SOURCE: Gontarski, S. E. “Staging Himself, or Beckett's Late Style in the Theatre.” Samuel Beckett Today 6 (1997): 87-97.

In the following essay, Gontarski appraises Beckett's reworking of his earlier plays and the changes they have undergone, paying particular attention to Play.

In the early 1960s the nature of Samuel Beckett's writing for the theatre changed profoundly as he increased his direct advisory role in productions of his work and as he finally began to take full charge of directing his own plays. The experiences of staging himself had a double effect, altering his writing of new plays and, as important, but almost wholly ignored in current criticism, offering Beckett the opportunity to rethink, re-write, and finally re-create previously published work. That revisionist impulse—characteristic of Beckett's creative process at least as early as the rewriting of Dream of Fair to Middling Women into several of the stories of More...