Dr Emilie Morin
emilie.morin@york.ac.uk
SAMUEL BECKETT’S DRAMA AND BEYOND
Spring 2014
If critics have long considered Samuel Beckett one of the most important playwrights of the
twentieth century, his influence upon subsequent developments in British and Irish drama has
remained difficult to pinpoint. In this module, we will discuss Beckett’s drama and developments
beyond Beckett, charting the development of non-naturalistic trends in a wide range of dramatic
texts. We will begin by considering the influences shaping Beckett’s rejection of realism, paying
particular attention to the ambivalent relationship that his work maintains to the drama of the
Irish Literary Revival, and we will end by thinking about the ways in which qualities commonly
associated with the idea of ‘the Beckettian’ are echoed in a range of British and Irish plays from
the past three decades.
Our seminar programme will be divided into two parts. In the first four seminars, we will
focus on a range of plays written by Beckett, from absurdist plays such as Waiting for Godot and
Endgame to short dramatic texts whose status as plays is open to question. Waiting for Godot and
Endgame were heralded as groundbreaking in the 1950s, and Beckett’s desolate landscapes
responded to the anxieties of the post-war period, as their presentation of man’s relentless search
for meaning in a meaningless universe echoed contemporaneous philosophical concerns. In plays
of the 1960s and 1970s, Beckett moved away from an absurdist aesthetic and experimented with
the boundaries of dramatic expression, showing a particular fascination with the possibilities of
the voice, dramatic monologue and technology. His investigation of the modalities of perception
and meaning had a determining influence on subsequent developments in Irish and British drama
– an influence that can be traced in the work of playwrights as varied as Harold Pinter, Sarah
Kane, or Marina Carr. The second half of the module will lead us to think about Beckett’s legacy,
and we will look at plays by Tom Murphy, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Frank
McGuinness, Brendan Behan, debbie tucker green, Sarah Kane and Tim Crouch (the corpus is
extremely varied and details are below). We will discuss these playwrights’ representations of
linguistic, sensory and cognitive breakdowns, elements which evoke the transformative effect that
Beckett had on dramatic form, and we will consider the motives shaping their engagement with a
non-naturalistic aesthetic.
No previous experience of studying drama is required – all you need to approach the
module materials is an interest in the topics and the authors; everything else starts from there.
All plays by Beckett may be found in his Complete Dramatic Works (Faber) – you
must buy this collection. All other texts are available from Amazon and online sellers (Amazon
marketplace, Abebooks, etc); you should find plenty of inexpensive second-hand copies. No
particular recommendations as regards editions unless otherwise indicated. All core texts will be
in the Key Texts section of the Library.
When indicated below, primary texts will be available as handouts. Photocopies of critical
essays or links towards online resources will accompany seminars as appropriate.
READING LIST AND SCHEDULE OF SEMINARS
Week 1: No seminar
Week 2: Beckett and the Irish Revival
Samuel Beckett, Rough for Theatre I and The Old Tune [adaptation of a play by Robert Pinget, La
Manivelle]
W.B. Yeats, The Cat and the Moon and Purgatory (handout provided at the start of term)
Lady Augusta Gregory, The Workhouse Ward (handout provided at the start of term)
J.M. Synge, Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen
Week 3: history and oblivion
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot and Endgame
Theodor Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, New German Critique 26 (1982): 119-50 [to be
read/downloaded from JStor]
Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock (available in Three Dublin Plays, Faber – but any edition is fine)
Week 4: voice, recording, technology
Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape; All That Fall; Embers; Words and Music; Cascando
Week 5: monologue and experiment
Samuel Beckett, Happy Days; Not I; Footfalls; Rockaby
Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’ (online; to be read from JStor)
Week 6: Reading week – no seminar
Week 7: memory and storytelling
Tom Murphy, Bailegangaire
Martin McDonagh, The Beauty Queen of Leenane
W.B. Yeats, Cathleen Ni Houlihan (handout provided)
Week 8: landscapes of the mind
Sarah Kane, Crave (handout provided)
Conor McPherson, Port Authority (handout provided)
Week 9: narratives of incarceration
Brendan Behan, The Quare Fellow
Frank McGuinness, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me
Week 10: narrative and indeterminacy
debbie tucker green, random
Tim Crouch, England
Some useful starting points:
Beckett:
Ackerley, Chris, and S.E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to his
Works, Life, and Thought
***Gontarski, S.E., ed., A Companion to Samuel Beckett (Blackwell)
Maude, Ulrika, Beckett, Technology, and the Body
Morin, Emilie, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness
Oppenheim, Lois, ed., Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies
Pattie, David, The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett
***Pilling, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Book and e-book
***Roche, Anthony, Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness [2009 ed.]
***Tonning, Erik, Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen 1962-1985
***Uhlmann, Anthony, ed., Beckett in Context
Watt, Stephen, Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing
If you want to know more about Beckett’s life, the reference work by James Knowlson (Damned
to Fame) is inexpensive on Amazon and can often be found in second-hand bookshops. Gerry
Dukes’s short biography of Beckett is also a good starting point.
British and Irish drama:
Acheson, James, ed., British and Irish Drama since 1960
Grene, Nicholas, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel,
Innes, Christopher, Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century
Kritzer, Amelia Howe, Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain: New Writing, 1995-2005
Hans-Thies Lehmann, Post-dramatic theatre
Lonergan, Patrick, Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era
Luckhurst, Mary, ed., A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama, 1880-2005
Morash, Christopher, A History of Irish Theatre, 1601-2000
Murray, Christopher, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: A Mirror up to Nation
Richards, Shaun, The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama [e-book, accessible via
library website]
Roche, Anthony, Contemporary Irish Drama
Sierz, Aleks, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today
Trotter, Mary, Modern Irish Theatre
Worth, Katharine, The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett
Wilson, Michael, Storytelling and Theatre: Contemporary Storytellers and Their Art
Online resources:
The online databases available through the Metalib Gateway of the Library give you access to a
large number of critical articles on modern drama (all can be saved in pdf format).
Periodicals relevant to this module include Modern Drama, New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre Journal,
The Drama Review: A Journal of Performance Studies, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Comparative
Drama, New Hibernia Review, Irish University Review, The Irish Studies Review, Eire-Ireland: A Journal of
Irish Studies, The Irish Review, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Contemporary Theatre
Review: An International Journal, Journal of Modern British and American Drama, Performance Research...
This is by no means a complete list.
All of these periodicals can be accessed online, via JStor OR Project Muse OR via the Library
catalogue and Yorsearch (in the latter case, you will need to type in the journal title, and then
click on ‘find it! to access the relevant database).
Presentations:
Each student will be asked to prepare and deliver a short presentation of no more than ten
minutes in duration, dealing with one of the texts discussed. We will agree on a schedule of
presentations at our first seminar in Week 2.