#Samuel “Sam” Barclay

[iwtv-az-hours]

Samuel Barclay, playright, does one photoshoot and takes the crown for the coolest cuntiest vamp in the coven

(hits harder after we've seen his long suffering I-have-to-do-everything-around-here ratbox keeper sass)

pics from Gorrei on X

[vampire-dove]

"Oh, Armand could have physically overpowered Sam, he COULD have prevented it."

Maybe what he really feared was Sam being disappointed in him, have you ever considered that? The real threat was Sam shaking his head disapprovingly and saying he's not mad, just disappointed.

[toscrollperchancetomeme]

“The pen is mightier than the scythe.”

- Samuel Barclay Beckett, probably

[wizardpink]

Reblog for larger sample size pls.

[what-shitfuckery-is-this-ew]

stupidest thing i came up with (ACTUALLY I’M NOT READING TOO MUCH INTO IT - IT’S CANON)

Sam is Samuel Beckett

they’re both playwrights who are extremely experimental in their fields

They both were around after WW2

Sam’s plays have an absurdist nature which show people being trapped and life being meaningless but you must keep living regardless and simply accept that everyone will betray you and you will remain trapped. Which are the points of all of Samuel Beckett’s plays

Also Sam wrote ‘Enduring for Guido’ which is just ‘Waiting for Godot’

[oracleofdiscord]

by the way, i have been watching iwtv (the tv show version) and there are a lot of wild moments in there but for i think that so far the wildest one was when i realized that the show seemed to be heavily implying that irish author and playwright samuel beckett, creator of waiting for godot, was a member of the theatre des vampires

[talamasca-amc]

My ideal Talamasca season:

episode 1: we learn about the bees

episode 2: samshid (the vampire Sam and Real Rashid) romcom coffee date bottle episode

episode 3: ???

episode 4: ???

episode 5: ???

episode 6: ???

[kutputli]

So this list is a bit tongue-in-cheek, which is absolutely fine, but I do want to point out that the creation of Sam Barclay as a character is a great example of the failure of Rolin and Co to create a coherent world. And it's because they are white writers.

See, the entire existance of Sam's character is a giant in-joke by (Western) theatre nerds - Sam is, in this universe, the beloved and iconic Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, and Waiting for Guido is the ur-draft of Waiting for Godot.

It's one of those har-har what if's that one jokes about in relation to a foundational theatre text that has been dissected and theorised for the past 50 years - oh suppose Vladimir and Estragon were vampires, that would explain the eternal waiting. Who better than a vampire to write a work of existential literature, eh?

But if you're going to say Sam wrote Waiting for Godot, then you need to address Lucky. (For those who are not familiar with the play - there are two characters called Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo enters the plays holding a rope which is around Lucky's neck. Lucky is explicitly, a slave who Pozzo is planning to sell. Lucky doesn't speak in the first act except to deliver one nonsensical monologue when commanded to 'think', and in the second act he is mute. Lucky is burdened with all of Pozzo's possessions and fetches and carries them, while Pozzo carries a whip.)

Now, when Waiting for Godot was first staged, in the French it was written in, in Paris, in 1953, all the actors were white. This has remained the case for the majority of the play's revivals. With two exceptions - as early as 1957, an all-Black cast did the first Broadway production of the play (if anyone can access the full article linked, I'd love a copy!), and in 1980, in apartheid South Africa, a 'multiracial' casting had Black Vladimir and Estragon, while both Pozzo and Lucky were played by white actors. This production went on an international tour, and was boycotted in the US by anti-apartheid protestors. Beckett himself had, in earlier years, been part of a colalition of playwrights that refused to give permission for their plays to be performed in segregated South African theatres.

Now, there is an interesting parallel one can make between the Black American protestors in Baltimore whose boycott of the production ultimately cancelled its performance, and the way non-white fans have been responding to IWTV itself. The white British director of the South African play, who denounced apartheid, felt that the protestors misunderstood the play's intentions with its multiracial cast. I myself, looking at the incident from the perspective of normalisation and BDS against Israel in the 2020s, feel much more sympathy for the protestors' position.

But those are thoughts for a larger essay. The simple point of this is - if any version of Waiting for Guido included a version of Lucky in it, then it is inconceivable that Louis and Claudia would have nothing to say about it. It is inconceivable that Sam the playwright would have written a play with slavery, and not have had a discussion about the implications of it, when he has a Brown director, and Black and Asian actors in the company. Those discussions could have gone in various directions, but they had to have happened, and there is no way such conversations could then be erased when it came to the way he wrote the lynching play.

Frankly, I find it telling that we do not get any conversations about the minstrel show nature of the Baby Lulu play - all we see is Louis's look of wary discomfort while watching it. I do not believe that Louis and Claudia would not have talked about it. I do not believe that Louis would not have talked about it with Armand. The fact that we are shown none of this, is because the white show writers are, like the white Sam they are writing, oblivious to what conversations happen between creative people of colour.

Further, the mind which wrote Waiting for Godot was the kind of mind that the avante-guarde admiring, abstract art appreciating Louis would have enjoyed talking to. Clearly, Samuel Barclay is not the intellectual equal of Samuel Beckett - both the absence of any such conversations, as well as the texts of the other plays he has written shows us this.

But then why have Waiting for Guido at all?

It's a trivial, cheap joke, but what it does is show us that Rolin sees no functional difference between the two Sams. Barclay COULD have been Beckett, because to him there is no fundamental moral distinction between the two. This is one of the facts of liberal white people who are so fixated on racism being only a thing that evil right wing fundamentalist people do - they cannot see the difference between themselves and another white person who may be more clued in to racial violences, because none of it registers as racial violence in the first place.

I have no idea how racist or not Samuel Beckett was in real life, of course. If Louis and Claudia had interrogated the politics of making Lucky a slave in Beckett's most famous play, that would have been a rather brilliant way in which the race-bent characters of IWTV add new richness to the source material. It could even have been a commentary on the merits and failures of absurdist art that is on the surface, apolitical. They could have then drawn a through line to explain why he went on to write the lynching play.

But we get none of that because Rolin and Co do not realise that they have written a lynching play.

And THAT is why I hate the character. You can add that reason to the list.

Joining in on Sam Barclay haterism. The list of things this man needs to pay for:

He wrote a racist play that killed Claudia (this should be enough reason for all of us to hate him and want to kill him)

He also wrote the Baby Lou Lou play so we need to kill him for that too

His plays, when they are not racist, are just plain bad. Wtf was that "Enduring for Guido" shit anyway?

He wrote a racist play that killed Claudia

He has ugly hair and doesn't do anything about it, despite clearly having the money to.

Says shit like "Its an honor to work in the company". Sucking up to fucking Armand of all people? Come on!

He wrote a racist play that killed Claudia

He works for the Telemasca (i don't know if I spelled that right and i don't care), which I have decided is a really boring and sloppy plot point so he needs to die for that too

HE WROTE A RACIST PLAY THAT KILLED CLAUDIA

[thebrokenpapergirl]

I have been on the "Fuck the Coven" train from the beginning, because I knew what was coming. This show, however, has made it really hard to hold on to that feeling though.

(I do still want to watch them all burn.)

Them having Sam Barclay as a stand in for Samuel Beckett and the play as a vampiric "Waiting For Godot"... Santiago just flawlessly performing direct quotes from the IWTV book.

These writers are fucking me up.

See, now, I have to wonder how many loved ones has each member of the coven watch be mercilessly executed? How many of them have lost a Claudia, a Louis or a Madeleine? How many times did they have to grin and bear it as Armand enforced the laws and made them watch?

Santiago is a power-hungry, vindictive, little bitch (affectionate). His actions make sense, in regards to how he has been presented. The rest of the coven, not so much. Eglee, Sam, Estelle they are the softest ones, yet they are following Santiago's lead, because they too, I bet, have lost people they loved.

I wonder how many of them were as torturously punished, as Claudia was, for minor infractions. How many times? How often? Were they even allowed to mourn the people they lost or would they be punished for it?

For all the ways in which the Théâtre Des Vampires is different from the Children of Darkness the foundation is still the same. The Laws are to be upheld, with no exceptions. Then Armand starts making all kinds of exceptions for Louis. I can't really fault the coven for wanting to bring them to "justice", when their own pleas for the ones they loved fell on deaf ears.

[iwtv-az-hours]

And when they get THIS GUY in the documentary??

And when there's a Vampire Lestat ft. DJ Vampire Sam colab to retell their version of the trial??

[vampire-dove]

"Armand could have physically overpowered Sam because-"

Okay well maybe it's like where the adult lions will pretend the lion cubs are actually hurting them so they'll continue hunting

Them fr

[xxgothchatonxx]

A vampire named Sam Barclay, implied to be real-life playwright Samuel Beckett, becoming a Daft Punk-esque DJ in modern times is still nowhere near the top 10 list of batshit crazy things that Anne Rice wrote in her books, but I appreciate the attempt, Rolin and co. ;)

[wizardpink]

The Vampire Sam, Talamasca double agent:

[jaggedjot]

When naming the members of the Théâtre des Vampires, Armand introduces Louis and Claudia to their “playwright in residence”, one Samuel Barclay (“Sam. Call me Sam.”). This is almost certainly a reference to Samuel Barclay Beckett, the famous modernist writer, theatre director and playwright. The style of theatre that Beckett was instrumental in creating, the so-called Theatre of the Absurd, with its focus on existentialism and tragicomic tones, shares some notable characteristics with the plays shown at the Théâtre des Vampires; Louis’ complaint that “They were weird! And always ended in death or some kind of cruel, barely motivated violence.” feels affectionately pointed. Beckett’s most famous work, Waiting for Godot, has also been confirmed by a reviewer to appear in the show (“Santiago fuming about the lack of action in a vampiric version of Waiting for Godot”). The choice of name and the inclusion of a play that was written during this period of Louis and Armand’s lives (“The Paris Albums, 1946-1949.”) but did not premiere until 1953, could suggest that Sam is meant to be the man himself. 

This is not the first time the show has played with the idea that a famous writer may have been a vampire, however, unlike Emily Dickinson, Beckett was alive and working in Paris until his death in 1989. Considering the ending of the show’s source material, it seems unlikely that Sam will live that long unless he independently parts ways with the Théâtre des Vampires. It is also notable that, if intended to be a cameo, Sam has been quite underplayed compared to historical figures like Jelly Roll Morton and Jean-Paul Sartre. Though the supposed playwright for the company, Sam is shown selling tickets for the performance and collecting laundry rather than, say, giving notes on that night’s performance. Sam is presented as apart from the other members of the coven; absent during their prank on Louis and Claudia, not joining in the ensuing greetings, and leaving during the introductions. This framing of the character suggests that he is therefore not intended to be the real Beckett. Perhaps then the name was chosen by Sam himself in an attempt to emulate a writer he admires. Perhaps it is meant to further emphasise the strangeness of the supposed playwright for the company having the least interaction with its members, while only being shown to perform menial tasks. Or perhaps this is simply a reference made by a team of writers with backgrounds in theatre.

[lestatdelioncoeur]

Samuel Barclay Beckett

I've seen suggestions that Sam the Playwright in Interview with the Vampire (AMC) may be Samuel Beckett. They do also share the name Barclay 🤔 and keen observations on rats...

Essay here ~

[bleachersgirl]

sam???? the vampire sam??? samuel barclay beckett????