Samuel Beckett's Play written 1962-63 was an aesthetic watershed inaugurating his late
'abstract' dramatic style. This book gets close to Beckett's creative process by examining the
possible influence of Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone music and Vassily Kandinsky's abstract
painting upon this formal shift by tracing Beckett's developing attitude to abstraction and
its relation to his long-standing preoccupation with the 'breakdown' of the subject-object
relation and the ultimate failure of all expression and by following his formal choices
through manuscript drafts. The author goes on to analyse Beckett's attempt to adapt his new
methods to the media of film and television and to demonstrate how Beckett's late works for
stage and screen develop alongside one another right up to his 1985 adaptation of the play What
Where for television. Throughout the book unpublished manuscript materials such as Beckett's
letters drafts notes on philosophy psychology and art and his 'German diaries' augment a
detailed account of the submerged sources that Beckett appropriated to the evolving needs of
his abstract dramatic art.
