Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater

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Oxford University Press, 1990 M12 27 - 224 páginas
Beyond Minimalism explores Beckett's drama of the '70s and '80s, examining the ways in which play text and performance merge through the playwright's poetic idiom. Beginning with Not I and continuing through Catastrophe and What Where, Brater examines the plays not only as texts but also as theater pieces. Discussing the technical and aesthetic demands that productions like Footfalls and Rockaby make on actor, director, and spectator, Brater clarifies the essential relationship between Beckett's achievement in the context of the breakdown of genre, performance poetry, and the electronic intrusion of the recorded voice as a new theatrical convention. In the course of his analysis Brater demonstrates how Beckett's late style in the theater both continues and clarifies the dramatic lyricism that is the hallmark of earlier works such as Endgame and Waiting for Godot.

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Genre Under Stress
3
The Eye in Not I
18
That Time on That Space
37
Footfalls to Infinity
52
Shades for Film and Video
74
Monologue Impromptu and Mask
111
Other Only Images
139
Play as Performance Poem
165
Notes
179
Bibliography
193
Index
202
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Página 46 - And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.
Página 6 - Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries.
Página 50 - Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
Página 97 - Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost? If on the lost, admit you turned aside From a great labyrinth out of pride, Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought Or anything called conscience once; And that if memory recur, the sun's Under eclipse and the day blotted out.
Página 53 - Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.
Página 116 - Suck was a queer word. The fellow called Simon Moonan that name because Simon Moonan used to tie the prefect's false sleeves behind his back and the prefect used to let on to be angry. But the sound was ugly. Once he had washed his hands in the lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel and his father pulled the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. And when it had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin had made a sound like that: suck. Only louder.
Página 101 - My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. "Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. "What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? "I never know what you are thinking. Think.
Página 15 - 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, raises head, gazes front.) And you, she says, what's the idea of you, she says, what are you meant to mean?
Página 106 - All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins. Before me floats an image, man or shade, Shade more than man, more image than a shade; 10 For Hades...
Página 153 - Producers don't seem to have any sense of form in movement. The kind of form one finds in music, for instance, where themes keep recurring. When, in a text, actions are repeated, they ought to be made unusual the first time, so that when they happen again — in exactly the same way — an audience will recognize them from before.

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