Catastrophe

Background >

The grimly satirical one-act minimalist Catastrophe was one of Beckett’s last and uncharacteristically overtly political dramas. Dedicated to the former Eastern Bloc dissident playwright Vaclav Havel, (today the President of the Czech Republic), it was first presented at a benefit event in Avignon to support Havel during his persecution under Communism. A contemporary review in the Manchester Guardian Weekly observed in the play, ‘a statement of the similarity between a dictatorship …and the way in which a director treats his actors’.

Written originally in French, Catastrophe was first performed at the 1982 Avignon Festival. Alan Schneider directed its first American production at the Harold Clurman Theatre, New York, in 1983. In 1984, Éditions de minuit published the text in Paris, with Faber and Faber (London) publishing its English translation that same year.