Image of an in vitro produced bovine blastocyst

Marcelo Fábio Gouveia Nogueira (3935048)

José Celso Rocha (4243879)

Felipe José Passalia (4243870)

Felipe Delestro Matos (4243885)

Maria Beatriz Takahashi (4243873)

Marc Peter Maserati Jr (4243888)

Mayra Fernanda Alves (4243867)

Tamie Guibu de Almeida (4243876)

Bruna Lopes Cardoso (4243882)

Andrea Cristina Basso (2838680)

Most theatre audiences first introduction to Samuel Beckett’s drama in the early 1970s come not from major works such as Waiting for Godot or Endgame, but a ‘dramaticule’ lasting less than forty seconds. The piece, entitled Breath reached mass audiences worldwide due it opening an erotic revue, Oh! Calcutta! devised by the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. Beckett’s contribution was one amongst a whole host of other luminaries from the period, including John Lennon, David Mercer and Sam Shepherd. The show itself was heralded as landmark cultural event in espousing the spirit of sexual liberation that came to define the late 1960s. The show opened in New York, but its original conception and many of its themes and preoccupations where definably British and its impetus came out of the struggles against the system of theatre censorship that existed in the UK until 1968. Its premiere the following year can also claim to be one of the first pieces of theatre that actively celebrated the lifting of strictures on what could be presented on-stage.Yet to see Breath as somehow totemic for the ‘permissive society’ seems highly dubious, as would Beckett somehow advocating the new found sexual freedoms of the late 1960s. In fact, his work often seems to be in direct antithesis to its values, where human sexuality amounts to deep-seated feelings of shame, punishment, or one of impotence and sterility. Drawing extensively on archival sources including the Kenneth Tynan and Harold Pinter collections at the British Library as well as the Beckett archive at the University of Reading, this article will look in detail at Beckett’s somewhat unwilling secondment into the mores of the late 1960s sexual revolution through his involvement in Oh! Calcutta! Beckett’s own seeming estrangement from the utopian ideals of the times will also be framed through many of the contradictions thrown up by Tynan’s erotic revue: on the one hand it functioned as a high profile beacon in proclaiming countercultural values; yet with its transfer to Broadway, and subsequently productions in many of the major theatre capitals around the world, Oh! Calcutta! provided a safe, not to say anodyne introduction for middle aged and middle class audiences to gingerly expose themselves for the first time to material that had formerly been seen as taboo. <br/

Saunders, Graham

University of Birmingham Research Portal

Contracts, clauses and nudes:<i>Breath, Oh! Calcutta!</i> and the freedom of authorship

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Contracts, Clauses and Nudes:  Breath, Oh! Calcutta!  and the Freedom of Authorship

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