Samuel Beckett And The Temptation Of Direction

: Samuel Beckett remains in the history of literature as one of the most important creators of the XXth century. His work, streched over more than six decades, surprises the reader through his permanent stylisation of form, from the vast intertextualities in his early novels and nuvelas to the language essentialization, the characters synthesis and the structural economy which we find in his later works. In our cultural memory remai, still current and widely known, his plays, of which Martin Esslin said in 1960 that they uncover a new type of theatre, a theatre of the absurd. Indeed, Beckett’s plays contradict, up to a point, the scenic `canon` of those times and propose an universe in which the character is no longer a prisoner of the relevant biography, tributary to the Stanislavskian inheritance. However, in this study we are interested in understanding how Beckett’s plays are influenced by his scenic experience, because, starting with the late 60s, he directs his own texts in some European theaters. This step is a defining one, in our opinion, because working directly with actors changes and reflects in his late work both in theatre and prose.