Executive Produer: Dato' Faridah Merican
Artistic Director: Joe Hasham
Playwright: Samuel Beckett
Director: Gavin Yap
Cast: Alvin Wong, Sharifah Amani, U-En Ng and Kelvin Wong
Lighting Designer: Mac Chan
Production Designer: Loo Jia-Wei
In conjunction with the worldwide celebration to mark the centenary of Samuel Beckett's birth, KLPac will be presenting a play by this Noble Prize-winning Irish playwright.
Endgame is set in a bare room, serving as a shelter, sit four characters: Hamm the master, Clov his servant and Hamm's mother and father, Nell and Nagg. Outside all seems dead and nothing happens. Inside, the characters pass the time toying with fears and illusions of a possible change, all along sensing the inevitability of their end.
The one-act play premiered in 1957 at London's Royal Court Theatre. Alongside other pieces like Waiting for Godot, Endgame is considered to be amongst his most important pieces of work.
Samuel Beckett Centenary Celebration (1906 - 2006) Exhibition
Date & Time: 1, 7, 8, 9 & 10 August from 10am - 6.30pm and 2, 3, 4 5 & 6 August from 10am - 8pm
Description: Display of photographs & texts (touring internationally)
Venue: Pentas 2 foyer, KLPac
Admission: Free (open to public)
About Samuel Beckett (Playwright)
Beckett studied French and Italian at Trinity College. During a stint in Paris, Beckett was introduced to James Joyce. In the years to come Joyce would have an "overwhelming" effect on his fellow Irishman. Beckett became one fo the intimates in Joyce's circle and contributed time and effort to his work.
By the end of the 1920s Beckett had begun to publish his own work. After acquiring a Master's degree from Trinity, he settled in Paris in 1937.
1941 brought news of the death of Joyce, and the invasion of the Nazis. Thereafter, he joined the resistance and was later awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1945 for "extreme bravery". After the war, his focus in writing shifted to ideas of the essential, the minimal, the unadorned. His trilogy of novels, Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953), is among the greatest prose writings of the century.
When Waiting for Godot first appeared on the stage in 1953, the world of theatre was startled to find itself changed. Didi and Gogo do very little in the course of two acts but wait, wait, wait, for someone named Godot, who may or may not be coming. This very human drama was pared down to its most necessary gestures: expectation, companionship, abuse, hope. The plays which followed such as Endgame (1958) similarly used abstraction as a means to explore the most powerful themes, and to question whether they have any value or meaning.
Beckett received an honorary doctorate from Trinity College in 1959, and two years later he won, with Jorge Luis Borges, the Prix International des Editeurs (or Prix Formentor). Beckett also won the Nobel Prize for, in the words of the Academy's citation, "his writing, which - in new forms for the novel and drama - in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation."
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