No Samuel Beckett play is set in stone

It must have been shortly after my first performance of Not I in London in 2005 when Matthew Evans, the former chairman of Faber, handed me a volume, published in 1992, of The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett.

He told me that the series was no longer in print and therefore difficult to get hold of, but he dearly wanted me to have this copy. It was volume 3 — Krapp’s Last Tape, one of the two of the series (the other being Endgame) that Beckett himself had approved and personally overseen the edits for. Doing so had prompted Beckett to make further adjustments to the play text, despite it having been published more than 20 years earlier — such was his own artistic process of obsessively tinkering with and amending his work.

In fact if there is only one reason to turn to these particular notebooks it is to witness an artist who was in constant transition — who realised that, unlike the static, finite nature of prose text, theatrical work was, and always is, a changeable art form.

But the personality of a pulsating medium in a constant evolutionary process is unfortunately incongruous with the publishing business. So if you were looking to discover the final text of any given Beckett play following his death, you would have done well to arm yourself with the most up-to-date amendments found in these notebooks — if you could afford it.

Today, if you are lucky, you can purchase the same hardback copy of Krapp’s Last Tape for anywhere between £600 and £1,000 on eBay. So until Faber’s paperback republication of the series, an actor would have had to cough up more than an entire week’s salary to access the nearest version possible to any ‘complete’ working text.