The Theatrical Notebooks Of Samuel Beckett The Shorter Plays

"[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

Shorter Plays follows Waiting for Godot, 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 his plays and presents the complete and definitive texts for Play, Footfalls, Come and Go, What Where, That Time, Eh Joe, and Not I. 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. Beckett's theatrical notebooks, which are reproduced in facsimile here, offer a remarkable record of his involvement with the staging of his texts. They present his solutions to the practical problems of staging and also provide a unique insight into the way he envisaged his own plays. With additional information taken from Beckett's annotated and corrected copies of the plays, and using his experience as a director and scholar, S. E. Gontarski has been able to constitute a revised text for each of the plays, incorporating Beckett's many changes, corrections, additions, and cuts.

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.

Collects over twenty short plays published by the Nobel Prize winning playwright Samuel Beckett. Includes his mimes, radio and television plays, screenplay, and adaptations of other's works.