Becketteers

"Rodney Sharkey of Trinity College, whose meticulous research illuminated so many areas of Beckett biography and who so often discussed the results with me with such keen interpretation"
from Preface to SAMUEL BECKETT: THE LAST MODERNIST by Anthony Cronin, London: Flamingo, 1996, pp viii-iv



With compliments of

Siddeek Bakr Tawfeek, MA (Leeds), 1972

Formerly Professor of English Literature, Mustansiriyah University, Baghdad, Iraq

Currently Senior Translation Specialist, Supreme Council for Family Affairs, Doha

MA dissertation topic THE ATTEMPT AT FAILURE: A STUDY OF SAMUEL BECKETT'S PLAYS, supervisor: Robert Welch, currently Dean of Faculty of Arts, Ulster University-Coleraine, N Ireland. Welch is Cronin's personal friend and he is mentioned in Cronin's book above on p 469

Following is an email I sent  in April 2007 to Professor Rodney Sharkey



Dear Dr Sharkey

Your lecture which you wittily opened with the Krapp banana tableau yesterday evening was, among other things, interesting and illuminating and at times more than one, eye-opening to things Beckettian. You rang genuinely Beckettian, or to use the form coined by Ruby Cohn, Becketteer. In my remark yesterday, memory didn't serve to mention Nagg's statement "There's nothing funnier than unhappiness" to be an apt translation of Mohammed's saying "The gravest calamity is that which evokes laughter." All things considered, as WC Fields said once, I usually attempt at enhancing the dialogue of cultures, to bring east and west closer, introduce the foreign community to Arabic culture and also because I am in the habit of collecting material on Beckett in the Arab world, especially that Beckett frequented Morroco and Tunisia where he was when the news about his Nobel winning was broken and Knowlson in DAMNED TO FAME explains how Tunisians helped Beckett and Suzanne in hiding from press and media people, and it was also in Tunisia, sitting in a cafe where Beckett was inspired with the idea of NOT I. Beckett was a man of action more than what is known about him. In WWII, he assisted in resisting the Nazi. During my visit in July 2005 to Professor John Pilling, University of Reading, I asked him why there isn't a good study or research or even a book on Beckett's war affiliations and as you mentioned in your lecture that Beckett lost many friends in concentration camps, Pilling told me that there isn't sufficient material and documents and because, and this typically Beckettian, Beckett didn't talk a lot about the subject--whenever did he talk a lot at all about anything! Now going back to the banana tableau associated with Krapp, during having lunch with Beckett biographer James Knowlson and Elizabeth his wife in the University of Reading Senior Common Room where he invited me also in July 2005, Knowlson talked to me things Beckettian one of which things was about how during rehearsals of KRAPP at the Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square-London in 1972, Beckett told Albert Finney playing the part to make the gesture of turning his head back slowly as if touched on the shoulder by someone whom Beckett intended to be death coming to Krapp, and was Knowlson furious when he saw the play with Finney not doing as Beckett had directed him. Beckett was not there because he never saw any of his plays. Of course Beckett wasn't there as he attended rehearsals but never full performances of his plays. Knowlson would have gone on telling me more things Beckettian, in the end Knowlson apologised to me that he couldn't continue talking because he was feeling unwell in his throat, especially that he was fresh from an operation of cancer of the mouth