Peter O'Shaughnessy historian and folklorist". Peter O'Shaughnessy Peter O'Shaughnessy OAM (5 October 1923 – 17 July 2013) was an Australian actor, theatre director, producer and writer who presented the work of playwrights ranging from Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov to modern dramatists, such as Ionesco, Pinter and Beckett. He is best known as mentor to and collaborator with comedian Barry Humphries in his early career. O'Shaughnessy was a major exponent of Samuel Beckett, both in Australia and in Ireland. He produced the first "Waiting for Godot" in Australia in 1957. He played Krapp in the Australian premier of "Krapp's Last Tape" at
Krapp's Last Tape eighty degrees to make coitus possible in the position he is in!'"––a position that Rosette Lamont proposes also "suggests that of a suckling babe." Beckett would not be 69 until 1975 so, from his perspective, with Krapp a proxy for him, the action is set in the future. The first line of the play explicitly sets it 'in the future', although nothing onstage reveals this. Beckett wrote this play shortly before he turned 52 years old. As it happens, with "Waiting for Godot", success had found him but, at 39, the future must have seemed a lot bleaker for the