Samuel Beckett's resistance to self-refection, to a public metatext, to theorising his own theatre was legendary, and yet his personal letters and notebooks, his intimate, occasionally ‘uncautious’ conversations with directors and actors, were replete with just such reflections and revelations. While he told the critic Colin Duckworth in 1965, ‘I'd be quite incapable of writing a critical introduction to my work’ (Duckworth 1966: xxiv), his own musings – recorded in manuscripts and typescripts, in theatrical notebooks, in letters to directors, publishers, friends and confidants – constitute, collectively, just such critical insights.

The disparity suggests something of a multiplicity of voices, diction and contra-diction, a plural, at times a dialogic relation with his work. In one voice private discourse echoed public posture as it outlined a resistance to and incapacity for self-reflection. In a letter of 18 October 1954 to his American publisher, Barney Rosset, Beckett expressed a sense of diminished authority of authorship soon after translating Waiting for Godot. In a London meeting with Ralph Richardson, Beckett ‘told him that all I knew about Pozzo was in the text, that if I had known more I would have put it in the text, and that this was true also of the other characters’ (Letters 2 507).

The position bordered on the obsessive and Beckett restated it to his American director Alan Schneider nearly a decade and a half later, on 16 October 1972, looping back again to the Richardson incident. This time the offending ‘stars’ were the legendary American theatrical couple, Hume Cronin and Jessica Tandy, the play in question, Not I:

To Duckworth he termed that ‘stage entity’ merely ‘an object’: ‘I produce an object. What people make of it is not my concern’ (Duckworth 1966: xxiv).