Third International Conference

Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts

May 16-18, 2009, Lincoln, UK

Beckett and Theatre Degree Zero: (or: Bananas on the Beach)

Biography: Ralph Yarrow

Teacher, theatre director, performer, actor trainer, writer, editor, translator, project leader. Final post: Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature. Was Head of French and (for a long time) Chair of Drama programmes.

Career spans an engagement with language and cultural production from Europe to India, from comparative criticism to postcolonial theory, from teaching innovations to directing practice; theatre and performance in France, Germany, Poland, the UK, India and Asia, South Africa.

Founding international contribution to research into consciousness and the arts; further specializations in improvisation, Indian and Asian theatre; and theatre in and as development, which comes out of theatre practice as training for personal and communal creativity, but it also opens out into democracy as practice.

Books include Improvisation in Drama, Indian Theatre, and the recent Sacred Theatre. Directing includes 15 productions for UEA Drama, many in French for his own UEA-based company Sacré Théâtre, others for Sewell Barn Theatre Norwich and for other institutions in Wales and India.

Among other things, has been a clown (Feste in Twelfth Night), a saint (Thomas Becket in Murder in the Cathedral), a French homosexual speaking bad German (in Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson), a colonial wife (Betty in Churchill’s Cloud Nine), a witch (in Macbeth), a cricket-loving Jewish Godfather (Goldberg in The Birthday Party) and a sado-masochistic erotomaniac fantasising as a French General (in Genet’s The Balcony).