Centenary of the birth of Samuel Beckett

This month Ireland will experience a unique celebration of one of Ireland’s foremost writers, Nobel Laureate Samuel Beckett. The Festival marks 100 years since Beckett’s birth, on Good Friday, 13 April 1906.

Beckett was a master of many genres from novels to dramas to extraordinary one-act plays. His works and his powerful influence on other artists will be showcased in Ireland throughout the month of April.

Among the many events planned for the festival are nine of Beckett’s stage plays at The Gate Theatre including Waiting for Godot and new productions of Endgame, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Play, Catastrophe, Footfalls and Come and Go, with directors Loveday Ingram, Charles Sturridge, Atom Egoyan, Robin Lefèvre, Alan Gilsenan, Walter Asmus and Michael Caven.

Trinity College Dublin will celebrate with two events: an Academic Symposium which will bring together eminent scholars and artists from around the world to discuss the legacy and work of its graduate, Samuel Beckett, and an extraordinary exhibition of Beckett’s manuscripts and letters in Trinity College Library.

There will be an exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy, which will include two of America’s most outstanding artists of the twentieth century together with three recent films of Beckett’s shorter plays; Kathy Prendergast’s A Dream of Discipline and a new video installation will be on exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery.

An audio/visual library of international performances of Beckett’s plays and prose will be available to the public at the Heraldic Museum courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. An exhibition of photographs by John Minihan will be on display at the National Photographic Archive; a round table discussion of Beckett’s relationship with the visual arts will take place at The National Gallery.

There will be music recitals at the National Concert Hall and RTÉ will broadcast Beckett’s plays along with radio and television documentaries on Beckett’s life and work. There will be a film festival at the Irish Film Institute showing documentaries as well as the Beckett on Film Series; projections of quotations from Beckett’s writings onto buildings around Dublin City by American textual artist, Jenny Holzer and a portrait exhibition by Cian McLoughlin of actors in characters from Beckett plays.

Later in the year, in the Millennium Wing of the National Gallery of Ireland, an exhibition titled ‘Beckett and the Visual Arts’ will trace the development of Beckett’s interest in art.

For further information visit: www.beckettcentenaryfestival.ie