Beckett: Unbound: Keynote and Welcome

The University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies and The Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs, in association with Unreal Cities are pleased to present , 4 days of exploring Samuel Beckett’s wild fascination with communication and technology’s traversal of time and distance, across a programme of theatre, music, film, dance, photography, and discussion.

New Directions in Beckett Performance: Beyond the Boundaries

This talk challenges the pervasive myth that Beckett's work is hyper-restrictive, both in terms of its own form and content, and in the opportunities it offers to contemporary practitioners.

Countering this myth, we’ll consider Beckett today as one of the great – perhaps the greatest – among the literary experimenters in the twentieth century. We’ll examine Beckett’s compulsive interest in finding new ways of communicating beyond the printed word, as he probes the possibilities and the limitations (and the possibilities in the limitations) of other modes of communication, and particularly in media at the technological forefront of its day. We’ll also look at some case studies of particularly innovative twenty-first century responses to Beckett’s work: contemporary works that are continuing a Beckettian legacy of radical experimentation.
Dr Hannah Simpson is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness: Pain in Postwar Francophone Drama (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022; winner of the TAPRA David Bradby Monograph Prize 2023). She works primarily on the representation of the human body on stage and politicised representations of the body more generally. She is also Theatre Review Editor at The Beckett Circle, and lead organiser for the Samuel Beckett Society annual conference 2025, which will be held in Edinburgh on the theme of "Beckett's Relationships".

is funded by The Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs and Culture Ireland, and with thanks to University of Liverpool Alumni and Friends fund for their generous support of the Beckett Student Ambassador Scheme at the festival.

We are grateful to acknowledge additional funding received from The TS Eliot Foundation and the Martin and Rimmer Trusts.

Host or Publisher The Institute of Irish Studies