The Theatrical Notebooks Of Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot follows Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape in this highly praised series of Beckett's notebooks, which show for the first time the extensive revisions made by Beckett during revivals of the play. This volume is in part a facsimile, with transcription and commentary, of the notebook kept by Beckett for Berlin's Schiller-Theater production in 1975. It contains a full set of directorial notes, and discloses, section by section, a total system that works by repetition and analogy, musical rhythm and echo, establishing subtle patterns of sound, movement and gestures.

Vol III of the four-volume series reproducing Beckett's theatrical notebooks in facsimile - now in affordable paperback edition.

"[Beckett's] specifications are preserved in the remarkable series of notebooks . . . now completed by S. E. Gontarski's exemplary edition of Beckett's ledgers for productions of his short late plays."--New York Review of Books

"The publication of Samuel Beckett's Theatrical Notebooks . . . is a major event which casts fascinating light on the thought processes of a great writer."--Review of English Studies 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. Beckett directed Krapp's Last Tape on four separate occasions: this volume offers a facsimile of his 1969 Schiller Theater notebook, which contains some of the most explicit analysis by the playwright of his own work ever revealed. The revised text incorporates many of the changes he made in the 1969 Schiller production, as well as subsequent changes in later productions. It reveals a flexibility and openness of approach often considered alien to Beckett's ways of working in the theatre.