Synopses & Reviews
This collection of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett's dramatic pieces includes a short stage play, two radio plays, and two pantomimes. The stage play,
Krapp's Last Tape, evolves a shattering drama out of a monologue of a man who, at age sixty-nine, plays back the autobiographical tape he recorded on his thirty-ninth birthday. Jerry Tallmer called it "a most amazing piece of 'incidental' writing....In one and the same pungent breath it is a comment on time past, passing, and to come; on the tinny mechanization of the age and the yet unquenchable wellsprings of the heart; on the anal desiccation and sterilization of all feeling or response in modern man, and his nevertheless immutable thrust toward love."
The two radio plays were commissioned by the BBC; All That Fall "plumbs the same pessimistic depths [as Waiting For Godot] in what seems a no less despairing search for human dignity" (London Times), and Embers is equally unforgettable theater, born of the ramblings of an old man and his wife. Finally, in the two pantomimes, Beckett takes drama to the point of pure abstraction with his portrayals of, in Act Without Words I, frustrated desire, and in Act Without Words II, corresponding motions of living juxtaposed in the slow despair of one man and the senselessly busy motion of another.
Synopsis
This collection of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett's dramatic pieces includes a short stage play, two radio plays, and two pantomimes. The stage play, Krapp's Last Tape, evolves a shattering drama out of a monologue of a man who, at age sixty-nine, plays back the autobiographical tape he recorded on his thirty-ninth birthday.
The two radio plays were commissioned by the BBC; All That Fall "plumbs the same pessimistic depths [as Waiting for Godot] in what seems a no less despairing search for human dignity" (London Times), and Embers is equally unforgettable theater, born of the ramblings of an old man and his wife.