Plays & Poetry

Krapp's Last Tape was first performed by Patrick Magee at the Royal Court Theatre in October 1958, and described as 'a solo, if that is the word, for one voice and two organs: one human, one mechanical. Box - [Pause.] - three, spool - [Pause.] - five.

Happy Days was written in 1960 and first produced in London at the Royal Court Theatre in November 1962. WINNIE: [ . .] Well anyway - this man Shower - or Cooker - no matter - and the woman - hand in hand - in the other hands bags - kind of big brown grips - standing there gaping at me [...] - What's she doing?

His first published work of fiction (1934), More Pricks Than Kicks is a set of ten interlocked stories, set in Dublin and involving their adrift hero Belacqua in a series of encounters, as woman after woman comes crashing through his solipsism. More Pricks contains in embryo the centrifugal world of Beckett's men and women.

'Malone', writes Malone, 'is what I am called now.' On his deathbed, and wiling away the time with stories, the octogenarian Malone's account of his condition is intermittent and contradictory, shifting with the vagaries of the passing days: without mellowness, without elegiacs;

Samuel Beckett directed Krapp's Last Tape on four separate occasions: this volume offers a facsimile of his 1969 Schiller-Theater notebook. Professor Knowlson writes that in these notes 'we see Beckett simplifying, shaping and refining, as he works towards a realization of the play that will function well dramatically.

This volume completes the publication of this series of notebooks, the plays in question being Play, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Footfalls, That Time and What Where.

Famously described by the Irish critic Vivien Mercier as a play in which 'nothing happens, twice', "En attendant Godot" was first performed at the Theatre de Babylone in Paris in 1953. It was translated into English by Samuel Beckett, and opened at the Arts Theatre in London in 1955.

'Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful.' This line was adopted by Jean Anouilh, to characterize the first production of "Waiting For Godot" at the Theatre de Babylone, in 1953. Anybody acquinted with Beckett's masterly black comedy would not question the recognition of this twentieth-century literature classic.

We find in Beckett's masterful, exquisite prose, the familiar themes from his earlier works here expressed in the anguished murmurings of the solitary human consciousness.

Murphy's friends and familiars are simulacra of Murphy, fragmented and incomplete. The combination of particularity and absurdity gives Murphy's world its painful definition, but the sheer comic energy of Beckett's prose releases characters and readers alike into exuberance.