The document provides context and analysis of Samuel Beckett's play Catastrophe. It begins with background on the play's dedication to Czech dissident Václav Havel and its premiere in 1982. It then summarizes key quotes from scholars that analyze the play's political themes and portrayal of power dynamics between the Director and Protagonist. The document concludes with bibliographic references related to Beckett and his plays.
This powerpoint presentation describes the Dramatic Features of a Play and can be used to assist the individual's creative process or simply become integrated into a lesson about theatre.
This powerpoint presentation describes the Dramatic Features of a Play and can be used to assist the individual's creative process or simply become integrated into a lesson about theatre.
Hercule : application Android pour la musculationJérémy
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مما لاشك فيه أن إدارة المخاطر تعد بمثابة القلب النابض لأي عملية تتعلق بالتخطيط للطوارئ " الازمات والكوارث " الا أن المشكلة الاساسية تكمن في مدى قدرة الادارة العليا " القيادية " على فهم أهمية الدور الذي تلعبه إدارة المخاطر في التقليل من الاحداث التي قد تقود الي الازمات والكوارث والحد من الاثار التي تخلفها أو منعها بشكل نهائي.
وتتمثل هذه المشكلة في أحد المعوقات الهامة لاعتماد إدارة المخاطر كمرجع اساسي للعمليات في المنظمات المختلفة في كون العائد الغير منظور للاستثمار فيها ، بالرغم من كونه عائد استثماري هائل يصل إلي 600% ، أي أن كل دولار يتم صرفه على عمليات التحضير لمواجهة الحالات الطارئة يوفر 6 دولارات سيتم صرفها على عملية التعافي من النتائج المرتبة عن هذه الحالة في حالات عدم التحضير .
Programme de musculation complet sans materielBruno Chauzi
Lien internet https://entrainement-sportif.fr/programme-musculation-complet-sans-materiel.htm
Ce programme en circuit-training augmente la tonicité musculaire générale sans prise de volume. Il ne nécessite aucun matériel
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(The was also Samuel Beckett's favorite actress to direct in his plays)
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Endgame by Samuel BeckettWe have our second play of the semest.docxchristinemaritza
Endgame by Samuel Beckett
We have our second play of the semester, but this one is different. Beckett was different. As you’ll see in your introduction, he was Irish, but he lived in France and was very influenced by living in France, and he was also impacted, like most everyone else during the time, by the catastrophe of World War II. In World War I, 10 million people died and it was thought to be the war to end all wars. In World War II, 56 million people died, and the war reached over several continents.
It was, not surprisingly, a very pessimistic time, and the art of the mid-century reflects this.
Beckett wrote in French, though it was his second language. Why? He wrote in French because, and those of you who have taken another language know this, because his vocabulary was smaller and more direct in his second language, and Beckett was trying to strip down language to its bare minimum. Beckett’s theatre is known at Minimalist Theatre. For not only the language, but also for the bare stage, minimal characters, and the stark, desolate themes.
You have to remember that this is a play, and it is written with a stage production in mind. And it is written under the impact of a massive war, and the threat of nuclear holocaust very real in the minds of the modern world.
Watch a few clips of the play here:
Endgame, clip 1
Endgame, clip 2
Endgame, clip 3
Beckett’s world is the world of last things – stark, bare, gray – in which life is reduced to mere waiting and game-playing. It is a world that leans towards silence. Endgame has some central themes: desolation, the dead world outside, the dead world inside, restriction of both space and time, the notion that life cannot be won, the master/slave relationship. In Endgame, characters are aware of themselves as characters in some type of “game.”
When the curtain rises, it is as if the characters are just waking up, preparing themselves for another day, seemingly the same day over and over and over again. The furniture is covered in sheets, suggesting storage and the covering of the dead. Motions are ritualistic, dialogue is ritualistic. Concerning dialogue, notice all the word play.
There appears to be no future and the past is foggy, at best. The characters live in the hell of an eternal present, but outside is the “other hell.” The waves of the sea are like “lead,” the sun is “zero,” there is “no more nature.” Even a suggestion of life outside terrifies the characters.
Discussion questions:
1. The stage is symbolic. It has been interpreted many ways: as the inside of a skull, a last refuge after a unnamed catastrophe (such as a nuclear holocaust), as a metaphor for the twilight of civilization, purgatory, or simply man’s consciousness. After reading and watching some clips, how you do you interpret the stage setting?
2. Why do you think the stage setting is without any particular interpretation?
Let’s face it: this is a non-traditional play. Beckett’s refusal to assign a definite me.
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This Gasta posits a strategic approach to integrating AI into HEIs to prepare staff, students and the curriculum for an evolving world and workplace. We will highlight the advantages of working with these technologies beyond the realm of teaching, learning and assessment by considering prompt engineering skills, industry impact, curriculum changes, and the need for staff upskilling. In contrast, not engaging strategically with Generative AI poses risks, including falling behind peers, missed opportunities and failing to ensure our graduates remain employable. The rapid evolution of AI technologies necessitates a proactive and strategic approach if we are to remain relevant.
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The empire's roots lie in the city of Rome, founded, according to legend, by Romulus in 753 BCE. Over centuries, Rome evolved from a small settlement to a formidable republic, characterized by a complex political system with elected officials and checks on power. However, internal strife, class conflicts, and military ambitions paved the way for the end of the Republic. Julius Caesar’s dictatorship and subsequent assassination in 44 BCE created a power vacuum, leading to a civil war. Octavian, later Augustus, emerged victorious, heralding the Roman Empire’s birth.
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1. Catastrophe
Samuel Beckett
Cam M. Roberts
November 10th, 2011
ENG 301: Samuel Beckett
Prof. J. Holdridge
2. Catastrophe
pp. 455–463
Dedicated to Václav Havel
Václav Havel:
Czech playwright, essayist, poet,
dissident and politician.
Written in French in 1982.
It was first performed at the Avignon Festival in 1982.
First published in English by Faber and Faber, London, in 1984.
3. Catastrophe
(kãtæ-strõfi)
1. The change which produces the final
event of a dramatic piece; the dénouement.
2. ‘A final event; a conclusion generally
unhappy’ (J.); overthrow, ruin.
3. An event producing a subversion of the
order or system of things, esp. in Geol.
A sudden and violent physical change, such
as an upheaval, depression, etc.
(See CATACYLSM, CATASTROPHISM.).
4. A sudden disaster. (Used very loosely.).
5. Beckett on Film
Catastrophe (2000)
D: Harold Pinter
A: Rebecca Pidgeon
P: John Gielgud
directed by David Mamet
6.
7. John Gielgud & Rebecca Pidgeon
in a 2000 TV production of Beckett's Catastrophe
Photograph: Channel 4 Television/PR
This was John Gielgud’s final performance.
Gielgud died of natural causes on May 21st, 2000.
He was 96 years old.
8.
9. “… a related image resurfaced when Beckett came to write
Catastrophe in support of the Czech dissident writer Vaclav Havel. In
Catastrophe the Protagonist, humiliated, reduced, ‘baited’ throughout the play,
‘raises his head, fixes the audience,’ and reduces their applause to a stunned silence.”
(Knowlson, 298)
“… Catastrophe focuses on the presentation of a silence body as visual
spectacle by a figure of institutional power.”
(McMullan, 17)
“… Catastrophe… while powerful in performance and penetrating in its
equation of theatrical and totalitarian impulses, is a political play whose relatively
conventional agonistic structure lies outside the mainstream of Beckett’s lifelong
concerns.”
(Gontarski, ed., 379)
“‘Visual Abstinence’ is rather a good term for Beckett’s late theatre, since
he often employed only a single or a double image, illuminated in the surrounding
dark, empty spaces…”
(Knowlson & Haynes, 44)
10. Catastrophe is arguably, almost self-evidently, Beckett’s most overtly political
play in his entire oeuvre.
The subordinate protagonist ‘P’ is denied certain requisites of ‘Character’ status,
however ‘P’ does not fulfill an identity of ‘Actor’, which otherwise would ideally
construct a hypothetical analogy between the Director–Actor Dynamic and the
Authoritarian Narrator–Character: Protagonist Dynamic. Traditionally in both
plot-driven and narrative-driven dramas, symbolic carriers (ex. metaphor, simile,
metonymy, synecdoche, tableaus, mimetic images) are the expressive agents
which denote meaning. This is not the case in Beckett’s theatre since his dramas
for the theatre (especially his most cinematic plays) are never symbolic carrying
mimetic/diagetic vehicles.
Protagonist – in drama, the character(s) who drive forward the progression of
the plot (or the play’s sequence of events through physical action in order to
achieve a ‘super’ objective and/or to overcome a major obstacle. The term is
given life by Aristotle in his Poetics and Constantin Stanislavski.
11. “As often with Beckett, there is a kind of black humour even in the grimmest of
subjects: since the protagonist is continually being given orders by a theatrical
producer, the play can be seen both as a kind of parody of agit prop plays as
well as a statement of the similarity between a dictatorship (whether of the
proletariat or not) and the way in which a director treats his actors.”
Richard Roud, Manchester Guardian Weekly, August 21st, 1983. p. 20.
“At the end, after some order shouted by an unseen light man, Protagonist stands on a
dark stage with only a spotlight on his frightened face. Director predicts an enthusiastic
response from the audience; a sound effect of applause follows, in which I thought I also
heard hoofbeats and the turning wheels of a tumbrel – but maybe not, maybe that was
only an aural hallucination from my own spellbound imagination… Even without the
dedication, the political implications are clear.”
Edith Oliver, The New Yorker, June 27th, 1983. p. 75.
12. Beckett in Performance
Interview with Alvin Epstein.
March 4th, 1986.
Epstein acted in numerous American Productions of Beckett’s work:
Waiting for Godot (1956), Endgame (1958), Alan Schneider’s TV film of Godot (1961),
the triple-bill Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe, What Where (1984),
and the radio productions All That Fall (1986) and Words and Music (1987)
EPSTEIN: “There’s an ambiguity there, in acting […]. Beckett’s always doing
that. I mean even in Catastrophe where the Protagonist is
standing on a pedestal, on display, and the director is
directing, and the assistant is like the assistant director, and
they’re arranging him for a performance, and the
performance is going on while you’re doing it. At the end
the director is out in the hall, out among the audience,
talking about a future performance, but there’s a
performance going on now. So he plays games, the same as
in Godot and Endgame. End-Game.”
(Kalb, 195)
13. Beckett in Performance
Interview with David Warrilow.
May 18th, 1986.
Beckett wrote A Piece of Monologue (1980) for Warrilow.
His other Beckett work includes Ohio Impromptu (1981), a stage version of Eh Joe (1981),
Catastrophe (1983), What Where (1983), Cette Fois (That Time) (1985),
and radio productions of All That Fall (1986) and Words and Music (1987).
WARRILOW: “In Catastrophe, for example, I would give myself over to a
more traditional form of theatre and play it out that way. I
far preferred to play the Protagonist in Catastrophe; that’s a
much more interesting role to do, much more interesting.
For one thing because it’s sculptural, and there’s an infinite
amount of delicate muscular work to be done. It’s also very
interesting to deal with the problem of not feeling like a
victim. He can look whatever way he looks to the audience,
but not to be involved in self-pity while standing on that
block is a very interesting task.”
(Kalb, 224–5)
“Those who saw David Warrilow perform in Catastrophe will recognize the… phenomenon of the
mask: his Protagonist was a faceless victim until the final moment when his spirit seemed to escape his mask
(indeed, his skull) to confront the audience with his transcendent accusatory stare. ”
(Cima, 197)
14. “And it could be, like the ‘fibrous degeneration’ in his play Catastrophe, felt at
considerable cost. One of the… conditions from which Beckett himself suffered – a thickening of
deep tissue that passes from palm to fingers, causing the hands to claw – it was inflicted on the
character P, the barefoot protagonist up on a plinth who seems nothing more than a prop – fists
clenched, face down, black wide-brimmed hat, black gown, not hooded or veiled, but like the
now-notorious figure at Abu Ghraib, up on a pedestal too, with electric wires attached to his
hands. With D, the director as chief sadist, the torture is a performance, or the performance
torturous, prepared by precise instruction to A, the more than willing female assistant…”
(Ben-Zvi & Moorjani, eds., 41)
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21. Bibliography
Beckett, Samuel. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works. London:
Faber & Faber, 2006. Print.
Barry, Elizabeth. Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliché. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.
Ben-Zvi, Linda and Angela Moorjani, eds. Beckett at 100: Revolving It All. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.
Cima, Gay G. Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights, and the Modern Stage. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993. Print.
Cooke, Virginia. Beckett on File. London:
Methuen, 1985. Print.
Gontarski, S.E., ed. A Companion to Samuel Beckett. Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Print.
Innes, Christopher, ed. Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print.
Kalb, Jonathan. Beckett in Performance. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989. Print.
Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York:
Grove Press, 1996. Print.
Knowlson, James, and John Hayes. Images of Beckett. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print.
McMullan, Anna. Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama. New York:
Routledge, 1993. Print.
McMullan, Anna. Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. London:
Routledge, 2010. Print.
23. Further Reading
Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of The Absurd, 3rd ed. New York:
Vintage Books, 2004. Print.
Eyre, Richard and Nicholas Wright. Changing Stages: A View of British and American Theatre in the Twentieth Century. New York:
Alfred A Knopf, 2001. Print.
Garner, Jr., Stanton B. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Print.
Kane, Leslie. The Language of Silence: On the Unspoken and the Unspeakable in Modern Drama. Rutherford:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984. Print.
Luckhurst, Mary, ed. A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama: 1880-2005. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Print.
Malkin, Jeanette R. Memory-Theatre and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1999. Print.
McDonald, Ronan. The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print.
Pilling, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994. Print.
Rusinko, Susan. British Drama 1950 to the Present: A Critical History. Boston:
Twayne Publishers, 1989. Print.
Shepard, Simon. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Theatre. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.
Watt, Stephen. Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1998. Print.
Worthen, W.B. Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theatre. Berkley:
University of California Press, 1992. Print.