Текст 8
Beckett
In 1953 modern theatre was changed by Waiting for Godot, a play about nothing that was written in French by an Irishman. Born in 1906 in a suburb of Dublin, Ireland, Samuel Beckett came from a Protestant background and studied Romance languages at Trinity College in Dublin. After teaching for a time, he moved to Paris, the first step in a period of restless travel throughout England, France, Germany, and Italy. In 1937 Beckett decided to settle in Paris. As a citizen of Ireland, a country that was neutral in World War II, he was able to stay in Paris even after the city was occupied by the Germans. He joined an underground resistance group in 1941. When Beckett heard that members of his group had been arrested by the Nazis, he went into hiding in the French countryside, returning to Paris in 1945.
After World War II Beckett entered a period of intense creativity. Before the war he had written some essays, short stories, and a novel, Murphy. From 1946 to 1947 Beckett produced more short stories, the novels Molloy and Malone Dies, and two plays. Many of these works remained unpublished until the success of his play Waiting for Godot made Beckett famous. Originally written in French, En attendant Godot opened at the small Theatre de Babylone in Paris in 1953. It came to be seen as the first example of a new type of drama—soon called “absurdist”
He almost always wrote his plays first in French, later translating them into English. This process forced him to concentrate on the meaning of his words, rather than any superficial eloquence. Beckett’s later works became shorter and shorter and more concentrated. For example, Come and Go contains only 121 words spoken by three characters, and his Acts Without Words is just that. Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He died in 1989 in Paris. Among the major writers of the 20th century, Beckett stands out for the simplicity and purity of his approach to literature and for his insights into basic human experience. His works are also major experiments in modern theatrical form.
Расскажите о важных событиях в жизни Самуэла Беккета, опираясь на следующие даты:
1906, 1937, 1941, 1945, 1946-1947, 1953, 1969, 1989.
Текст 9
Theatre of the Absurd
In his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, French writer Albert Camus defined the human condition as essentially absurd, or meaningless. In the 1950s a number of dramatists, including Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Fernando Arrabal, and Edward Albee, created works representing the universe as unknowable and humankind’s existence as hopeless and seemingly without purpose. The characters in these works are bewildered, troubled, and endlessly threatened by inner turmoil or external, unexplained forces. They seem to be out of sync with the universe.
The influential critic Martin Esslin was the first to label these theatrical works as absurdist and began to speak of the theatre of the absurd as a movement; none of these playwrights described his own work as absurd, nor were they consciously working to create an artistic movement. Yet, although each playwright developed an individual style and tone, the eventual outcome of their plays is largely the same: no matter how frantically a character tries to improve his or her fortunes, nothing will change the human condition. Ludicrous, even farcical, character behavior and strange, twisted dialogue create humor, but there remains a fundamental seriousness and internal disquiet.
Theatre of the absurd often contains combinations of these established performance conventions:
• theatrical effects like those used by jugglers, acrobats, bullfighters, and mimes
• clowning and fooling
• scenes of madness and crazed behavior
• disjointed language full of cliches, puns, repetitions, non sequiturs (words that do not relate to what was previously said), and nonsense
• elements of dream and fantasy
In the theatre of the absurd, these conventions were harnessed together to serve a new philosophy of existence—one in which a non sequitur might seem a right and logical response.
Beckett’s Contributions to the Absurd
Beckett’s writings, simultaneously comic and pessimistic, force readers and audiences to question the basic assumptions of their lives. In Waiting for Godot, two characters wait for an individual named Godot who never comes; by the end of the play it seems that the characters must go on like this forever. Endgame dramatizes the breakdown of the relationship between a master, Hamm, and his servant, Clov. Nothing substantial happens, and it’s this absence of anything important that is the point. Like other comedy, Beckett uses physical humor. In Happy Days a woman named Winnie sinks deeper and deeper into a pile of dirt onstage as she rattles on about the trivialities of life. Even as she nears her death and is about to be swallowed up by the ground, she persists in pretending furiously that life will continue normally. Beckett’s theatre is no different from other theatre that you might attend—but the world that his theatre creates could almost be that of another planet.
Ответьте на вопросы:
What are the main features of the theatre of the absurd?
What are the plays Waiting for Godot and Happy Days about?
Is Beckett’s theatre different from other theatres?