C.I.C.T./Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord: Fragments

3000 Ft / Student: 2300 Ft (Trafó Season Ticket is not valid)

PENDULUM swinging into motion theatre series 2’
 

Directed by PETER BROOK**,
based on Samuel Beckett's texts**
 

Lenghts of the programme: 60’
The performance is in English, with Hungarian subtitles.
 

„Samuel Beckett and Peter Brook. Two theatre gurus: the playwright, tall and gnarled; the director, small and contained. If Beckett were alive, he might feel tempted to put them into one of his double-act dramas. But here we get the work of one upon the work of the other. And it’s a compliment to this evening of Beckett dramas directed by Brook that you soon forget the status of both artists and just enjoy the work. The show consists, as the title suggests, of short Beckett pieces. They give us distilled Beckett: that bleak vision of humanity struggling to make sense of it all before toppling into the grave. But they also give us Beckett the clown.” (Sarah Hemming, Financial Times)



„Today, with the passage of time, we see how false were the labels first stuck on Beckett – despairing, negative, and pessimistic. Indeed, he peers into the filthy abyss of human existence. His humour saves him and us from falling in, he rejects theories, dogmes, that offer pious consolations, yet his life was a constant, aching search for meaning.” (Peter Brook)
 

„Rather than the traditional wallow in the melancholic misery of most Beckett interpretations, Brook manages to celebrate the unexpected comedy of Beckett, without diminishing the aphotic despondency.” (Sophie Gorman, Irish Independent)
 

Peter Brook was born in London in 1925. He directed his first play there in 1943. He then went on to direct over 70 productions in London, Paris and New York. His work with the Royal Shakespeare Company includes Love’s Labour’s Lost (1946), Measure for Measure (1950), Titus Andronicus (1955), King Lear (1962), Marat/Sade (1964), US (1966), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970) and Antony and Cleopatra (1978).
 

In 1971, he founded the International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris and in 1974, opened its permanent base in the Bouffes du Nord Theatre. There, he directed Timon of Athens, The Ik, Ubu aux Bouffes, Conference of the Birds, L’Os, The Cherry Orchard, The Mahabharata, Woza Albert!, The Tempest, The Man Who, Qui est là?, O! les Beaux Jours, Je suis un Phénomène, Le Costume, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Far Away, La Mort de Krishna , Ta Main dans la Mienne, Le Grand Inquisiteur, Tierno Bokar, and Sizwe Banzi is dead – many of these performing both in French and English.
 

In opera, he directed La Bohème, Boris Godounov, The Olympians, Salomé and Le Nozze de Figaro at Covent Garden; Faust and Eugene Onegin at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, La Tragédie de Carmen and Impressions of Pelleas, at the Bouffes du Nord, Paris and Don Giovanni for the Aix en Provence Festival.
 

Peter Brook’s autobiography, Threads of Time, was published in 1998 and joins other titles including The Empty Space (1968) – translated into over 15 languages, The Shifting Point (1987), Evoking (and Forgetting) Shakespeare (2002), and There are No Secrets (1993). His films include Lord of the Flies, Marat/Sade, King Lear, Moderato Cantabile, The Mahabharata and Meetings with Remarkable Men.
“The revered director Peter Brook takes a somewhat unusual view of Samuel Beckett. In a programme note to this selection of some of the dramatist's shorter pieces, he writes: "Today with the passage of time we see how false were the labels first stuck on Beckett - despairing, negative, pessimistic." Actually despairing, negative and pessimistic would seem to me to be perfectly accurate descriptions of much of Beckett's work. [...] Nevertheless Brook is right to suggest that doom and gloom isn't the complete picture. There is something uplifting about the courage with which Beckett stares into the void, something heroic in the humour he wrings from desperation, something deeply moving about the manifest human sympathy of his writing. These five brief pieces are little more than chippings from the master's work table, yet in its modest, unfussy away, this is a revelatory evening. [...] Cruelty, laughter and unexpected tenderness combine in Rough for Theatre I, as a blind beggar, and a wheelchair-bound cripple try, and finally fail, to establish a mutually helpful relationship. And once again there is also an unexpected zest for life in the writing, as the characters remember the women in their lives and salivate at the thought of corned beef. Brook's spare, simple staging is alive to every nuance in these plays, and the three performers bring a richly beguiling mixture of light and shade to their performances. (…) What riches are to be found in these apparently insubstantial minor works.” (Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph)
 

“Beckett's plays don't lend themselves to being described in culinary metaphors. You'd scarcely call Waiting for Godot a "feast" of drama or Happy Days a "banquet", indisputable masterpieces though they both are. "Soufflés with substance" is how a programme note portrays the five short pieces in Fragments, a production by Beckett's friend and fellow-expatriate in Paris, the great director Peter Brook. Nutritious is what they certainly are, though they wouldn't have me reaching for the cook-book in an effort to evoke them. Music is what comes to mind as you sit entranced by the skill of the pacing, the charm of the order in which they are presented, and the quite extraordinarily beautiful shifts of lighting that carry you from one piece to another like some deep controlling intelligence. You experience the show as a strange, haunting, humorous chamber symphony in which three of the movements are scherzos.” (Paul Taylor, The Independent)
 

“(...) Both Beckett and Brook have an aura of unapproachable, irreproachable saintliness, but here the director’s brisk, common-sense attitude is a good antidote. Bare, beady-eyed, unflinching and painfully funny, this is Beckett as it should be done, even if it’s not always Beckett as Beckett said it should be done.” (Christopher Hart, The Sunday Times)
 

Texts by: Samuel BECKETT
Directed by: Peter BROOK
In collaboration with: Marie Hélène ESTIENNE
With: Hayley CARMICHAEL, Antonio GIL MARTINEZ, César SARACHU
Light design:** Philippe VIALATTE
 

Production of the C.I.C .T. / Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Paris.
 

French language premiere: Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, October 2006, in collaboration with: Lilo Baur Co-production partner of the English language premiere: Young Vic Theatre, London.
 

With the support of:

TRAFÓ KORTÁRS MŰVÉSZETEK HÁZA
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