"A unique moral figure," I wrote of [Beckett] five years ago, "not a dreamer of rose gardens but a cultivator of what will grow in the wasteland, who can make us see the exhilarating design that thorns and yucca share with whatever will grow anywhere." It's 30 years—is that conceivable?—since he wrote "Godot," a play still perfectly vital, its eloquence spare then, still spare now, het positively garrulous by the standards he sets himself today. In the late months of his 72d year, he bends more and more effort on fewer and fewer words, still pursuing his impossible ambition of making silence sing. The most frequent stage direction in "Godot" was "Pause." Last year in "Footfalls," a play like a late Beethoven quartet, the most eloquent voice was that of a girl not speaking, simply pacing, pacing, very possibly a girl not there, since the last spills...