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.