History
“Tynan had asked … to write a brief skit for an erotic review, and Beckett agreed when he heard that Edna O'Brien., Jules Feiffer, Leonard Melfi, John Lennon and Tynan himself were planning to contribute. All the contributions were to be listed anonymously on the programme so that none of the contributors would be identified with his writing.”
Beckett sent the text of the play on a postcard to Tynan. At the first production, his staging was altered to make the work fit in with the somewhat risque nature of the revue by adding naked bodies to the rubbish, suggesting that the work was about sexual intercourse. “In one of his few displays of public anger, Beckett called Tynan a ‘liar’ and a ‘cheat’, prompting Tynan to send a formal notice through his lawyers that he was not responsible for the travesty, which he claimed was due to others … Beckett decided the incident wasn’t worth the argument and dropped it.”
“85 million people saw 1314 performances making it easily Beckett’s most viewed play.”
“John Calder claims that Tynan commissioned it; but Ruby Cohn disputes this, saying that Samuel Beckett had recited it to her years before, and that Calder published a fair copy but not the original, which SB had written on the paper tablecloth of a café.”
Read more about this topic: Breath (play)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)