Collected Shorter Plays

Samuel Beckett, the great minimalist master and winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, has produced some of his most widely praised work for the stage in the form of the shorter play. This complete and definitive collection of twenty-five plays and “playlets” includes Beckett’s celebrated Krapp’s Last Tape, Embers, Cascando, Play, Eh Joe, and Footfalls, as well as his mimes, all his radio and television plays, his screenplay for Film, his adaptiation of Robert Pinget’s The Old Tune, and the more recent Catastrophe, What Where, Quad, and Night and Dreams.

“Beckett reduces life, perception, and writing to barest minimums: a few dimly seen, struggling torsos; a hopeless intelligence compulsively seeking to come to terms, in rudimentary yet endlessly varied language, with the human condition they represent. Within these extraordinary limitations, Beckett’s verbal ability nonetheless generates great intensity.” – Library Journal

“Beckett stalks after men on their way out… His plays (Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape) and novels (Molloy, Murphy) are metaphors for modern man’s spiritual bafflement… In spite of the hits of movement… all is really paralytic stasis – except for the voices, the indomitable voices.” – Time