About The Book

From the mid-1960s, Samuel Beckett himself directed all his major plays in Berlin, Paris, and London. For most of these productions he meticulously prepared notebooks for his personal use.

The theatrical notebooks of Beckett that are reproduced in facsimile here offer a remarkable record of his own involvement with the staging of his texts. They present his solutions to practical problems of staging but also provide a unique insight into how he envisaged his own plays. With additional information taken from Beckett’s own annotated and corrected copies of the plays, the editors of the Theatrical Notebooks have been able to constitute a revised text for each of the plays. These new texts incorporate the playwright’s many changes, corrections, additions and cuts.

This volume completes the publication of this series of Beckett’s Theatrical Notebooks. The other volumes in this series have covered Waiting for Godot, edited by Douglas McMillan and James Knowlson; Endgame, edited by S.E. Gontarski; and Krapp’s Last Tape, edited by James Knowlson. The plays covered in this final installment are Play, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Footfalls, That Time and What Where. To these ‘shorter plays’ Samuel Beckett devoted the same care and attention to the details of textual revision and stagecraft as he did to his longer works, and the editors have brought the same attention to these works as they did to the earlier volumes in this series.

Praise

“The theatrical notebooks for the shorter plays, all of which were created in the period of Beckett’s active career as a director, reveal not the rigidity of an autocrat but the fluidity and flexibility of a true man of the theater at home with the inescapable contingency of an art form in which circumstances always alter cases. . . . [T]hey show, in an appropriately Beckettian gesture, that finality is a cruel illusion because the Godot of a truly achieved text never arrives.” —The New York Review of Books

“A gold mine for Beckett fans who wish to dig for anecdotes, incidents, allusions, and analogies that appear throughout almost everything he wrote . . . Grove is to be commended for the care lavished on the design of these volumes, for they are physically as handsome as their content is comprehensive.” —Deirdre Blair, Newsday