A Twelfth-Century Journey: Samuel Beckett’s Return to Irish Soil
It s a national reclamation – When the calendar turns to 2036, actor Samuel West will step onto a stage to deliver Beckett’s contemplative monologue, Krapp’s Last Tape. At sixty-nine years old, West will embody the character’s exact age. What makes this performance extraordinary is the recording itself: West will play back his own voice from 2006, captured when he was thirty-nine—precisely the age Krapp was during that fateful evening of recording. Just two years after West’s performance, Richard Dormer will undertake a parallel undertaking, utilizing a comparable recording currently stored within BBC archives.
These remarkable commissions form part of the Samuel Beckett Biennale, an ambitious twelve-year initiative promising experimental performed readings of the playwright’s catalogue across Ireland and Britain. Seán Doran conceived the project, which operates through his cross-border entity Arts Over Borders. The festival will traverse locations intimately connected to Beckett’s existence and artistic development, moving from Enniskillen, Belfast, and Dublin to Folkestone, Reading, and Snodland, effectively mapping the playwright’s journey across both islands.
Questioning Beckett’s Irish Identity
The Biennale’s dual-island approach feels particularly fitting. While Beckett remains best known for his absurdist theatrical masterpieces—Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Happy Days—scholars have long debated whether he truly belonged to Ireland. Following his graduation from Trinity College Dublin in 1927, Beckett relocated to Paris and never established permanent residence in his homeland once more. During his final twenty-one years, he barely set foot in Ireland, choosing instead to rest at Paris’s Montparnasse Cemetery.
Beckett’s relationship with his native land grew increasingly complex. While remaining in France throughout the Second World War, he penned a letter to his mother expressing a preference for France during wartime over Ireland in peacetime. Many of his most cherished works, including both Waiting for Godot and Endgame, were originally composed in French before being translated into English. This linguistic duality prompted Irish literary critic Vivian Mercier to observe:
Samuel Beckett is an Irishman but not an Irish writer.
His sense of displacement likely originated from his position within the Protestant ruling minority of an overwhelmingly Catholic nation. Growing up in Dublin’s wealthy Foxrock suburb, Beckett and his brother attended boarding school in Enniskillen during the period of national partition, when their school town became part of Northern Ireland. This bitter division shaped his worldview, contributing to what he described as his
chronic inability to understand … a phrase like ‘the Irish people’.
From Rejection to Reclamation
The Biennale’s opening in Enniskillen carries deliberate significance. Yet Beckett’s distance from Ireland stemmed primarily from what he perceived as the country’s stifling theocracy. When clerical authorities required the exclusion of works by contemporaries Seán O’Casey and James Joyce from the 1958 Dublin international theatre festival, Beckett retaliated by prohibiting Irish productions of his plays for two years.
Meanwhile, London embraced the pessimistic playwright’s stark examinations of existential anxiety. The Royal Court, the National Theatre, and the West End’s Arts Theatre all presented his works throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In Britain, Beckett established himself as a modernist before becoming identified as Irish—an absurdist, a European formalist, a chronicler of universal human experience rather than national particularity.
Scholars have nevertheless identified distinctly Irish elements within Beckett’s characters and settings. His 1956 radio drama All That Fall remains undeniably Irish in location. When the inaugural Gaelic translation and staging of Waiting for Godot occurred in 1971, Beckett granted his approval. Furthermore, documentation confirms that his French writing preference represented not a rejection of English but rather an aspiration to
write without style
, pursuing rawness and simplicity.
For most of Beckett’s existence, Ireland offered only the version he had escaped: Catholic, censorious, and resistant to the godless modernism he practiced. A nation that prohibited John McGahern’s coming-of-age novel The Dark for obscenity would never easily embrace Beckett. However, beginning in the 1980s, Ireland underwent transformation. Church authority diminished, European membership strengthened, homosexuality received decriminalization in 1993, and divorce became legal in 1995, collectively reshaping Ireland’s identity as secular, plural, and internationally engaged.
Now, with the Biennale’s twelve-year program underway, Ireland appears ready to welcome back the son who once left, claiming Beckett not merely as an export but as a reclaimed cultural treasure. The festival represents more than theatrical performances; it embodies a national reclamation of an artist who spent much of his life searching for belonging beyond Ireland’s borders.
