Literary futures are sometimes unpredictable. Honoré de Balzac, unsatisfied with fame as a novelist, dreamt fruitlessly of becoming a great playwright. Samuel Beckett once confided that he considered his sequence or ‘trilogy’ of post-war novels to be his most important work. Yet slipped in between the composition of the second and third volumes (Malone meurt and L’Innommable) was a two-act play that he claimed to have written ‘as relaxation, to get away from the awful prose I was writing at that time.’ Such was En attendant Godot, later to be acclaimed by many as the greatest play of the twentieth century On the day Beckett began composing the play – Saturday, 9 October 1948 – the London theatre scene hardly seemed to be waiting for Godot. That evening, theatregoers had a range of options which included the usual variety of farces and musicals, an American ice show, plays by established writers such as Terence Rattigan and George Bernard Shaw, a production of Doctor Faustus at the Old Vic, and one or two new offerings, such as Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie at the Haymarket Theatre. Yet, within a few years, Godot was to force a reconsideration of what theatre was and what it could be. In 1955, the critic Kenneth Tynan would remark that the play had prompted him to reflect on the rules governing drama, ‘and, having done so, to pronounce them not elastic enough. It is validly new.’ The journey through text, transmission and reception was, however, a long and complex one. In 1948, Beckett had recently emerged from the uncertainties and traumas of the Occupation in France, much of which he had spent in hiding, with his partner Suzanne, in the unoccupied southern zone