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Portrait of Samuel Beckett

Literature · Playwrights

Samuel Beckett

1906–1989 · Irish

Theatre of the Absurd; modernism

Samuel Beckett, a Dubliner who settled in Paris and wrote in both French and English, transformed modern theatre with Waiting for Godot, in which two tramps wait for someone who never comes. His spare, bleakly comic plays and prose explore waiting, memory and the struggle to go on. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.

How to spot them

  • ▸Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot, with Pozzo and Lucky
  • ▸Characters in dustbins (Endgame), buried in a mound (Happy Days), or reduced to a mouth (Not I)
  • ▸'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' (Worstward Ho)
  • ▸Former assistant to James Joyce; wrote in French and translated himself
  • ▸The only Nobel laureate to appear in Wisden, for first-class cricket with Dublin University

Key works

Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot) (1953)

Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait by a tree for the mysterious Godot, who never arrives

Endgame (Fin de partie) (1957)

The blind Hamm, his servant Clov, and Hamm's parents Nagg and Nell in dustbins

Krapp's Last Tape (1958)

On his 69th birthday, Krapp listens to a tape-recording he made thirty years earlier

Happy Days (1961)

Winnie chatters cheerfully while buried up to her waist, and then her neck, in a mound of earth

Not I (1972)

A disembodied, spotlit Mouth pours out a torrent of words

Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (1951–1953)

His trilogy of novels, first written in French

Murphy (1938)

His first published novel, about an Irishman in London who likes to rock himself in a chair

Key ideas

  • Martin Esslin grouped him in the 'Theatre of the Absurd' (1961)
  • Stripping theatre down to its minimum: bare stages, few characters, silence and repetition
  • Vivian Mercier described Godot as a play in which nothing happens, twice
  • Wrote in French for its discipline, then translated his own work into English (and vice versa)

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born on 13 April 1906 (Good Friday) in Foxrock, near Dublin; died in Paris on 22 December 1989
  • •Studied at Trinity College Dublin and played two first-class cricket matches for Dublin University against Northamptonshire
  • •Assisted James Joyce in Paris in the late 1920s
  • •Was stabbed in a Paris street in 1938 by a pimp and survived
  • •Joined the French Resistance in the Second World War and was awarded the Croix de Guerre
  • •En attendant Godot premiered at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris in January 1953, directed by Roger Blin; Peter Hall directed the first English production in London in 1955
  • •Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969
  • •Breath (1969) lasts well under a minute and has no actors

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources