Performing Beckett in Different Media in Serbia

Abstract

In a very rich “love story” between Beckett’s work and Serbian audiences, there have been some significant cornerstones. Since the first translation of Waiting for Godot in 1953 to the present day, Beckett has been performed not only on stage (the famous clandestine performance of Godot in Belgrade in 1954) but also on Radio Belgrade (All That Fall in 1961) and Television Belgrade. It was with his radio drama Words and Music that broadcasting of the Third Programme of Radio Belgrade began in 1965. Unfortunately, there are no traces left of television programmes broadcast in the sixties, so the first reliable proof of Beckett’s presence in this medium is from the seventies. Together with his books translated into Serbian (novels, stories, plays, poems, and essays), we can say that Beckett’s mostly spiritual “migrations” into other cultures (“mostly”, since he was our guest in 1958 when he spent a few weeks of his holidays during summer) were very successful in the case of the Serbian one. Since he himself was a voluntary migrant from one culture to another, and from one language to another, Beckett was familiar with the migrant experience of being poor and anonymous. In our paper, then, we will try to trace Beckett’s metamorphosis in different media in Serbia, and follow his rise in our culture during all those decades.