believes firmly he is doing what Sam wanted.” Warner sees now that she was dealing with a grieving estate. “We’re not trying to produce cloned productions, but we insist they play the play as Sam wrote it,” he said. “It was speaking a slightly different language, but nonetheless Sam’s.” At the time, Edward Beckett defended his action. “We made the piece speak, I thought, remarkably,” says Warner now. The Guardian critic Michael Billington wrote that Warner’s transgression was “a bit like doodling on a Rembrandt.” The production’s European run was pulled. Warner’s 1994 production of Beckett’s Footfalls with Fiona Shaw, in which they altered the stage directions and switched two lines, led to Warner being banned from Beckett for life by his estate. “In order to make theatre live and breathe,” said the director Deborah Warner, “it has to be newly made for not every year or every second, but certainly every generation.” Others argue there should be more room for interpretation. Like Dwan, many believe Beckett’s exactness is part of his genius, with his stage directions akin to a musical score. “It’s not as if they can go back and check with the author.” Beckett’s behaviour was changeable, and he’d often alter his work. “One of the responsibilities of any estate is they must remain frozen in time,” said Lisa Dwan, the Top Boy actor best known for her rendition of Beckett’s Not I. “The irony of waiting for Waiting for Godot is not lost on me,” said Wakely drily. With an increasingly fluid understanding of gender today, the Beckett estate’s restrictions seem ever more archaic. The copyright for a play runs out 70 years after the playwright’s death, meaning women and non-binary performers legally have to wait until the end of 2059 to be able to play Vladimir and Estragon. “The more we read about the history, the more we realised we’d just get a big fat no,” said Jack Wakely, a non-binary member of the clown theatre company Silent Faces, who wanted to perform Godot.
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