Peer’s Last Tape: Ibsen and Beckett in 2006.
PEER’S LAST TAPE: IBSEN AND BECKETT IN 2006

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between the plays of Ibsen and Beckett in the centenary year of their respective death and birth. It investigates the familiar claim that Ibsen is the "father of modern drama" and therefore an influence on even such unlikely forms as Theatre of the Absurd. However, Intertextual Theory and Performance Theory both persuade modern comparative scholarship to consider the possibility of bidirectional influence: in other words, to acknowledge that our reading of Beckett may influence the ways in which we read Ibsen one hundred years later. The testcase for this proposition was my adaptation of Peer Gynt for performance in 2000, where I explored the idea of "Selfhood" in Ibsen's play by using the split-self device borrowed from Beckett in Krapp's Last Tape.

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