Krapp S Last Tape Theatrical Notebooks

Vol III of the four-volume series reproducing Beckett's theatrical notebooks in facsimile - now in affordable paperback edition.

"The publication of Samuel Beckett's Theatrical Notebooks . . . is a major event which casts fascinating light on the thought processes of a great writer."--Review of English Studies From the mid-1960s, Samuel Beckett himself directed all his major plays in Berlin, Paris, or London. For most of these productions he meticulously prepared notebooks for his personal use. The Theatrical Notebooks of Beckett that are reproduced in facsimile here are translated and annotated and thus offer a remarkable record of his own involvement with the staging of his texts. They present his solutions to practical problems but also provide a unique insight into the ways he envisaged his plays. With additional information taken from Beckett's own annotated and corrected copies, the editors have been able to constitute a new revised text for each of the major plays. Beckett directed Krapp's Last Tape on four separate occasions: this volume offers a facsimile of his 1969 Schiller Theater notebook, which contains some of the most explicit analysis by the playwright of his own work ever revealed. The revised text incorporates many of the changes he made in the 1969 Schiller production, as well as subsequent changes in later productions. It reveals a flexibility and openness of approach often considered alien to Beckett's ways of working in the theatre.

Samuel Beckett directed Krapp's Last Tape on four separate occasions, and this volume offers a facsimile of his 1969 Schiller-Theater notebook. The notebook contains what is probably some of the most explicit analysis by Beckett of his own work ever revealed.

Samuel Beckett’s theatrical works maintain a prominent position within contemporary theatre. His plays provide a prodigious potential to study several forms of acting, staging, and dramaturgy, as well as language and translation, thereby setting a fertile ground to tackle the problematic issue of the relationship between theatre criticism and theatre-translation criticism. That is precisely what this study examines by drawing attention to the fundamental characteristics of translated theatre texts as blueprints for productions and taking several aspects into account from directing to acting, from staging to performance, together with the language factor. To that end, Burç İdem Dinçel focuses on one of Beckett’s most significant plays, namely, Krapp’s Last Tape, situating it within the author’s oeuvre and along the way scrutinising not only the theatrical pieces but also the prose. By looking into the Turkish translations and productions of the play, this book brings forth a new dimension into approaching theatre through translation.

Waiting for Godot follows Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape in this highly praised series of Beckett's notebooks, which show for the first time the extensive revisions made by Beckett during revivals of the play. This volume is in part a facsimile, with transcription and commentary, of the notebook kept by Beckett for Berlin's Schiller-Theater production in 1975. It contains a full set of directorial notes, and discloses, section by section, a total system that works by repetition and analogy, musical rhythm and echo, establishing subtle patterns of sound, movement and gestures.

"Packed with wonderful details illustrating Beckett's literary and dramatic brilliance and providing fascinating interpretive aids to these important plays."--David E. Liss

Beckett and Aesthetics, first published in 2003, examines Samuel Beckett's struggle with the recalcitrance of artistic media, their refusal to yield to his artistic purposes. As a young man Beckett hoped that writing could provide psychic authenticity and true representation of the physical world; instead he found himself immersed in artificialities and self-enclosed word games. Daniel Albright argues that Beckett escaped from this bind through allegories of artistic frustration and through an art of non-representation, estrangement and general failure. He arrived, Albright shows, at some grasp of fact through the most indirect route available. Albright explores Beckett's experimentation with the notion that an artistic medium might itself be made to speak. This powerful and highly original book explores Beckett's own engagement with radio, film, and television, prose and drama as part of an attempt to escape the confines of the aesthetic. Albright's Beckett becomes a sophisticated theorist of the very notion of the aesthetic.