“Perversely, it seems to me, familiarity has made these plays more inaccessible: their visual motifs are so well known beforehand that they are more easily dismissed. Godot is ‘the one where nothing happens’; Endgame is ‘the one with the old pair in the bins’; Happy Days is ‘the one about the woman buried in the sand.’ Like conceptual art, the point becomes the idea, not engagement with the work. Potential audiences stay away, thinking they know everything because they’ve heard the idea, while those that do attend don’t find these well-worn conceits surprising or disturbing. The radical encounter with the savage poetry of Beckett’s work is lost.”
Beckett Begins Again (Prospect)
