Janusz Pyda OP: If we interpret Happy Days as a critique, ironic and elegiac in tone, of optimism and the philosophy of consolation, we might view Rough for Theatre II as a satire on pessimism. It is, at any rate, an ironic and grotesque take on the opposite attitude.

But before we start to analyse this one-act play, I have some questions about form. What is ‘rough for theatre’ supposed to signify as a title? Why did Beckett decide on such a formal label instead of an original title for this piece and its twin, Rough for Theatre I? And do these two short compositions have anything in common, apart from the fact that both are brief sketches?

Antoni Libera: Beckett wrote them both in French in the second half of the 1950s, under the working title Fragment de théâtre. In English he called them Roughs for Theatre. We know little of the circumstances of their composition except that they were written after Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape and that they were attempts to re-engage with the world and poetics of Godot. Both have a similar pair of protagonists, like Didi and Gogo. In Rough I these are two vagrants, one of them blind, the other crippled; in Rough II they are two officials, one embittered, sluggish and indifferent, the other enthusiastic, disciplined and full of drive. It's hard to say what Beckett had in mind when he sat down to write these miniature plays: whether they were intended to be one-act plays or something bigger, and whether they can be considered finished works or rough sketches. Judging by the way they both end, one could consider them finished rather than abandoned half-way through, although in both cases their conclusions seem to lack clarity and conviction, and give the impression of having been tacked on. It's possible that that is what they were: that 20 years later, after his Nobel prize, Beckett suddenly decided to go back and finish them. He published them in 1974 and 1976.

So the titles are working titles. They indicate that these were dramatic sketches, rough drafts with no clear character: neither full plays nor classic one-act plays but something in between, ideas partly worked out in draft and sketches to be performed on stage.