This volume of the BDMP analyses the genesis of En attendant Godot. Samuel Beckett wrote his most famous play between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949, as a relaxation from the ‘awful prose’ of the trilogy he was writing at the time, and it soon became a worldwide success after its Paris premiere at the Théâtre de Babylone in January 1953. Having little to no experience in the theatre, Beckett significantly revised the text in rehearsal and in the English translation that followed in ...

This volume of the BDMP analyses the genesis of Fin de partie / Endgame. Described by Samuel Beckett as more ‘inhuman’ than Waiting for Godot and as possessing an ability to ‘claw’, it was his favourite among all his plays and yet also a work the genesis of which was particularly arduous. It took Beckett many years to complete the French version, and about the translation process he complained in 1957: ‘What a losing battle it is always’. This book explores that genesis through an...