Pinter/Beckett.

"The old man rose painfully as the performance ended. The applause built slowly from a single clap of hands to a tumult. Harold Pinter, playwright and actor, weakened by the years and by illness, had just performed Krapp's Last Tape, by his friend and fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett." Alan Cowell reports from London for the New York Times.

This is one of two events marking "the most momentous week of this [centenary] celebration for the finest, funniest and wisest dramatist-novelist Ireland has produced," writes Paul Taylor in the Independent, the other being a set of productions directed in Paris by Peter Brook. "That's the measure of the momentousness. The greatest living English playwright and the greatest living English director are concurrently celebrating the greatest dramatist of the 20th century." Also, more on Pinter's performance.

Updated through 10/22.

The Guardian's Michael Billington finds that Pinter "offers the harshest, least sentimental reading of Beckett's play I can recall." It is a performance "that will be written up in theatrical history," writes Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard.

"[I]n every key respect this is surely a performance that would have delighted Beckett," writes Benedict Nightingale in the London Times. "And all along Pinter makes you feel the gravity, the meticulousness, the sheer power of his endeavour. This is an old man's last-gasp search for a meaning that he knows he'll never find."

Update, 10/22: "Here is the playwright often thought of as Beckett's inheritor giving a new life to his words," writes Susannah Clapp in the Observer. "The audience laugh - it looks for a minute as if Pinter has suddenly blasted his way out of Beckett, and is using his own script - before recognising this as Beckett to the letter."

Posted by dwhudson at October 21, 2006 6:17 AM