Colm Tóibín writes in the London Review of Books about Samuel Beckett and Irish theater and actors. He shows how much Ireland was a part of Beckett’s works and why he was in my opinion one the best writers of the last century. Sugary excerpt:
It must be emphasised, but perhaps not too much, how close Beckett was to the theatre of the Irish Literary Revival, the classic plays through which the Abbey Theatre became famous. The only time in his life when Beckett actually went to the theatre regularly was in the 1920s, when he was a student at Trinity College Dublin. In his first year there he saw a production of Sean O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman at the Abbey. Later he saw a revival of J.M. Synge’s The Well of the Saints, as well as the two great O’Casey plays Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars. He also saw Yeats’s two extraordinary Oedipus translations. The best sense of him as an enthusiastic attender at the Abbey is given by the fact that he was in the theatre not only on the opening night of The Plough and the Stars but two nights later, on the night of the riots, when he sat in the centre of the first row on the balcony.
What I admire the most about Beckett is the fact that he chose to write in French even though it would have been a lot easier to continue to write in English. Anybody who knows anything about French knows that it is a much more difficult language than English that is harder to mold and to master. It is for that reason that Samuel Beckett’s gifts to literature is undervalued and that one has to speak both French and English to realize why En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) is one of the best plays ever written.
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