Chess and Art: Samuel Beckett's Obsession with Chess
Alexandra Kosteniuk's Chess Blog for Daily Chess News and Trivia (c) 2013
Hi everyone,
Stephen Moss has a brilliant article on Samuel Beckett's great obsessions in the Guardian. Was this game of fierce purity and life-or-death stakes is the key to all his work?
It is a monumental struggle, or would be if Milligan were any good at chess. Even though he designed the set, with bronze pieces modelled on Beckett's characters and pawns representing props used in his plays (boots and carrots from Waiting for Godot, a banana from Krapp's Last Tape, the pistol from Happy Days), he knows little about the game. In anticipation of playing me, he has been studying a book optimistically called Learn to Play Chess in a Weekend, but I still checkmate him in 20 moves. Don't give up, I tell him. Fail again. Fail better.
Read more »Hi everyone,
Stephen Moss has a brilliant article on Samuel Beckett's great obsessions in the Guardian. Was this game of fierce purity and life-or-death stakes is the key to all his work?
Chess represents life reduced to essentials, to a struggle to survive … a 2009 production of Samuel Beckett's chess-themed play, Endgame. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
"I am something of an interloper at the Samuel Beckett festival in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. While the Beckettians are here to venerate the master and his works – concentrated, intense, elliptical – I have come for the chess, which is why on Sunday afternoon I find myself in the high street playing a game on a giant chess set against the man who created it, local sculptor Alan Milligan," writes Moss.
"I am something of an interloper at the Samuel Beckett festival in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. While the Beckettians are here to venerate the master and his works – concentrated, intense, elliptical – I have come for the chess, which is why on Sunday afternoon I find myself in the high street playing a game on a giant chess set against the man who created it, local sculptor Alan Milligan," writes Moss.
It is a monumental struggle, or would be if Milligan were any good at chess. Even though he designed the set, with bronze pieces modelled on Beckett's characters and pawns representing props used in his plays (boots and carrots from Waiting for Godot, a banana from Krapp's Last Tape, the pistol from Happy Days), he knows little about the game. In anticipation of playing me, he has been studying a book optimistically called Learn to Play Chess in a Weekend, but I still checkmate him in 20 moves. Don't give up, I tell him. Fail again. Fail better.
Labels: chess and rt, samuel beckett, stephen moss
posted by Chess Blog Admin @ 10:03 AM
0 Comments
