|
Thursday, 04 March 2010
 The Guardian brings
news of the passing of Barbara Bray in late February.
Bray was a unique behind-the-scenes champion of twentieth
century theatre, sharing a close personal relationship with Samuel Beckett
for three decades as she tirelessly worked to bring his work, as well as
that of Harold Pinter, Bertolt Brecht and others, to public notice. Notes
Andrew Todd:
Strikingly beautiful, opinionated and headstrong, Bray
had run the course of her career at the BBC by 1961. At the age of 36, she
moved to Paris with her daughters, partly to be closer to Beckett (who was
55) and partly to pursue a freelance career as a translator and critic.
Besides writing for the Observer and appearing regularly on the
BBC programme The Critics, she translated almost all of Duras's
work; Anouilh's Antigone; Pinget's Clope; Genet's
Prisoner of Love; Michel Tournier's The Ogre; works by
Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Michel Quint, Frederic Richaud and Amin
Maalouf; Flaubert's correspondence with George Sand; and Elisabeth
Roudinesco's biography of Jacques Lacan. She won the Scott Moncrieff prize
for translation four times.
An extraordinary woman by any measure, Bray's final years were marked
by the same fierce independence as the rest of her life: "A stroke in 2003
limited her activity, and left her using a wheelchair. She remained
doggedly independent in a studio flat in the Rue Seguier, proudly reciting
swathes of Shakespeare, Donne and the King James Bible from memory. After
a steady decline in her health, she moved last December to Edinburgh to a
nursing home near her daughter Francesca's house. Resolutely rational and
atheist to the last, Bray eschewed a funeral and donated her body to
science." The full obituary, well worth reading, is here.
|
|
Superfluities
Redux home page
George Hunka
home page
theatre
minima home page
Theory and polemic
95 Sentences About Theatre (2007)
Organum I (2006-2007)
Organum
II (2008-2009)
Critique of
Tragedy (2010-continuing)
Notes
Howard Barker
1
Howard
Barker 2
Samuel
Beckett 1
Samuel
Beckett 2
Bertolt
Brecht
Richard
Foreman 1
Richard
Foreman 2
Je Suis
Sang
Sarah
Kane
Music
Marilyn
Nonken
Saint Oedipus
Contact
geh@panix.com
Copyright © 2003-2010
by George
Hunka
|
