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Beckett’s Afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to posthumous reworkings of Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre. Contextualised against the backdrop of his own developing views on adaptation and media specificity, it nuances the long-held view that he opposed any form of genre crossing. Featuring contemporary engagements with Beckett’s work from the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America, the volume does not approach adaptation as a form of (in)fidelity or (ir)reverence. Instead, it argues that exposing the ‘Beckett canon’ to new environments and artistic practices enables fresh perspectives on the texts and enhances their significance for contemporary artists and audiences alike. The featured essays explore a wide variety of forms (prose, theatre, performance, dance, ballet, radio, music, television, film, visual art, installation, new/digital media, webseries, etc.), in different cultural contexts, mainly from the early 1990s until the late 2010s. The concept of adaptation is broadly interpreted, including changes within the same performative context, to spatial relocations or transpositions across genres and media, even creative rewritings of Beckett’s biography. The collection offers a range of innovative ways to approach the author’s work in a constantly changing world and analyses its remarkable susceptibility to creative responses. Viewed from this perspective, Beckett’s Afterlives suggests that adaptation, remediation and appropriation constitute forms of cultural negotiation that are essential for the survival as well as the continuing urgency and vibrancy of Beckett’s work in the twenty-first century.
expectations and, to a lesser degree, from the Beckett Estate. But festivals also find themselves a product of a dialogue (concocted or not) between an author and a place, and operate at the nexus of culture and tourism. Beckett in Ireland is not immune to such forces, as festivals are fundamentally interlinked there with tourist marketing. We can see quite readily the tensions around the preservation of authorial vision and intentions mapping onto the Gate and Happy Days festivals. We might conclude also that festivals are somewhat unruly in themselves
. Anybody who cares for the work couldn't fail to be disgusted by this’ (qtd in Kalb, 1989 : 79)]. De Haarlemse Toneelschuur's all-female cast of Godot , which the Beckett Estate unsuccessfully sued to prevent in 1988 (‘Dutch to defy Beckett’, 1988 ). The Denver Center Theatre's Godot starring two women [with this disclaimer inserted in the programme: ‘Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot for five male characters and has never approved otherwise’ (qtd in Ben-Zvi, 1990 : xvii)]. The Beckett
's essential core may have been the key that made this adaptation of Come and Go possible. He and Estienne were granted permission by the Beckett Estate to cast the short one-act for three women with male actors. 5 With a mixed cast of two male actors and one female actor, the production travelled from London to New York and Paris, where it met with great success. 6 Brook and Estienne's production certainly challenges the audience as Ru
-derivative work of art. This impression is strengthened by the fact that Kurtág is also the author of the libretto, however bound he was by the strict fidelity standards of the Beckett Estate. Libretto As Hutcheon and Hutcheon note, the libretto is almost always an adaptation in its own right of the original text to the opera format, which typically entails ‘drastic selection and compression’ ( 2017 : 308–9). What is atypical in the case of Fin de partie is that Kurtág had to use Beckett's text almost verbatim: as the opera's production
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
, 2014 ) which has won web programming awards but was rejected for film festivals (Corozine, 2018 ). The project is representative of current modes of independent low-budget filmmaking. Azank claims to have translated Beckett's original unpublished manuscript of En attendant Godot as a thesis at NYU and to have received the blessing of the Beckett Estate for his project (Roveri, 2014 ). Based on Azank's new translation of the uncensored French ur- Godot , it appears that the script validates both his initial claim (‘brand new translation’) and his title, as it
Woman (2021) by clown theatre company Silent Faces (Wyver, 2020 ), in which a ‘trio [of female and non-binary actors] are waiting for the Beckett estate to answer their call about performance rights for Godot’ (Armitstead, 2021 ). The more critical acclaim authors receive, the more institutionalised they become and the more they are perceived as the representatives of a cultural establishment. This can trigger two types of responses, as Sanders illustrates once more with the example of Shakespeare: ‘Some authors are … seeking to authenticate
with or influenced by the playwright. But in the name of fidelity, the Beckett estate would allow no changes to the texts whatsoever. ( 2013 : 93) However, because these were transpositions of essentially theatrical works to film, with links to television, the ways in which the plays had been conceptualised for their original source medium had to be reconfigured. And even though the texts themselves did not undergo any major alterations, the stage directions were not adhered to
people laughed at what we were trying to achieve, saying it couldn't be done. Then gradually one by one, word got out, and we got people interested, then attached. That in turn changed the perception of it’ (qtd in Wistreich, 2000 ). The existing relationship between Colgan and the Beckett Estate ‘facilitated the deal’ but Moloney found that ‘one of the difficulties we had with financing it was convincing people that the way to do it was to do all of the plays, that there was no point in just financing some of them’ (qtd in Wistreich, 2000 ). The profitability and