This report summarizes the activities of the Samuel Beckett Working Group in the academic year 2023-24. It hightlights the achievements of the group, as well as its objectives for the upcoming year.

INTERIM MEETING

 

The Samuel Beckett Working Group held its online interim meeting in November 2023. We put into place a mentorship programme, by means of which postgraduate researchers can receive feedback on their projects and seek advice about professional development. A number of academics kindly volunteered to act as mentors, but we welcome more participation. 

 

All working group members – and especially those located in the Global South – were invited to reach out to the theatre review editors of the Journal of Beckett Studies and The Beckett Circle to publish reviews of performances taking place in their respective countries, thus facilitating more inclusivity and diversity in our field.

 

In addition, our group drafted, discussed and internally ratified its own code of conduct. We also reflected on the ways in which we can contribute to the development of the IFTR’s own text for the protection of vulnerable members and the prevention of harassment and discrimination. We are very much in support of the efforts of the organisation more broadly to engage with this issue and delighted to see work ongoing on the matter.

 

Eventually, we discussed the ongoing research of the past and current members of the working group and prepared our annual in person meeting at the conference held in Manila in July 2024. 

 

ANNUAL CONFERENCE

 

The theme of the annual conference was “Our States of Emergency: Theatres and Performances of Tragedy.” In response to the general call for papers, our group proposed to reflect on “Samuel Beckett, Tragedy and Catastrophe: From the Modern Stage to Contemporary Performance.” Via the nine presentations that were delivered during the conference and the conversations they enabled, we explored the form of tragedy and the idea of the tragic in Beckett’s oeuvre together with language and the unsayable; emotions, psychology and psychoanalysis; the grotesque, the smile, laughter, comedy and tragicomedy; attic tragedy and French classical tragedy; the Beckettian canons and their possible reconfigurations; environmental catastrophe and the Anthropocene; intimacy, the couple and the everyday; natalism, the future, futurity and their absence; the notion of ‘tragic optimism’; disability, age and gender; as well as redemption and divine mercy in monotheistic religions. Our working group sessions demonstrated the relevance of rethinking tragedy and the tragic in Beckett Studies and the need for a new publication on the same, which we will work towards. 

 

This year, our first and last sessions were open workshops, in the view to further embedding our work and our community within the broader conference. Throughout the week, the Working Group sessions were attended by regular auditors. Their presence and contributions showed not only how Beckett’s oeuvre continues to be of interest and use to contemporary societal issues and to theatre practices responding to this context, but also how the working group offers a connection space in which Beckett Studies directly interact with other areas of theatre and performance research and practices. In our first workshop, we offered a breathwork session to welcome people in the space hosting the conference and help them ground themselves into the space, time and community. This was followed by a communal reading of Worstward Ho and a discussion of the experience and the text, which provided core themes to explore throughout the week, as well as an embodied approach to Beckett and the tragic. In our last workshop, we were honoured to host two theatre directors from Japan and the Philippines: Yuta Hagiwara and Gabo Tolentino. They shared with us their performances of Beckett’s works, playing clips and showing pictures from their archives. They also generously offered reflections on their practice and the role that Beckett plays in their respective theatre-making journey. Both artists expressed a willingness to connect further with the Beckett community and the importance to foster communication between academics and artists, which we will endeavour to continue facilitating in coming years. We are grateful to the convenor of the Asian Theatre Working Group at IFTR, Beri Juraic, for introducing us to Yuta Hagiwara, and we look forward to further collaborations with this and other working groups in the near future.

 

We are pleased to report that the co-edited volume Samuel Beckett and Ecology should be published in 2025 with Bloomsbury. It is based on the work generated by the working group over the past four years, but also encompasses other disciplines (such as translation) and artistic reflections to feature a wide range of voices from all continents. 

 

In addition to actively pursuing our mission of research production and dissemination, our working group would like to focus on the following directions in the coming year: 

• Making the conference more accessible for colleagues from the Global South, particularly in regards to funding and travel requirements (primarily visas),
• Contributing to the IFTR’s on-going writing of a text which prevents harassment and discriminations,
• Helping new scholars transition from the New Scholars Forum to working groups,
• Collaborating with other working groups through common workshops,
• Facilitating the connection between Beckett studies and artists to the benefit of both parties,
• Developing support to ECRs and advocating for a fairer work ecosystem.

Our next interim meeting will be announced in the autumn and should happen online at the end of November or at the beginning of December. The 2025 IFTR conference is scheduled to take place in Cologne (Germany) between 9 and 13 June. We welcome queries and suggestions throughout the year at sbwg.iftr@gmail.com.