Krapp's Last Tape: Theatrical Notebooks - (Beckett Production Notebooks) Annotated by Samuel Beckett (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"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.

Review Quotes

"What Knowlson has produced in this volume is the Gray's Anatomy of 'Krapp, ' and every serious practitioner, whether in the tutorial room or the rehearsal room, must consult it."--Irish Times

About the Author

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), one of the leading literary and dramatic figures of the twentieth century, was born in Foxrock, Ireland and attended Trinity University in Dublin. In 1928, he visited Paris for the first time and fell in with a number of avant-garde writers and artists, including James Joyce. In 1937, he settled in Paris permanently.

James Knowlson is the author or editor of ten previous books on Beckett's work, and the general editor of The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, as well as the founder of the Beckett Archive.