Presidential Address 2006: It Must Change

Extract

This year marks the centennial of Samuel Beckett's birth, and the celebrations around the world have been a wonder to behold. From Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Rio de Janeiro to Sofia, from South Africa (where Beckett did not permit his plays to be performed until apartheid was ended) to New Zealand, from Florida State University, in Tallahassee, to the University of Reading, from the Barbican Theatre, in London, to the Pompidou Center, in Paris, from Hamburg and Kassel and Zurich to Aix-en-Provence and Lille, from Saint Petersburg to Madrid to Tel Aviv, and of course most notably in Dublin, 2006 has been Beckett's year. Most of the festivals have included not only performances of the plays but also lectures, symposia, readings, art exhibitions, and manuscript displays. Paris Beckett 2006, for example, cosponsored by the French government and New York University's Center for French Civilization and Culture, has featured productions of Beckett's entire dramatic oeuvre, mounted in theaters large and small all over Paris, and lectures by such major figures as the novelist-theorists Philippe Sollers and Hélène Cixous, the playwrights Fernando Arrabal and Israel Horovitz, and the philosopher Alain Badiou. To round things out, in 2007 the Pompidou Center will host a major exhibition of and on Beckett's work.