Happy days

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