June Dr Dan Katz (University of Warwick)
“A Few Days Are All We Have: 'Malone Dies' and Some Modern American Poems”

Ends and Odds

Another update in the off-season of this blog, but I wanted to draw attention to the bootleg film available on Ubuweb of the post-Katrina Godot, staged in Gentilly, New Orleans, directed by Paul Chan and featuring Wendell Pierce. As the video reminds us the footage has dubious legal status, so it's unclear how long it will remain available.

Enjoy it while you can here.

Ends and Odds

A late update for the sporadic maintenance of this blog during the 'off-season', but I wanted to flag the excellent website of the AHRC-funded Beckett and the Brain seminar programme, which has its third and final workshop next week at the University of Warwick. The website can be seen here. 

Importantly for those interested but unable to attend, the website also has recordings of talks given there, including papers by Prof. Mary Bryden, Prof. Catherine Malabou, Dr Laura Salisbury and myself.

Those from the Reading workshop can be streamed from here, and those from the Birkbeck workshop are here.

Ends and Odds

Although I've already blogged about it, the ongoing unveiling of the planned events at the Happy Days Beckett Festival in Enniskillen makes it worth another mention. Since I last posted on the subject a long list of talks and readings has been announced including:

Will Self, Paul Muldoon and Alice Oswald, Shivaun O'Casey and David Gothard, James Knowlson and Anne Atik Arikha...

Have another look here.

Ends and Odds

An audio update as BBC Radio 3's lunchtime concert, broadcast from the 2012 Rodewald Concert Series, recently featured a performance of Philip Glass's Company by the Fine Arts Quartet.

You can, for a limited time, here the performance here.

Also making what may turn out to be a fleeting appearance free to stream online is Beckett's television play Nacht und Träume. Thanks to George Hunka's Superfluities Redux blog you can see it here.  

Ends and Odds

At the Daily Telegraph Jane Shilling reviews Old Earth, an intriguing collaboration between Jericho theatre company and The Sixteen, performed at the Spitalfields Festival last week. 

She writes,

"The world premiere of Old Earth, given by theatre company Jericho and the singers of Harry Christophers’s ensemble, The Sixteen, brings together four short prose texts by Samuel Beckett with specially commissioned music by the composer Alec Roth. Beckett composed his “Fizzles”, a cycle of eight short prose pieces, between 1960 and 1972. All but one were in French, under the title “Foirades”, and later translated into English by the author. (In both languages the titles convey overtones of humiliating failure.)


The collection of fragments depicts the struggle of a character restlessly poised – apparently at the point of death – between memory and forgetting, reaching for a connection between the past and the present which remains perpetually just beyond his grasp.

Beckett stretches language to the point of syntactical disintegration as he depicts the spirit wandering in a purgatorial wilderness before returning to places where the memory of former happiness can be dimly discerned in disjointed images of once familiar scenes."

You can read the rest of the review here.

For a far less impressed response try Guy Dammann at The Guardian. 

"Struggling in low light to find my seat, I noticed the ushers were all muttering to themselves, as if simultaneously afflicted by the same madness. "Ashes to ashes" was the reply to my inquiry about the whereabouts of seats E14 and 15."

Read the rest of this review here.