The Dublin theatre festival is marking the 60th anniversary of Waiting for Godot by putting on a new production of Samuel Beckett's masterpiece this September. In fact it was Pierre Latour and Lucien Raimbourg in the French version under the title En attendant Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris in 1953. In fact the play did not have its English language première until 1955.
James Joyce finished Ulysses and wrote Finnegans Wake entirely in Paris, somehow always linking Irish creativity and Dublin in particular with the city. However, Beckett spent the largest part of his life, wrote all of his great works and even joined the Resistance in WW2 and is buried there.
I hope there will be some celebration of Godot in France this year as befits the great work.
Don't do acting, 'cos I'm no good at it. However did Lucky for our college production in '68, even that is hard work but I would never have made Estragon or Vladimir and we had a 'born' Pozzo. That was my intro to Beckett really, but now like it after many rereads.
Apologies that they are not in chronological order - I used Wikipedia because I couldn't remember the dates. :-)
Exactly and who could debate all of that...
I hope so too. In fact, the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris does an excellent job of promoting Irish creativity, of both living and dead writers and poets. We won a whopping €5 at a Trivial Pursuit game one night naming Irish Nobel prize winners (we didn't manage all of them but named the most).
So, in the interest of winning next time, they are:
Samuel Beckett (Literature 1969)
Seamus Heaney (Literature 1995)
George Bernard Shaw (Literature 1925, and he also won an Oscar in 1938)
Ernest Walton (Physics 1951)
W.B. Yeats (Literature 1923)
Sean McBride (Peace, 1974)
Mairead McGuire (Peace 1976)
We should include in any list of Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker. Not sure about Stoker, but Joyce and Wilde spent a lot of time in France, and Wilde is buried in Pere Lachaise.