Eleutheria (play) Eleutheria (play) Eleutheria (sometimes rendered Eleuthéria: see image) is a play by Samuel Beckett, written in French in 1947. It was his first completed dramatic endeavor ( Samuel Johnson). Roger Blin considered staging it in the early 1950s, but opted for "Waiting for Godot", because its smaller cast size made it easier to stage. At this point, Beckett suppressed the manuscript. Beckett later recycled the name "Krap" (with two Ps) for his play "Krapp's Last Tape". In 1985, Beckett's longtime American publisher, Barney Rosset, was fired after a buyout of Grove Press. Beckett offered to help Rosset, and proposed translating
Theatre of the Absurd plots of many Absurdist plays feature characters in interdependent pairs, commonly either two males or a male and a female. Some Beckett scholars call this the "pseudocouple". The two characters may be roughly equal or have a begrudging interdependence (like Vladimir and Estragon in "Waiting for Godot" or the two main characters in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"); one character may be clearly dominant and may torture the passive character (like Pozzo and Lucky in "Waiting for Godot" or Hamm and Clov in "Endgame"); the relationship of the characters may shift dramatically throughout the play (as in Ionesco's "The Lesson"