Samuel Beckett

“Words are all we have..”

Samuel Beckett was born 100 years ago today on Good Friday, April 13th 1906, in Foxrock, County Dublin, Ireland.

He is viewed by many as the greatest playwright of the twentieth century ; his work influencing many artists both old and new.. and as diverse as Harold Pinter and Quentin Tarantino.

His apparent Bleak Worldview captured many of the trials and tribulations of contemporary existence. Listless , desolate , yet imbued with the sharpest, most sardonic humour.. hope and hell were always the strangest of bedfellows in most of his work.

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.”

The gallows humour of plays such as the infamous WAITING FOR GODOT and his own personal fave ENDGAME showed that a steely redemption is found in the dogged stoicism of the human condition.. tapped usually by the natural and perpetual catalysts of pain and laughter.

“The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”

As keen for sport as he was books, Samuel Beckett was educated at Trinity College DubliN. He was introduced to James Joyce in Paris in 1928.. and the two became lifelong friends. After a brief stay in London in the early 1930s, Beckett eventually settled in France in 1937.

Eventful times lay ahead. A year later he was stabbed by a pimp on a Parisian street. In 1941-42 he worked with the French Resistance.. eventually escaping Paris with his wife to be Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil.
Three years later saw Beckett working extensively for the Irish Red Cross based in Normandy. He was subsequently awarded the Croix de Guerre and began to write exclusively in French.

1947-49 was a significantly productive period producing the novel MERCIER ET CAMIER and WAITING FOR GODOT.

It was quite a while before GODOT received it’s world premier, and when it eventually did in Paris in 1953, it was an instant scandal.. totally polarising opinion. The London and Dublin premiers followed in 1955.

Catapulted to notoriety, Beckett continued to produce challenging, revolutionary work throughout the 1960s – including his one and only screenplay FILM with Buster Keaton in 1964.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, giving most of the prize money to preferred charities.

He wrote less and less throughout the 70s and 80s.
Samuel Beckett died on Dec 22nd, 1989.