Samuel Beckett's working relationship with the Royal Court Theatre, where some of his most stunning English-language productions were staged and where his most protracted aesthetic and cultural battles were fought, was unprecedented in British theatre history. But the Royal Court meant for Beckett less a building, a playhouse, a Society, a stage, than a collection of people, especially those associated with the English Stage Company, particularly George Devine and Jocelyn Herbert. At the Royal Court, particularly during the Devine years, Beckett was playwright and shadow director and so simultaneously both tutor and tutee, master and apprentice, and, as Martin Esslin has noted, ‘In fact the Royal Court was the home of Beckett’ (Doty 1990: 208). In 1956 the English Stage Company declared itself ‘A Writers Theatre’, and, at a conference in 1981, Esslin went on to laud such emphasis as the Royal Court maintained: ‘this is a theatre that really does have respect for the writers and doesn't go in for one of the great diseases of the theatre of our period, namely, the so called director's theatre where the director has some concept which he imposes and thinks the script is little more than raw material’ (Doty 1990: 205). Over his career in the theatre Beckett would be extraordinarily fortunate to find producers and directors who ‘have respect for the writer’: Roger Blin in Paris, Alan Schneider in the United States, and, perhaps chief among them, George Devine in the UK.

Devine had been interested in Samuel Beckett's work at least since he developed the English Stage Company at the Royal Court in 1957. Almost immediately thereafter Devine was in touch with Beckett about staging Beckett's first mime and was negotiating the English-language rights for what would be Beckett's second produced play, Fin de partie.