The theatrical notebooks of Samuel Beckett

very nearly wrote an honors thesis on this before i decided to take another path - fascinating play. i'll write a review someday

My first introduction to Beckett was Endgame, performing as Hamm in my early 20s. It's still difficult to read it without remembering the hours of rehearsal and the physical tics each word causes.

Endgame is, therefore, probably not my favourite work - that's Happy Days but it is, I think Beckett's best. Our intractable lives, the inevitability of death, run through with a black humour. A perfect one-act play.

Read in the tube from Heathrow airport home. Infuriating, frustrating, itchy. In a good way. I am not particularly sure whether Beckett is my thing, but I admire his work.

Beckett knows how to put a couple of banal words together and shift tectonic plates in your mind.

This is my first time actually reading the text, after seeing a stunning filmed version starring David Thewlis and Michael Gambon some years ago. It's as violently claustrophobic and funny as I remember. And I feel comforted by it this time. Endgame doesn't need some grand gesture or epiphany to send to its audience, it's content to just stare into the void and invite us to stare alongside it. Not behind it, though, that'd give it the shivers.