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choréographie majeure du XXe siècle’ ( 2014b : 20) (a major choreography of the twentieth century). By developing Beckett's work in the direction of dance, Dupuy similarly paves the way for innovative, less pessimistic approaches. The French dancer and choreographer, who has been instrumental for the recognition and development of modern and contemporary dance in France after the Second World War, 14 attended the premiere of En attendant Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone in 1953. Living in Paris, he also
This chapter re-examines Beckett’s 1950s coining of the terms ‘adaphatroce’, which could best be paraphrased as ‘dreadful’ or ‘atrocious adaptation’, to argue that it does not signify a wholesale rejection of creative responses to his work but rather constitutes the starting point of a gradual embrace, at least an acceptance or recognition of the phenomenon as a powerful cultural force. By critically assessing his comments on the matter as they appear in published letters from the 1950s to the 1980s, touching upon various genres and media, the chapter attempts to reconstruct Beckett’s implicit ‘poetics’ of adaptation and illustrate how it aligns with key notions such as self-translation, self-directing, intertextuality and intermediality, which now have come to be recognised as central to his creative practice. Starting with an overview of adaptations that Beckett was himself involved in, the account moves on to creative reworkings he merely authorised or denied, to end with a reflection on how his perception of his own authority over his own work had changed as a result. In doing so, the chapter makes the ongoing (re-)historicising of Beckett, partly through archival research, an important precondition, not only for a better understanding of his own views on adaptation but also to keep his work vibrant in a twenty-first-century context.
radio play about his community, resonating with their enduring history within the state – increased the sense of an official recognition, if not of a rapprochement on the part of the state. The paradox of the nation's embrace of Beckett, whose work they had previously banned and whose presence they frequently ignored, is reciprocated by his own sense of ambivalence towards the state, most eloquently summed up in a letter to Adam Tarn on 9 April 1968, following his last visit to the country: ‘The short stay in Ireland was very moving. … I understood even better than
, but again such language is hardly neutral. Hutcheon's recalibration of adaptation as the amalgamation of ‘repetition with variation, … the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise’ ( 2013 : 4) is a more positive and fruitful one, and so is Sanders’ characterisation as ‘the tension between the familiar and the new, and the recognition of both similarity and differences’ ( 2016 : 17). Only then can adaptation studies be ‘understood as a field engaged with process, ideology and methodology, rather than encouraging polarized value judgments’ ( 2016 : 24
when the Beckett on Film versions were made they were first screened at film festivals, events like the theatre festivals in which cultural value, national canons and international recognition were negotiated. Beckett on Film was in some ways a legacy of the Gate's Beckett extravaganza, an adaptation in the sense of a natural progression or successor. In an interview for the film industry magazine Netribution , Colgan's collaborator, the Irish producer Alan Moloney, formerly of Parallel Films, recalled: ‘It was slow to get going, in that
editors of his letters point out, ‘Beckett finds himself both seduced and repelled’ ( 2014 : lxxviii). The fact that the Beckett Estate has seen fit to grant the rights for theatrical productions, not just of How It Is (Part 1 and Part 2) but of a number of other prose texts, indicates a recognition of Beckett's increasing openness to adaptation and intermediality during his lifetime. Initially, Beckett's comments to George Duthuit regarding the painter Nicolas de Staël's contributions to the theatre suggest a similarly implacable rejection of
that neurodiverse communities ‘contest the default pathologizing of differences in brain circuitry that are revealed in behavioural deviances from the standard norm’ and seek (as they emphasise) ‘a recognition that, though they are neurologically, cognitively and behaviourally different, they do not necessarily suffer from being neurodiverse nor do they need to be cured’ ( 2007 : 1). At the heart of these debates lie issues of power and the dynamics of social inequality that cut across communities to include long-standing debates concerning gender and ethnicity
when the player is first seen and/or heard in the guise of his adopted persona . Such recognition may occur before the player has started to play. However, the contract is reinforced when the player steps onto or over a demarcated threshold that constitutes the agreed playing space. [. . .] Delineation of the playing space did not always exist prior to performance. Sometimes the space needed to be created by the player on his first arrival into the ambit of the audience. 13 This ‘theatrical contract’ had temporal as well as spatial functions. Before God
Which xal saue mankende, As it was spoke by prophesye. 105 No longer obscured by Synagoga’s stony blindfold, Joseph’s vision is restored along with his recognition that his is ‘þe tyme’ spoken about in prophecy. Yet Joseph’s denunciation of all he has previously said and believed suggests that, while he now recognises the truth of his wife’s condition, he continues to experience time somewhat differently from her. Where Joseph wishes to forsake entirely his former beliefs, Mary is in the practice of refashioning the past in the service of the present – just
’s sexual act as an ‘ill spon weft’: work that is malformed, warped and kinky. Realising the child ‘is lyke to oure shepe!’, the shepherds finally realise the ‘frawde’: their sheep’s four feet have been swaddled together. 116 This ‘slow reveal’ that the baby in the cradle is, in fact, a sheep draws out the recognition for maximum comic effect. That it is most definitely their sheep is attested when it is identified using one of the play’s few stable signifiers: ‘I know hym by the eere marke / that is a good tokyn.’ 117 Finally, it becomes clear that the occupant of