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The acclaimed director James Marsh takes on the challenging task of bringing Samuel Beckett’s complex life to the screen in Dance First. Written by Neil Forsyth, the film stars Gabriel Byrne as the older Beckett, with Fionn O’Shea playing him in his younger days. It skips through key periods, relationships, and events in a largely linear chronology.

The story opens in 1969 at the Nobel Prize ceremony, from which Beckett hastily escapes. This prompts conversations with another Beckett where he reflects on those who caused him “shame”—his m mother, James Joyce’s daughter Lucia, and the two women in his life.

Through flashbacks we see Beckett’s difficult upbringing in Ireland, his arrival in Paris and work with Joyce, his involvement in the French Resistance, and his long relationships with his eventual wife Suzanne and translator Barbara Bray.

While providing glimpses into Beckett’s experiences, the film only touches on his groundbreaking works.

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” So goes the famous opening line to Samuel Beckett’s 1938 avant-garde novel Murphy. There’s nothing much new to be found in director James Marsh’s film about the legendary Irish writer either, which takes a fairly rote cradle-to-grave approach to the Nobel laureate’s life. The great shame is that there were alternatives here and, in its best moments, Dance First hints at them, flirting with a more adventurous approach that, well, might have yielded something new.

The film begins promisingly at the 1969 Nobel Prize ceremony, where Beckett (Gabriel Byrne) learns the devastating news that he’s won the prize for literature. “Catastrophe,” he grumbles to his wife, Suzanne Dumesnil (Sandrine Bonnaire), before climbing the steps up to the stage, and then up the walls of the theater itself before clambering into a strange, cave-like crevice. The surreal place...

"Even in that horrible place, they couldn't turn off the stars..." Magnolia has revealed an official trailer for the film titled Dance First, an intriguing biopic about the life of literary genius Samuel Beckett. This premiered at the 2023 San Sebastian FIlm Festival last year, before then opening in the UK in November; Beckett was Irish so the UK got first dibs on this release. The film documents the Irish writer's life, from his childhood, his friendship with James Joyce until the incarceration of the latter's mentally ill daughter Lucia Joyce, his relationship with his future wife Suzanne Dumesnil, also as a fighter for the French Resistance during WWII, his postwar literary rise and subsequent Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, his affair with translator Barbara Bray and his later life until his death in 1989. Throughout the film, Beckett carries out an interior monologue. Irish actor Gabriel Byrne stars as Beckett, joined by Fionn O'Shea,...

Vivid portrait of the great playwright of inertia points up the contrast with his real-life romantic entanglements and daring work for the French resistance

Director James Marsh has boldly, maybe even sacrilegiously, given us a Hollywoodised biopic of Samuel Beckett. It starts with Beckett surreally escaping the Nobel ceremony to talk in private with a doppelganger confessor – a breezier, more worldly self in a rollneck sweater and jacket – and glumly wondering to whom in his life he should penitentially give the prize money, a guilt list which ushers in the flashbacks.

It isn’t hard to imagine what the man himself would have said about this movie, but though a little hammy, it is well acted and tells the story with verve, tackling the paradox of Beckett’s bleak fictional universe of stymied inaction and his dramatic real life of service in the French resistance and romantic intrigue. There’s a very thoughtful,...

In a genre not traditionally given to brevity, James Marsh’s literary biopic “Dance First” at least has that on its side: In 100 minutes, it races through the key events and alliances in the life of Irish author and dramatist Samuel Beckett, even finding time for some metaphysical musings alongside the cradle-to-grave checklist. But Beckett’s characteristic terseness — or radical “lessness,” to borrow a title from one of his stories — isn’t a feature of this creditable but ponderous film, which ultimately achieves its efficient runtime by skirting any meaningful engagement with Beckett’s work and literary legacy. What’s left is an anatomy of his unhappiness via a procession of stymied or soured relationships: shot with grace, acted with intelligence, but short on Beckettian daring or wit.

It’s another biopic from Marsh, following 2014’s popular “The Theory of Everything” and 2017’s less-seen “The Mercy,” that resists bringing his...

The actor talks about his new movie Dance First, in which he plays the Irish dramatist, the time he shared a drink with Richard Burton and why he had to leave Los Angeles

In 1969, Samuel Beckett and his wife learned that he had won the Nobel prize in literature in a telegram from his publisher. “Dear Sam and Suzanne,” it read. “In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel prize. I advise you to go into hiding.” Both were notoriously celebrity averse. Suzanne described it as a “catastrophe”. Beckett declined to give a Nobel lecture, and refused to talk when a Swedish film crew tracked him down to a hotel room in Tunisia, leaving them with a surreal mute interview.

Into this temporal void, a new psychological biopic has poured a monumental reckoning, in which the 63-year-old playwright scrambles out of the Nobel ceremony to find himself in a rough-hewn underworld.

European pay TV platform Sky has released the trailer for Sky Original film “Dance First,” ahead of its world premiere at San Sebastian Film Festival on Sept. 30. Film Constellation is handling international sales on the film.

The film is directed by BAFTA and Academy Award winner James Marsh (“The Theory of Everything”) and written by BAFTA winner Neil Forsyth (“Guilt”). “Dance First” will be released in movie theaters in the U.K. and Ireland in November, on Sky Cinema in those countries in December and on Sky Arts and Freeview next year.

In “Dance First,” Golden Globe winner Gabriel Byrne (“The Usual Suspects”) plays Samuel Beckett with young Beckett played by Fionn O’Shea (“Normal People”) in a sweeping account of the life of this 20th century literary icon. Parisian bon vivant, World War II resistance fighter, Nobel Prize-winning playwright, philandering husband and recluse, Beckett lived a life of many parts.