Janusz Pyda OP: Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot quickly, in less than four months. Endgame, though less than half the length, took him much longer: about three years (1954– 56). The meandering paths of the creative process are mysterious and usually remain so. But the author's own attitude to the finished work need not be a mystery, and in the case of Endgame it is not. We know that Beckett considered this play, so long in the making, as his best, or at least as coming closest to his ideal of what a play should be. What was that ideal? And what did Beckett mean by an ideal play?

Antoni Libera: Beckett seldom talked about his aesthetic or poetic ideals. The little we know about his views on the subject comes from his essays on other authors, mainly Joyce and Proust, and from his letters and brief remarks or instructions to various directors and actors with whom he worked on the staging of his plays. They are generally terse and moreover tend to be elliptical or metaphorical. Nevertheless, they can, taken together with a careful analysis of this work, give some insight into the basic elements of his artistic credo.

The most important of these, in my view, is what Beckett (in an early essay on Joyce) called ‘direct expression’, by which he had in mind a diverse collection of literary techniques to express meaning through form rather than content alone – in such a way that, in his own words in that very early essay, ‘form and content are inseparable’. The effect is to heighten the immediacy and reinforce the meaning of what is being expressed.