Shorter Plays: Theatrical Notebooks - (Beckett Production Notebooks) Annotated by Samuel Beckett (Paperback)

About the Book

"[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

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Professor Knowlson and his colleagues should be congratulated on the beauty and self-effacement of the presentation."--Daily Telegraph

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.

S. E. Gontarski, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University, specializes in twentieth-century Irish Studies, in British, U.S., and European Modernism, and in performance theory. He has been a resident Fellow at the Djerassi Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio, The Bogliasco Foundation, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. He has been awarded four National Endowment for the Humanities research grants, has twice been awarded Fulbright Professorships, has been Guest Editor of the following: American Book Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Modern Fiction Studies, and most recently Drammaturgia.