Shorter Plays: Theatrical Notebooks

From the mid-1960s, Samuel Beckett himself directed all his major plays in Berlin, Paris, or 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 are translated and annotated and thus offer a remarkable record of his own involvement with the staging of his texts. They present his solutions to practical problems but also provide a unique insight into the ways he envisaged his plays. With additional information taken from Beckett’s own annotated and corrected copies, the editors have been able to constitute a new revised text for each of the major plays.

The Shorter Plays completes the publication of this series of notebooks, the plays in question being Play, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Footfalls, That Time, What Where, and Not I. To these “shorter plays” Beckett devoted the same care and attention to the details of textual revision and stagecraft as he did to the longer works. This book contains revised texts prepared on the same editorial basis as before and provides a continuing revelation of the playwright’s approach to the staging of his work.

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