'Encore Magazine' (Samuel Beckett)

© reserved; collection National Portrait Gallery, London

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'Encore Magazine' (Samuel Beckett)

by Jerry Bauer
magazine cover, 1962
8 1/4 in. x 5 3/8 in. (210 mm x 135 mm) overall
Given by Clare Freestone, 2012
Photographs Collection
NPG x136874

Sitterback to top

Artistback to top

  • Jerry Bauer (1934-2010), Photographer. Artist or producer of 4 portraits.

This portraitback to top

Said to have shaped Post-War theatre, Beckett provides a fitting cover portrait to this issue of Encore magazine issued fifty years ago. Subtitled 'The Voice of Vital Theatre', the magazine that ran from 1954 to 1965, championed experimental and challenging work such that penned by the 'Angry Young Men' and staged at the Royal Court Theatre. In this issue, Herbert Blau, co-director of the actor's workshop, describes Beckett as 'a dramatist of the selvedge and salvage, the action and inaction'

Events of 1962back to top

Current affairs

After a series of by-election defeats, the prime minister, Harold MacMillan organises a drastic cabinet reshuffle, dismissing one third of his cabinet. Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe's wry comment summed up the desperate action: 'greater love hath no man than this, than to lay down his friends for his life.'
Britain suffers the 'Big Freeze' with no frost-free nights between 22nd December 1962 and 5th March 1963.

Art and science

The Beatles have their first hit with Love Me Do and release their first album Please Please Me.
The new Coventry Cathedral is consecrated and creates a showcase for British artistic talent with the first performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, a wall hanging by Graham Sutherland, stained glass by John Piper, and sculptures by Jacob Epstein and Elizabeth Frink.

International

The world comes to the brink of nuclear war with the Cuban Missile Crisis. In response to the USA's nuclear advantage, the USSR sent missiles to Cuba. The crisis lasted for 12 days before a deal was finally stuck between Khrushchev and Kennedy in which the Cuban missile bases were dismantled in return for the secret removal of US missiles from Turkey.

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