Texts by Samuel Beckett

Translated and directed by Antoni Libera; set design by Alexandra Semenowicz

This year, the centenary of Samuel Beckett's birth is being commemorated all over the world. Poet, playwright, novelist - Beckett wrote in French and English. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969.
Irena Jun, one of the best interpreters of Beckett's texts worldwide, prepared a short but exquisite evening with two short plays, one poem and an ”opera”.
”Not I” (1973), a monologue of the mouth, is besides ”Godot” Beckett's most popular play. The mouth utters fragmented, jumbled sentences which gradually coelesce into a narrative about a woman who has suffered an unpleasant experience.
In ”Rockaby” (1981), an elder woman is rocking, listening to a recorded voice, sometimes speaking with it, recalling and becoming her dead mother when, at the end, she goes ”down the steep stair,” and joins her.
Beckett's final work, the poem ”What is the word” (1988), written in bed in the nursing home where he spent the last days of his life, is the story of a quest for the right word.
Called an opera, ”Neither” (1976) is a work for soprano and orchestra, with Beckett's "libretto" . Morton Feldman, an American composer, asked the writer for a text which should be ”The quintessence. Something that just hovers”. ”Neither” is the input of two like-minded visionaries focused on a single theme: the endless and perhaps hopeless quest for understanding of the self and the universe, as carried out within the flash of a single life.

Irena Jun is actress at renowned Warsaw theatre “Studio”, director and professor at Theatre Academy in Warsaw. Antoni Libera, called by Beckett “my deputy in Eastern Europe”, translated his works into Polish, staged his plays internationally and directed them for Polish television.

Language: Polish, partly French
Length: 40 minutes

Kindly supported by Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Hamburg

German premiere

This performance is not part of the competition

<<<