Endgame: Production Notebooks

Packed with wonderful details illustrating Beckett’s literary and dramatic brilliance and providing fascinating interpretive aids to these important plays. –David E. Liss

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.

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 these major plays.

Beckett directed two separate productions of Endgame, once with the Schiller Theater Company in Berlin in 1967, and again with the San Quentin Drama Workshop in 1980. Beckett’s revisions for both maintain a consistency that makes a ‘corrected’ (Beckett’s word) text not only possible but desirable, a reflection of the substantial amount of thinking and theatrical testing the work has undergone since its publication. No previous edition includes the complete production-generated changes. This volume includes, moreover, the ‘final’ text for Endgame revised and approved by Samuel Beckett.