Beckett is coming to Berlin to direct Waiting for Godot. He is no stranger at the Schiller Theater: after Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, and Happy Days, this is his fourth visit as a director. He also took part in the rehearsals of Godot ten years ago, and it was then that he met the actors Bollman, Wigger, and Herm. Bollman and he had also worked together on Endgame.

Rehearsal conditions are ideal: from 28 December to 8 March, mornings only, mostly on stage. Everybody taking part in the production brings enormous sympathy and respect toward Beckett—to such an extent that this will be inevitably, though not obtrusively, reflected in the working process. But he is not only respected as an authority, as a competent interpreter of his own script; more than that the working relationship with him is characterized by caution, attention, concessions, and openness—criteria for attitudes to set free his own attitude. On this basis, everybody tries not to disturb, but to strengthen the tacit mutual trust and to do their job with the highest possible degree of understanding and appreciation toward Beckett.

Beckett began to write the short play Footfalls in Berlin on 2 March 1975, a little less than a week before the opening night of his now famous production of Warten auf Godot at the Schiller-Theater. The first manuscript draft consists of only two and a half pages. This includes most of the opening dialogue between the old mother and her daughter (who was called Mary in the first draft), together with an early version of the mother's monologue, which is very different from that printed in the published text. By autumn the Royal Court Theatre's plans for a Beckett seventieth birthday season for the coming April and May in London were well advanced. These plans included an evening of “shorts,” for which That Time was already written. With this in mind, Beckett returned to work on his earlier draft of a play written especially with the actress Billie Whitelaw in mind. On 1 October he added a “sequel” (called then an appendix) to what he had already written, recast the mother's speech later that month, and then worked almost continuously on the play in Paris until early November, when he felt sufficiently satisfied to announce that it was completed, although it was to be modified later in several minor respects in the course of the three productions Beckett has directed.

In his review of Dead Class, Bogdan Gieraczyński confidently wrote that “Dead Class is the most important and original Polish spectacle of the last decade. It is also one of the most famous, one which I believe will have a long and illustrious life abroad.” Shortly after its Polish premiere, Dead Class toured Holland, West Germany, France, Iran, Yugoslavia, Belgium, Italy, Australia, Venezuela, the USA, Switzerland and Mexico. It played in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Nancy, Belgrade, Milan, Syndey, Barcelona, Graz, Lyon, Lille, Stuttgart, Majorca, Caracas and New York City. In June, 1981, six years after its premiere, Dead Class was reported as having been performed 550 times worldwide. Altogether, in the 17 years of its travels, the spectacle played over 2000 times all over the world.

In the first week of the Edinburgh Festival, Dead Class won the Scotsman award for originality and high artistic value. Reviews were unanimously positive: “The visual impact of the performance is tremendous. […] it is quite simply agonizing. […] simply astounding” – wrote Fringe's Brian Barron. Gordon Parson of the Morning Star called the show “Outstanding.” An anonymous account of Cricot 2's visit to Edinburgh reveals the level of anticipation surrounding Kantor's show:

The above sentiment expressed by Robert Haupt in 1988 about the presence of British publishers in Australia and, by implication, overseas or imported texts in the local book trade, echoes other sentiments recorded decades earlier and equivalent complaints are heard today. Legally and commercially across the course of the twentieth century, British trading rights pertained to exclusive English-language rights throughout the former empire.2 Within this framework Australia was the largest export (or ‘run-on’)3 market for British books to 1959, valued at its peak to be worth £4,387,810 sterling in export turnover for British publishers;4 this value was a significant increase over Australia's estimated purchases of British books of £1.5 million sterling in 19485 and the second largest market for British books behind the United States after that time.6 During this period Australian booksellers, among whom the Australian firm Angus & Robertson doubled as publishers, were able to negotiate concessions from the peak organisation, the Publishers Association of Great Britain,7 prompting Hector MacQuarrie, managing director of Angus & Robertson's London office, to claim in 1949 that

As discussed in previous chapters, there was a two-fold rationale for Angus & Robertson to setup a London office. One goal was to secure British and American titles; the other was to sell Australian books in the United Kingdom. Bearing in mind that London was the centre of a massive English-language book trade that included Australia, Ferguson was concerned that authors would leave Angus & Robertson unless it offered a ‘reasonable chance of distribution in the big overseas English-speaking markets’. When new Angus & Robertson managing director Walter Burns announced in 1960 that ‘publishing in London was finished’, not surprisingly this galvanised opposition to his ‘Napoleonic’ management and merchandising principles (discussed further in the next chapter). Just a year earlier, Angus & Robertson's Sydney office had resigned from the Australian Booksellers Association over an attempted resolution that ‘no bookseller who was also a publisher could hold any executive office in the A.B.A.’ Given that Angus & Robertson doubled as publishers and booksellers and had staff on the committee, Ferguson dismissed the Australian Booksellers Association in the belief that it would lose most of its ‘bargaining power’ with British publishers following his company's resignation.

Robert Findlay notes that “Grotowski has been hailed by many of his contemporaries as the most significant twentieth-century theatrical figure since Stanislavsky.” Specifically, Findley points out Akropolis, “as a true ensemble work, […] set the style and tone for much of the avant-garde experimentation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, both in Europe and in North America.” Martin Gottfried adds that “Acropolis is an extraordinary kind of theatre utterly unlike anything that came before it.” Likewise, in his 1968 Paris review of the performance, Thomas Quinn Curtiss writes: “This Akropolis of Mr. Grotowski is an imposing achievement of the modern stage, a work that will have a wide and beneficial influence.” Considering the accolades that both the play and the director received throughout the years, how is it possible that Akropolis, a work of unquestionable international impact, escaped any serious dramaturgical inquiry in the countries that embraced it and gave it its reputation? The esteem in which Grotowski was held by American scholars and theatre practitioners – despite the fact that, as Findlay points out, “his performances have been in Polish, a minor European language spoken and understood outside Poland by almost no one except emigres”– raises pressing questions about how the meaning and context of theatrical works are formed and transformed cross-culturally. How do critics and theatre scholars tackle their lack of language or cultural context when assessing the value and impact of international theatre pieces?

Rockaby, which had its world premiere performance in Buffalo, New York, on 8 April 1981, continues Beckett's recent preoccupation with a small-scale play written specifically for a prerecorded voice in conflict with live stage action. A strange mixture of the carefully controlled and the spontaneous, the drama, whose sole protagonist is a woman dressed in black and whose only scenery is a rocking chair, restricts its subject matter and directs our attention instead to the formal elements of the play as performance. Light, sound, movement, and action therefore must be understood within the context established by this deliberately circumscribed stage space, an acting area in which a single image is expressed, explored, and advanced. Clear, articulate, definite, and precise, the visual impact becomes progressively haunting in its lonely simplicity. Simultaneously remote yet urgent in its personal appeal, a human shape is transfixed by the strong and pitiless light of a cold lunar glare. Much is made out of almost nothing.

What Rockaby gives up in breadth it makes up in fineness. The closely valued harmonics in the interplay of all that is visual and verbal, the use of light, the rocking of a chair that is controlled mechanically, the function of movement to emotionalize meaning, and the incorporation of electronics in the form of a magnetic recording tape are developed tactfully and richly.

Samuel Beckett's new piece of short fiction is both familiar ground and, as its title suggests, a progression into new territory. Beginning with Belacqua Shua in More Pricks than Kicks, a series of overlapping Beckett protagonists have been struggling “on” toward unattainable relief from compulsion. They are either compelled from without to push “on” in a physical journey in quest, flight from pursuers, or movement in some abstract pattern. Or else they are compelled from within to “say on” (page 7) until some story is completed or there are no more words to use up.

Each new Beckett character in a new situation is also another stage in an apparently endless progression. Like one of these characters, Beckett seems compelled to present all of the possible situations. Together, the succession of protagonists is his attempt to exhaust his own mind. Worstward Ho is thus, as the narrator informs us, the “latest state” (page 46) in the process of “all gnawing to be naught. Never to be naught” (page 46).

An unidentified speaker ruminates to himself. Slowly out of the verbiage a vision emerges of narrator represented by a skull “oozing” words out of one black hole.

Born in 1915 in Wielopole Skrzyńskie, a small Polish-Jewish town in Southern Poland, Tadeusz Kantor grew up in a world dominated by both Christian and Jewish mysticism. Today, in the house where Kantor was born, there is a small museum, with souvenirs from his childhood and props and drawings from his spectacles. During his childhood, every aspect of daily village existence, from birth to death, had religious ramifications that were imminently embedded within the entire sociocultural context of each congregation. The two worlds, Kantor remembers, “lived in an agreeable symbiosis,” each cultivating its own traditions. The synagogue and the church stood on opposite sides of the city; Jewish and Christian ceremonies were performed parallel to each other. Ruled by the cycles of their religious rituals, each community was oriented more towards sacred than earthly values. As Kantor reminisces, “beyond its everyday life, the little town was turned towards eternity.” The coexistence and intermingling of the two cultures, and the spiritually charged atmosphere of timelessness and mysticism they evoked, were resurrected time after time in all of Kantor's spectacles. The town – constructed like a theatrical space in which the predictable intertwined with the accidental, the grotesque with the profound, the sacred with the profane – became the framework for the juxtapositions Kantor investigated over years of theatrical experiments. Built around the everlasting oppositions between life and death, form and matter, illusion and reality, consciousness and object, Kantor's “religious dramas” attempt to simultaneously reconcile these poles and show the impossibility of doing so.

Kantor's second literary inspiration was Bruno Schulz, a Polish-Jewish writer of the interwar period, widely regarded as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation. His collection of short stories, Cinnamon Shops (published in English as The Street of Crocodiles), was first published in 1934 in Warsaw. A second collection, titled Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, was published three years later, and included a series of illustrations that Schulz created especially for the book. A third collection, The Messiah, was lost during World War II. A collection of Schulz's personal letters, titled Book of Letters, has only recently been published. Born in 1892 in Drohobycz, a small, predominantly Jewish town located near Lvov, Schulz spent most of his life in his hometown, rarely leaving. He considered Drohobycz a microcosm of the modern world, a place where small and grand passions play out against the canvas of drudgery-filled, day-to-day existence. He drew his inspiration from the town's daily rhythms, proving himself to be an accurate observer of its life and inhabitants. During World War II, Schulz's visual talents earned him protection from a Gestapo officer, Felix Landau, who was stationed in Drohobych and who admired Schulz's drawings. Schulz was eventually shot by another Gestapo officer as payback for Schulz's protector shooting the officer's own “personal Jew,” a dentist. The bitter irony of Schulz's own death has never been lost; in fact, it has become a part of his legend, always present in the consciousness of those who come to admire his writing.

In discussing Beckett's works it is frequently useful to divide his career into three segments: the early period of exploration in English extending from pieces like “Assumption” and “A Case in a Thousand” to Watt (up to 1944), the middle period of French prose and the narrator-narrated beginning with Mercier and Camier and including How It Is (1946–60), and the later period of the enigmatic short pieces from “Imagination Dead Imagine” through the present (1965–). Useful as it otherwise may be, however, a tripartite division of the Beckettian canon obscures an important shift in the conceptual framework of Beckett's pieces. How It Is does not present simply a continuation of the techniques and themes developed in the trilogy. Instead the book marks a turning point in Samuel Beckett's career from an exploration of the limitations of the human mind and an emphasis upon definitions of the self, to an identification of the self with the voice and an acceptance, if not a celebration, of the life of the imagination. Indeed, How It Is enables Beckett to surmount the attitude of disintegration L'Innommable once caused in him by directing attention not to the divorce of the mind from the external world, but rather to the internal worlds the mind creates.

Whatever might be said about the national and cultural significance of the circulation of printed products, witnesses for the 1930 Tariff Board Inquiry were essentially engaged in a debate about the proper economic balance between home and overseas (imported) books. At stake from their perspective as printers, booksellers and publishers was the best strategy for securing interest in locally manufactured products within a book trade dominated by international publishers whose business practices often enriched the sale of overseas books at the expense of Australian-made books. One solution, put forward by James Howard Catts, was the call for a tariff or a duty that would severely limit the importation of books into Australia. But, as other witnesses of the inquiry revealed, to restrict overseas books by way of an economic penalty at the border posed some challenges for the Australian book trade that could not be easily resolved.

Beckett took part in the June 1940 exodus from Paris before the advance of the invading German army, and arrived in Vichy later that summer. It was there that he saw Joyce for the last time. The hotel in which he and the Joyce family were staying was, like most of the hotels, being evacuated, and he had to “get on, clear out.” Joyce and his family went to a little town near Vichy where Madame Jolas (of Transition fame) had a school. Joyce stayed there until December, when he obtained a permit to go to Switzerland. Beckett started south on foot from Vichy. On the way he managed to board a train that went as far as Toulouse. There he avoided the refugee center, slept out on benches, and finally got a bus west as far as Cahors, where it was “all out” in the pouring rain. Famished, exhausted, he finally managed to find a spot on the floor of a shop dealing in religious articles, where he spent the night. Hiding in a truck the next day he succeeded in getting out of Cahors and traveling as far as Arcachon, where he was able to locate Mary Reynolds, an American he had known in Paris.

Murphy is a novel of great beauty and complexity. These qualities are interrelated: As the work's diverse elements coalesce into a unified pattern, its beauty is revealed. Like More Pricks than Kicks, Murphy contains many recurring elements that are used to illuminate an underlying level of meaning. One's understanding of the work changes after successive readings: Trivial details gain significance, unambiguous statements become mysterious, latent themes emerge. Little of this is immediately apparent, however. In the time since 1938, when Murphy first appeared, it has been considered an undemanding work. Beckett himself once said to an interviewer, “It's my easiest book, I guess.” But the qualifying phrase is important: if Murphy is easier than other works, it is still not an easy book. Nor does Beckett truly believe that it is. In a letter to a friend he called it “slightly obscure” and said that the narrative was “hard to follow.”

The apparent simplicity of the novel can be a stumbling block for the unwary reader, or—to use Beckett's term—“gentle skimmer.” Unless one is very attentive, the novel's repetitive devices will probably be overlooked.

The Hand that Signed the Agreement

On the back of stronger sales in 1952, January would not be a propitious start to 1953 for the London office. Due to a fire which turned the old storeroom into a ‘horrid cavern’ and the backyard into a ‘ghastly heap of half burnt and soaking books’, the present attempts to break into Britain's ‘fiercely contested market’ with Angus & Robertson's titles was set back by £4,888 in damaged stock. Although the branch had over-reached its 1952 target of £12,000 by a thousand pounds sterling, the first quarter of 1953 would be very quiet commercially while the office waited for resupplies from Sydney.

The ethical and formal relationships between survivors and those who had not undergone such experiences became the basis for the “detailed investigations of the actor-audience relationship.” Grotowski wrote that, in Akropolis, he consciously (and counterintuitively) mixed the actors with the spectators. As Walter Kerr put it: “He has put the audience and the actors together in an extraordinarily close relationship without insisting upon that false intimacy, that overbearing directness of contact, that marks and mars the work, say, of the Living Theatre.” The goal was for the spectators to remain distant, like witnesses, but also to immerse them in the theatrical reality. In an interview, Grotowski said: “In Akropolis the audience represents the living watching the ‘dead’ inmates in the nightmare dreams. Ultimately the audience must give its own answer. Will mankind retrieve its past dreams? Can it survive the greatest brutality of the century? Is there hope?” Or as Flaszen put it: