Beckett, Samuel

8vo (219 x 120mm.), FIRST BRITISH EDITION OF THE ENGLISH TEXT, PRESENTATION COPY INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR ("For | Alan Clodd | from | Samuel Beckett | Paris May 1971") on title page, with the small printed publisher's note tipped-in about the changes made to the text at the request of the Lord Chamberlain following the transfer of the play from the Arts Theatre to the Criterion Theatre, original ochre cloth lettered in crimson on the spine, dust-jacket, AN EXCEPTIONALLY FINE COPY

Federman & Fletcher 373.1

Condition is described in the main body of the cataloguing, when appropriate.
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A SUPERB INSCRIBED COPY OF THE GREAT DEFINING MODERNIST DRAMA OF THE POST-WAR ERA. The original French production opened in Paris in January 1953, with audiences so baffled by a play in which nothing seemed to happen that it became a "must-see" production. Beckett's English version premiered in London at the Arts Theatre Club in August 1955, transferring (with a few slight changes insisted upon by the Lord Chamberlain as indicated by the tipped-in publisher's note) to the Criterion Theatre in the West End in September. Harold Hobson and Kenneth Tynan, the two prominent and often opposing theatre critics of the day, were united in their acclaim: this was unique, ground-breaking drama. The rest is history, with the play establishing itself as the classic twentieth-century modernist play. One of the most extraordinary productions early on was that performed at the San Francisco Actor's Workshop for the inmates of the San Quentin penitentiary. The response was electric, with each prisoner instinctively comprehending what Vladimir and Estragon experience as they wait for an invisible authority to save them from their existence of entrapment.