Beckett Yesterday and Today: Memory, Trauma, Identity, and Resistance in Contemporary Theatre
ARTS, 5 May 2025
Udaya R. Tennakoon – TRANSCEND Media Service
Production: Intercultural Theater Thespis
20 Apr 2025 – Artists: Ajith Dasanayake, Benjamin Minchoroca, Brigitta Beglinger, Jeganathan Shanmuganathan, Mahmoud Alsaida, Mehgawanna Guruge, Nebahat Acar, Tülay Korkmaz
- Musiker: Deniz Celal Gezer, Urs Tobler
- Techniker: Jürg Giesinger
- Organisation Theatertraining:Barbara Schällibaum
- Assistance: Rushika Guruge
- Writer and Director: Udaya R. Tennakoon
Introduction
Udaya R. Tennakoon’s Beckett Yesterday and Today stands as a profound reimagining of Samuel Beckett’s existential legacy. Drawing upon Beckett’s aesthetics of absurdism, fragmentation, and introspective despair, Tennakoon crafts a multi-layered theatrical landscape that engages contemporary issues of war, memory, migration, environmental degradation, and cultural identity. This work does not merely echo Beckett’s existential preoccupations—it radically politicizes them. The play is both an homage and an intervention: it explores the philosophical undercurrents of Beckettian thought while placing them within a twenty-first-century context rife with postcolonial, ecological, and psychological tensions.
Literary Significance: The Beckettian Legacy Recontextualized
At its core, Beckett Yesterday and Today is a literary dialogue between past and present. It echoes Beckett’s formal techniques—minimalism, repetition, fragmented dialogue, and silences—but infuses them with political urgency. Beckett’s theatre of the absurd often resists overt interpretation, locating meaning in disorientation and the collapse of language. Tennakoon adopts these formal strategies but moves beyond abstraction. The characters are haunted not only by the void of existence but also by specific historical traumas—colonial legacies, war crimes, cultural erasure, and ecological collapse.
The intertextual allusions to works like Krapp’s Last Tape, Endgame, and Waiting for Godot are unmistakable. Like Krapp, Tennakoon’s characters are burdened with memory—fragile, selective, and invasive. The tape recorder becomes metaphorical: memory repeats itself, distorts, and disfigures. Yet Tennakoon’s play is not content to stay within the introspective confines of the Beckettian universe. It transforms Beckett’s solipsistic despair into a demand for ethical witnessing and political consciousness.
Socio-Political and Psychological Dimensions
What distinguishes Tennakoon’s work is its integration of the political into the psychological. Trauma in Beckett Yesterday and Today is not only personal—it is structural. Characters suffer not just from existential disorientation but from tangible socio-political violence: civil wars, ethnic cleansing, refugeehood, poverty, and systemic marginalization. The play is thus a form of cultural resistance: an insistence that memory must be reckoned with, that trauma must not be buried beneath abstraction.
Psychologically, the characters oscillate between repression and repetition. The play functions as a traumatic loop, where memory returns compulsively but never coherently. Their attempts to speak, to narrate, to find meaning, are constantly undermined by the weight of what cannot be said. Silence becomes both a symptom of trauma and a mode of survival. This tension—between the unspeakable and the demand to testify—generates the emotional and intellectual intensity of the play.
Tennakoon’s critique of global capitalism, environmental destruction, and postcolonial marginalization operates not as didacticism but as an embedded psychological reality for the characters. The violence of the world is internalized, manifesting in fractured identities, melancholic repetitions, and psychosomatic silences.
In Beckett Yesterday and Today, Udaya R. Tennakoon presents a diverse ensemble of characters, each embodying facets of trauma, memory, identity, and resistance within a fragmented world. Ajith, the existential seeker, navigates metaphysical exile, his plea for a moment of reflection highlighting a universal yearning for meaning amidst chaos. Jegan, deeply rooted in his Tamil heritage, bears the weight of historical trauma, his identity intertwined with collective memory and the scars of displacement. Beni’s silent presence and untimely death underscore the limitations of art in confronting systemic violence, his silenced guitar symbolizing the fragility of artistic expression. Brigitta emerges as the political conscience, her confrontational stance breaking the fourth wall to challenge both characters and audience with pressing global concerns. Mahmoud embodies the perpetual displacement of refugees, his fragmented speech and estranged demeanor reflecting the alienation of the marginalized. Barbara’s quiet grief speaks volumes, her silence an active resistance against the erasure of emotional reality. Nebahat represents the voiceless, her imposed silence highlighting the human cost of systemic marginalization. Mehga offers a fragile hope, his belief in collective resistance and solidarity disrupting the prevailing fatalism. Tulay, as a feminist and political interlocutor, challenges patriarchal norms and systemic injustice, her voice complicating and deepening the moral texture of the play. Together, these characters navigate a landscape shaped by existential uncertainty, cultural dislocation, and the search for agency, mirroring the fragmented realities of contemporary existence.
Conclusion: The Ethics of Remembering and Resisting
Beckett Yesterday and Today is not just a play—it is a manifesto of memory. Tennakoon’s characters carry history in their bones. They inhabit a world where the absurdity of existence is not metaphysical but political. Memory is not a private burden but a collective demand. The play forces us to confront what it means to remember ethically, to suffer visibly, and to resist collectively.
By fusing Beckett’s literary legacy with a politically charged and psychologically acute dramaturgy, Tennakoon revitalizes the theatre of the absurd for a world that is no longer merely absurd—but on fire. This is not the endgame. It is a call to witness, to mourn, and to act.
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Udaya R. Tennakoon – Lives in Switzerland. Poet/ Diaspora Writer, Journalist, Dramatist, Peace, Human Rights and Political Activist. Master of Art in Peace and Conflict Transformation. More about the poet may follow this link.
Note from the Author:
The inaugural performance of Udaya R. Tennakoon’s Beckett Yesterday and Today took place in German on April 12 and 13, 2025, in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Subsequent performances are scheduled for April 26 in Wil and May 10 in Zürich.
These performances mark the play’s introduction to the Swiss theatre scene, engaging audiences with its exploration of memory, trauma, identity, and resistance.
This text was composed with the assistance of artificial intelligence (ChatGPT). The AI contributed to the style, structure, and expression, as the author maintained control over the content and performed the final editing.
Tags: Art, Beckett, Literature
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 5 May 2025.
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