Superfluities Redux

by George Hunka
Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater


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Monday, 03 May 2010

Avigdor Arikha, 1929-2010


Samuel Beckett Listening to Music, 9 December 1976
Hard graphite on rag paper, 26.8 x 34.5 cm.

Margalit Fox reports in the 30 April issue of The New York Times the death of Avigdor Arikha, an Israeli painter "whose work captured both the haunting beauty and the looming menace of everyday things, a vision informed in no small part by his experience as a Holocaust survivor." Arikha was a close friend of Samuel Beckett's, the dramatist who served as the subject of several sketches by the artist, as well as How It Was, a fine small memoir by Arikha's widow Anne Atik. A small selection of Arikha's work appears along with the obituary here.

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Thursday, 04 March 2010

Barbara Bray (1924-2010)

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.

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Monday, 27 July 2009

Merce Cunningham (1919-2009)

Photo: Annie Leibovitz

Alistair MacAulay in the New York Times reports the death last night of Merce Cunningham at the age of 90. "In his final years he became almost routinely hailed as the world's greatest choreographer," MacAulay writes. "For many, he had simply been the greatest living artist since Samuel Beckett."

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