Contemporary Theatre Review, 2018 Vol. 28, No. 1, 1–2, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2018.1426918 Notes on Contributors Carl Lavery is Professor of Theatre at the University of Glasgow. His recent edition of the journal Green Letters, ‘Performance and Ecology: What Can Theatre Do?’, will be published as a book by Routledge in 2018. He is currently finishing a new monograph, Interrogating the Human: Ecology,Theatre, and Theatricality. 5 Andrew Lennon is a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham supported by the AHRC Midlands3Cities DTP. His research focuses on the mobilisation of documentary strategies in contemporary performance. He completed an undergraduate degree at Trinity College Dublin and studied at the Motley School of Design. He has worked in Ireland and 10 England as a lighting technician and designer. Anna McMullan is Professor of Theatre and Co-Director of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading. She was Principal Investigator of the AHRC Staging Beckett project, a collaboration between the universities of Reading and Chester, and the Victoria and 15 Albert Museum, London, from 2012 to 2015. McMullan is author of Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (2010) and Theatre on Trial: The Later Drama of Samuel Beckett (1993), and co-editor of Reflections on Beckett (2009) with Steve Wilmer. She also publishes on Irish theatre and Performance and is co-editor with Cathy Leeney of The 20 Theatre of Marina Carr: ‘before rules was made’ (2003). Trish McTighe is Lecturer in Theatre at the University of Birmingham. Previously, she lectured at Queen’s University, Belfast and was an AHRC post-doctoral researcher on the Staging Beckett Project at the University of Reading (2012–2015). Her book, The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel 25 Beckett’s Drama, was published with Palgrave in 2013, and she recently co-edited the double volume Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland and Staging Beckett in Great Britain (Bloomsbury-Methuen, 2016). She has published in the journals Modern Drama, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, and the Irish University Review, on topics 30 such as Beckett’s drama, embodiment, and Irish culture and performance histories. She is theatre reviews editor for the Journal of Beckett Studies. Sinéad Mooney is a senior lecturer in English at De Montfort University, Leicester. She works on Irish literature, modernism, and women’s © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 writing. Her previous work on Beckett includes A Tongue Not Mine: 35 Beckett and Translation (Oxford University Press 2011), which won the American Conference for Irish Studies Robert Rhodes Prize. Brenda O’Connell is a PhD candidate at Maynooth University, Ireland. Her thesis, entitled: ‘Age Matters: Motherhood, Matrixial Theory and the Ageing Female Body in Samuel Beckett’s Work’, is funded by the Hume 40 Scholarship. Brenda has published on performance art, theatre reviews and has a forthcoming article on the ageing female body in Beckett, published by Nordic Irish Studies. Sarah Jane Scaife, Adjunct Lecturer TCD and Artistic Director of Company SJ, researches and directs Beckett nationally and internationally 45 (London, New York, Greece, India, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Mongolia, America, Japan, and Georgia). Company SJ are currently touring their Beckett in The City series. Research projects include female Irish writers of the early twentieth century and a new Beckett production. Graham Saunders is the Allardyce Nicoll Chair in Drama at the 50 University of Birmingham. He has published widely on Sarah Kane including About Kane: The Playwright & the Work (2009) and ‘Love Me or Kill Me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (2002). He currently publishes on British Drama since 1945, Samuel Beckett, and the relation- ship between contemporary British dramatists and Elizabethan and 55 Jacobean Drama. He was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project, ‘Giving Voice to the Nation’: the Arts Council of Great Britain & the Development of Theatre & Performance in Britain 1945–1995 (2009–14), a collaboration between the University of Reading and the Victoria and Albert Museum London, and was a Co-Investigator on the 60 AHRC-funded Staging Beckett: the Impact of Productions of Samuel Beckett’s Drama on Theatre Practices and Cultures in the UK and Ireland (2012–15). Derval Tubridy is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. She works 65 on modern and contemporary literature, performance and the visual arts with a particular focus on the intersections between language and materi- ality. Her monograph Samuel Beckett: The Language of Subjectivity is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Phillip Zarrilli is Emeritus Professor of Performance Practice, Drama 70 Department, Exeter University, and Artistic Director, The Llanarth Group. He is known internationally for his directing and acting in Beckett’s later shorter plays. Most recently he directed Footfalls and Play for The National Theatre Company, Costa Rica (2017). Contemporary Theatre Review, 2018 Vol. 28, No. 1, 3–9, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2017.1405393 Editorial: Staging Beckett and Contemporary Theatre and Performance Cultures Once the epitome of experimental, ‘difficult’, avant-garde drama, at the edge of what is possible in the theatre, the plays of Samuel Beckett are 5 nowlikelytobepresentedandindeedtosellout,ininternational 1 1. Such as the Dublin Festivals, West End, Broadway, or national venues with high-profile Gate Theatre Beckett actors such as Michael Gambon, Ian McKellen, Fiona Shaw or Mark Festival launched in 2 1991, the Happy Days Rylance. Tracing the history of this trajectory was one of the aims of International Beckett the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council)-funded research 10 Festival inaugurated in ’ 2012, or the Barbican project Staging Beckett: the Impact of Productions of Samuel Beckett s Beckett International PlaysonTheatrePracticeandCulturesintheUKandIrelandthatran Festival in June 2015. – 2. Michael Gambon from 2012 2015 as a collaboration between the Universities of Reading played Hamm in a pro- and Chester and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Beckett is duction of Endgame at now a highly marketable, cultural icon with global brand recognition, 15 the Noel Coward Theatre in 2004, and but this does not adequately account for the legacies of his work for Krapp in Krapp’s Last contemporary theatre and performance practices and cultures, whether Tape in the Duchess 3 Theatre in 2010; Ian national, international, regional or fringe. McKellen played The Staging Beckett project set out to bring a range of contempor- Vladimir with Patrick ary practices and critical discourses from theatre and performance 20 Stewart as Estragon in the 2009 West End studies into dialogue with Beckett’stheatre.Beckett’splaysremainan production of Waiting important medium for what Herbert Blau termed ‘thinking through’ for Godot at the Haymarket, that subse- theatre and performance, asking fundamental questions about the quently toured to interrelations between self and other, human and non-human, theatre Broadway in 2013; and the other arts, and between the performing body, voice, technol- 25 Fiona Shaw performed 4 Winnie in Happy Days ogy, space, time and the ethics of witnessing. Beckett’sworktherefore directed by Deborah has the potential to open up new creative practices and vocabularies for Warner in a touring fi production which testing the languages and boundaries of theatre in the twenty- rst included the National century. Individual productions, whether through testimony or archival Theatre’s Lyttelton in 30 2007; and Mark remains, tell us a great deal about shifting practical and cultural inter- Rylance played Hamm pretations of Beckett at different historical moments and locations. with Simon McBurney Beckett’s work therefore remains a vibrant presence and inspiration as Clov in Complicité’s Endgame at the for scholars, practitioners and audiences of contemporary theatre and Duchess in 2009. performance.5 This issue, though inevitably covering only a small Further details of these 35 and other UK and Irish selection of case studies mainly from British and Irish contexts which productions can be was the stated focus of the project, aims to explore some of Beckett’s © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 4 found by searching the living legacies for the discipline of theatre and performance, from his Staging Beckett Database <https:// impact on actors, designers or directors, on theatre cultures at national www.reading.ac.uk/ and local levels, and on theatre and cultural programming, to the staging-beckett/> 40 [accessed generation of new approaches to theatre and interdisciplinary or inter- 3 March 2017]. medial performance and aesthetics, and on our interactions with the 3. See Nicholas Johnson’s performance archive. meditation on the wri- ter’s legacy in ‘A The repositioning of the human in relation to the non- or more than Theatre of the human is a fundamental concern of ecology and performance. This is the Unword: Censorship, ’ 45 Hegemony and Samuel subject of Carl Lavery s article that develops, using Beckett as a prism, Beckett’ in Ireland, existing work that he and Clare Finburgh presented in their 2015 edited Memory and collection, Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd: Ecology, Environment Performing the 6 Historical Imagination, and the Greening of the Modern Stage. However, Lavery does not ask us ed. by Christopher to once again consider Beckett a card-carrying absurdist, whose early Collins and Mary P. 50 Caulfield (Basingstoke: work for the theatre such as Endgame (1957) was seen at the time as Palgrave Macmillan, an expression of post-nuclear anxieties. Instead, Lavery puts forward the 2014), pp. 36–54 ’ (p. 38): ‘the true legacy proposition that Beckett s theatre becomes a site where the human dis- of a writer is only con- appears, or else is subjected to the ravages of time, such as the figures in tained in the durability Play (1963), whose visages have become weathered by the same processes of his or her living ’ 55 thought, and the rest is as the urns that enclose them.