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In an article written especially for The Beckett Circle, Jim Knowlson pays tribute to David Warrilow, who died twenty years ago. He explains how Samuel Beckett came to write the solo play A Piece of Monologue for Warrilow in 1979 and how his personal letters from Beckett were deposited in the University of Reading's Beckett Archive. [i]
David Warrilow in Joel and Ethan Coen's
Barton Fink
In the 1950s, the British journalist-editor turned actor David Warrilow, the only actor to premiere some of the bilingual dramatist's plays in both English and French, was a fellow student of French Language and Literature at the University of Reading with me and my wife Elizabeth. Although the three of us were near contemporaries on the same four-year B.A. degree course, David was a year behind me and two years behind Liz. This meant that she saw far more of him than I did during their undergraduate days, since, while he was on his second year in Reading, I was at the University of Grenoble on a third year of study abroad, while, on my return, he was away, also in Grenoble. At that time, the second and fourth year students took certain courses together; so David and my wife both attended, for instance, Professor A. G. Lehmann's joint seminars on the Modern French Novel.
He and I lived, however, for one academic year in the same hall of residence, Wantage Hall, where I remember that, quite separately, we wrote and performed a series of short, end of the year, dramatic sketches, the content of his sketch being more sophisticated, better written and better performed than the one I had co-written and was involved in. He was also a leading member of the University's 'The Guild of the Red Rose', which put on an annual 'Jantaculum' event and plays like James Elroy Flecker's Hassan, in which he acted the role of the Grand Vizier. With the university's Drama Society, he played the major role of Oedipus in Jean Cocteau's The Infernal Machine; in his Finals year, however, because of pressure of work, he only acted the tiny part of the King of France in King Lear. At university, we were never members of the same social group and, although...