BECKETT, Samuel.

£12,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Waiting for Godot. First UK edition, first impression, inscribed by the author on the title page, "For Michael Curtis, Sam. Beckett. London, June '79". The recipient was Dr Michael Curtis, a correspondent whom the playwright had invited to view a technical rehearsal for Happy Days on 4 June during the rerun at Royal Court Theatre.Curtis (1922-2002) was a London-based medical practitioner who befriended Beckett while collecting a substantial library of 20th-century literature, including many signed and inscribed copies.Beckett's own English translation of En attendant Godot (1952) was first published by the Grove Press in New York in 1954. The publisher's tipped-in notice explains that this first UK edition was subject to occasional textual deletions by the Lord Chamberlain and uses the version of the text as performed at the Criterion Theatre from 12 September 1955. The unexpurgated text was not published in the UK until 1965.The play premiered on 5 January 1953 at the Théâtre de Babylone, Paris. "The extraordinary success of this first production in French was responsible for Beckett's rise to worldwide fame, as the play rapidly became an object of intense international interest and controversy" (ODNB). The English-language theatrical premiere took place on 3 August 1955 at the Arts Theatre, London.This copy later passed into the theatre collection of Clive Hirschhorn (b. 1940), who spent decades as the Sunday Express's film and theatre critic and whose various histories of

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