Introduction – Pim Verhulst, Anna McMullan and Jonathan Bignell
1 Beckett’s ‘adaphatroce’ revisited: toward a poetics of adaptation – Pim Verhulst
2 Adaptation and convergence: Beckett on Film – Jonathan Bignell
3 ‘Imprecations from the Brighton Road to Foxrock Station’: the effect of place on Mouth on Fire’s stagings of All That Fall – Feargal Whelan
4 Engines of reverence? Beckett, festivals and adaptation – Trish McTighe and Kurt Taroff
5 Passing by, gazing upon: gendered agency in adaptations of Come and Go and Happy Days – Katherine Weiss
6 ‘Last state last version’: adaptation and performance in Gare St Lazare Ireland’s How It Is – Dúnlaith Bird
7 Intermedial embodiments: Company SJ’s staging of Beckett’s Company – Anna McMullan
8 Beckett, neurodiversity and the prosthetic: the posthuman turn in contemporary art – Derval Tubridy
9 Beckett and new media adaptation: from the literary corpus to the transmedia archive – David Houston Jones
10 Opera as adaptation: György Kurtág’s Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie, scènes et monologues – Olga Beloborodova
11 Questioning norms in three Beckettian choreographic projections: Maguy Marin, Dominique Dupuy, Joanna Czajkowska – Evelyne Clavier
12 ‘I’ll give you just enough to keep you from dying’: power dynamics disclosed in Tania Bruguera’s Endgame – Luz María Sánchez Cardona
13 Godot noir: Beckett in black and whiteface – S. E. Gontarski
14 Deferred dreams: waiting for freedom and equality in Nwandu and Beckett – Graley Herren
15 ‘How can you photograph words?’: expanding the Godot universe from adaptation to transmedia storytelling – Luciana Tamas and Eckart Voigts
16 The figure of Beckett in four contemporary novels– Paul Stewart
Index

Beckett’s afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to posthumous reworkings of Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre. Contextualised against the backdrop of the author’s developing views on adaptation and media specificity, it challenges the long-held belief that he opposed any form of genre crossing.

Featuring contemporary engagements with Beckett’s work from the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America, the volume does not approach adaptation as a form of (in)fidelity or (ir)reverence. Instead, it argues that exposing the ‘Beckett canon’ to new environments and artistic practices enables fresh perspectives and enhances the texts’ significance for contemporary artists and audiences alike. The chapters explore a wide variety of forms – from prose and theatre to radio, television, film and webseries – focusing on the period from the early 1990s to the late 2010s. The concept of adaptation is broadly interpreted, including changes within the same performative context, spatial relocations or transpositions across genres and media, and even creative rewritings of Beckett’s biography. The collection offers a range of innovative ways to approach the author’s work in a constantly changing world and analyses its remarkable susceptibility to creative responses.

Beckett’s afterlives suggests that adaptation, remediation and appropriation are forms of cultural negotiation that are essential for the survival and continuing urgency and vibrancy of Beckett’s work in the twenty-first century.