Teacher: Vicente Forés
Course: Filología Inglesa
I
Date: October - 20th
–2005
Theatre has
always been one of the most misunderstood arts of the human civilization,
specially nowadays, I think this could be because people uses to
consider the
art like a type of entertaiment and not like a very useful tool to
express all
our feelings; however, there have been lots of artists that have changed the
vision of the art becoming it a successful compilation of entertaiment and
feeling, and in the world of theatre two of the best examples we have
with that
features are Samuel Beckett and John
Osborne.
Samuel Beckett
(1906-1989) was
born in Ireland and grew in a Protestant Anglo-Irish family; he graduated in
romance languages at Trinity College (Dublin), but he started working in
Paris
(France); he travelled around Europe and met important writers and famous
theatre personalities, but he began to be known when he wrote in 1952
the drama
“Waiting For Godot” ; in 1969 he obtained The Nobel Prize for
literature.
John Osborne (1930-1994) was born in London, his
infancy
was terribly affected by important familiar shocks like his father’s
death when
he was only eleven years old; his studies didn’t get good results and he
left
them; some years later, Osborne became an actor-manager and next he tried to
make playwritings, one of them was the play that would make him very famous,
the play was called“Look Back In Anger” and it became very
important in
the postwar society; in the following years he wrote lots of successful
plays
like “The Entertainers” (1957); in 1963 he received an Academy Award
with one of his plays that were adapted into movies.
Both Osborne’s and Beckett’s
trajectories have had a lot of contrasts: John Osbone began writing a
chain of playwritings, and Samuel Beckett wrote little plays,
specially
a chain of monologues (“Murphy” in 1938, “Malone Dies” in
1951,
etc.); their fame has began with a very successful play, John
Osborne’s “Look
Back In Anger”, that was considered by the critics (between them was
Arnold
Wesker) a revolutionary postwar’s Brithish theatre because the angry
posture of J.Porter (the protagonist) against the decadence of the following
years of the Second World War, and Samuel Beckett’s
“Waiting
for Godot”, an absurdist drama that showed the comical face of the basic
existential problems with th characters of Estragon and Vladimir; next, they
both continued making plays: Samuel Beckett continued mixing the
narrative prose with the dramas and with grothesque situations to create
novels
like “Watt” in 1953 and, later, a short stories’ chain called
“Stories
And Texts For Nothing” in 1955, and some important plays like
“Endgame”
(1957), “Happy Days” (1961) or “Footfalls” (1976); in 1969 he
received The Nobel Prize for his literary trajectory; John
Osborne, at the
same as Beckett, continued writing important plays, but using the same
criticism like “Look Back In Anger” , so he wrote in 1957 “The
Entertainer”, the story of three generations of entertainers, with this,
Osborne, tried to show the decadence of England after the war; and later, he
made important plays like “Luthor” in 1961 (it was a play about The
Reformation’s Father: Luthor) or “Inadmisible Evidence” in 1965 (a
critic to the law system); next, a lot of his plays were adapted to the
cinema
and in 1963 Osborne obtained an Academy Award for one of the
movies.
Blbliography:
Enciclopedia Virtual de Larousse (Teatro
Contemporáneo)
www.theatrehistory.com/british