John Fletcher - About Beckett. The Playwright and the Work

When Samuel Beckett died, in December 1989, the event was overshadowed by the momentous happenings in Romania that were occurring at the same time. As part of the collapse of Communism that was sweeping through the whole of Eastern Europe, the people of that country overthrew their tyrants, the Ceauescu family; the hated dictator and his wife were summarily tried and executed. Mr Ceauescus obituary appeared in TheTimes on the same day as Becketts 27 December; but even then it was clear whose death held significance: the article about the dramatist (which I had been asked to write) took up the top half of the page, and the politicians was relegated to the space beneath it.

For, as history teaches us, kings, princes and other potentates come and go, but artists live for ever. Who would now remember the name of the Archbishop of Salzburg for whom Mozart worked in the 1770s if the great composer had not fallen out with him? How much would we know or care about the little princesses who lived at the Spanish court in the 1650s if the great painter Velasquez had not been commissioned to do their portraits? So, long after the Ceauescus have been relegated to a footnote in the history books, Becketts plays will still be performed around the world and studied in schools and universities everywhere. Even as I write, Channel 4 is screening specially made television versions of the complete dramatic works, and this means, of course, that they will reach a mass audience for the first time.

This book aims to explain why Becketts work is so significant and why it will last. Already, when he died at the age of eighty-three, he was seen as one of the truly great literary figures of the twentieth century; his writings for the theatre in particular had made him famous, and the plays that I shall be focusing on here WaitingforGodot,Endgame,KrappsLastTape,HappyDays,Play and NotI had become part of the standard repertoire in theatres all over the world. These and his novels were already considered classics of modern literature and as naturally a part of an educated persons experience as the works of Proust or Kafka or James Joyce. I put him among the top writers: Proust, Joyce, Kafka and Beckett, the top four of the century, declared lifelong friend Georges Pelorson, and John Calder, another close associate, agreed, adding that because Beckett encapsulated the other three in his own work and did it so brilliantly, he will ultimately be seen as the greatest of the twentieth-century writers (