Skip to main content

Another side of Samuel Beckett

Often recalled as the lonely genius of modernism, the Irish writer was also ‘Sam’, convivial friend and collaborator, who drank with Peter O’Toole, talked cricket with Harold Pinter and ‘wailed’ at Edna O’Brien’s piano

“I only had a minute.” Jane Bown, the Observer’s greatest postwar photographer, used to tell the story of the day she was sent to the Royal Court theatre to photograph Samuel Beckett, acclaimed author of Waiting For Godot. Bown was renowned for snatching photographs against the odds, but the shy, unsmiling, and nervously intense figure of Beckett, compared by one friend to an “Aztec eagle”, presented a rare challenge. “You can have a minute,” he announced, fiercely asserting the superiority of drama to journalism.

He was tall and remote; she was short but dauntless. In the half-lit alleyway outside the stage door, Bown positioned her reluctant celebrity against the wall, and fired off barely a dozen shots, later remembering the arctic blue intensity of Beckett’s eyes. After the prescribed minute of photographic concentration, she packed up her Leica, thanked him for his time, and fled, hoping that she’d got a usable frame. This is a story I heard from Jane Bown herself on a number of occasions. In the making of the radio programme on which this article is based, every other quotation either comes from the Beckett Foundation or was specially recorded for the BBC.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2MuBBmj

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...