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Mediations
First published in 1980, Mediations supplements, extends, and deepens Martin Esslin’s earlier writings on Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht. In the third section of this collection of essays, Esslin discusses the mass media as dramatic art and their effects – radio as a medium for drama; television’s insatiable appetite for artistic skills, its commercials, and its series, which he labels modern folk epics. Intimately acquainted with the cultural implications of several languages and ideologies and with the possibility for distortion inherent in translating them, Esslin’s Mediations gathers together decades of his rich experience and reflections on cross linguistic and artistic boundaries, as well as theatre. This book will be of interest to students of literature, drama, and media studies.
248 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1980
About the author
Martin Esslin
45 books31 followersMartin Julius Esslin OBE (6 June 1918 – 24 February 2002) was a Hungarian-born English producer and playwright dramatist, journalist, adaptor and translator, critic, academic scholar and professor of drama best known for coining the term "Theatre of the Absurd" in his work of that name (1961).
Born Julius Pereszlényi (Hungarian: Pereszlényi Gyula Márton) in Budapest, Esslin moved to Vienna with his family at a young age. He studied Philosophy and English at the University of Vienna and also graduated from the Reinhardt Seminar as a producer. Of Jewish descent, he fled Austria in the wake of the Anschluss of 1938.
Esslin defined the 'Theatre of the Absurd' as that which
Esslin's definition encompassed not only Beckett's works but those of Sławomir Mrożek, Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Jean Genet, Günter Grass and Edward Albee amongst others.
He began working for the BBC in 1940, serving as a producer, script writer and broadcaster. He was head of BBC Radio Drama 1963-77, having previously worked for the external European Service. After leaving the BBC he held senior academic posts at Florida State and Stanford Universities.
He also adapted and translated many works from the original German, for example many plays of Wolfgang Bauer between 1967 and 1990. Original works included the seminal Theatre of the Absurd, and The Field of Drama.
Esslin died in London on February 24, 2002 after a long battle with Parkinson's disease.
Source: Wikipedia
Born Julius Pereszlényi (Hungarian: Pereszlényi Gyula Márton) in Budapest, Esslin moved to Vienna with his family at a young age. He studied Philosophy and English at the University of Vienna and also graduated from the Reinhardt Seminar as a producer. Of Jewish descent, he fled Austria in the wake of the Anschluss of 1938.
Esslin defined the 'Theatre of the Absurd' as that which
"The Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought."
Esslin's definition encompassed not only Beckett's works but those of Sławomir Mrożek, Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Jean Genet, Günter Grass and Edward Albee amongst others.
He began working for the BBC in 1940, serving as a producer, script writer and broadcaster. He was head of BBC Radio Drama 1963-77, having previously worked for the external European Service. After leaving the BBC he held senior academic posts at Florida State and Stanford Universities.
He also adapted and translated many works from the original German, for example many plays of Wolfgang Bauer between 1967 and 1990. Original works included the seminal Theatre of the Absurd, and The Field of Drama.
Esslin died in London on February 24, 2002 after a long battle with Parkinson's disease.
Source: Wikipedia
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March 28, 2026
We saw the play “On Beckett” yesterday
[notes on this book further below…]
Theatre Review: ‘On Beckett’ created and performed by Bill Irwin at Shakespeare Theatre Company
Posted By: Teniola Ayoolaon:
,
“…invite(s) the audience into the same essential task: extracting meaning from apparent absurdity.
Irwin acts as a guide, translating, contextualizing, and illuminating Beckett’s ideas without flattening their complexity…affirms what theater at its best can do: help audiences see something in art, in society, or in themselves that they might not have seen alone.
That parallel feels fitting. In “On Beckett,” Irwin does precisely what the audience is doing alongside him: attempting to decode the language, philosophy, and silences of Samuel Beckett, the 20th century Irish playwright whose work later came to define what is now called “The Theatre of the Absurd.” Irwin does not merely recite Beckett’s texts, he performs them, embodies them, interrogates them, and then pauses to share what they have come to mean to him after more than three decades of immersion.
At the top of the show, Irwin offers a disarmingly plain roadmap. The evening will move between passages from Beckett and Irwin’s reflections, repeated over the course of the performance. He calls this reassurance, a line that lands as a joke and earns an early laugh. The simplicity of the structure, however, masks the intellectual and emotional range of what follows.
…This is neither an academic lecture nor a conventional solo show. It is a conversation between artist and influence, filtered through memory, body, and breath.
Throughout the performance, Irwin weaves Beckett’s writing together with discussions of existentialism, theories of consciousness, and the “middle-of-the-night questions” Beckett returns to again and again. He touches on Beckett’s identity as a French modernist who translated his own work into English, shaping what Irwin describes as an “Irish voice.” References to “Dante’s Inferno,” language of hats, even phonological debate on producing “Godot” as God-oh versus Go-doh, all enter the frame.
Irwin’s exploration of Lucky’s monologue in “Godot” becomes one of the evening’s most striking interpretations. Lucky, a literal beast of burden tethered by a rope, is commanded to think and responds with a torrent of language that grows increasingly unmanageable for those around him. When his hat is removed, his thinking stops. He is returned to silence, to labor, to obedience. “That sounds political to me,” Irwin observes, letting the implication linger.
Clown theory, unsurprisingly, plays a central role. Irwin demonstrates classic clown shtick through repeated attempts at climbing stairs, donning a jacket incorrectly, and misjudging physical space, with each failure building toward laughter through precision rather than chaos. A particularly memorable sequence involves an automated podium system that raises and lowers the speaker instead of the microphone, spiraling into a physical gag that nearly swallows Irwin whole. The moment recalls a widely circulated mishap from the 2025 Academy Awards, when a stage platform malfunction left a presenter visible only from the waist up. That balance between humor and inquiry defines the show.
What makes “On Beckett” especially generous is its accessibility. Audiences do not need to be Beckett scholars, classicists, or students of French or Irish literature to engage with the material. While those with academic familiarity may recognize references more quickly, Irwin acts as a guide, translating, contextualizing, and illuminating Beckett’s ideas without flattening their complexity.
…a deliberately spare production to further bridge that gap. The minimal design supports the performance rather than distracting from it, allowing theatergoers to leave not only entertained, but newly aware of Beckett, of performance, and perhaps of their own interpretive instincts.
In the end, “On Beckett” affirms what theater at its best can do: help audiences see something in art, in society, or in themselves that they might not have seen alone…
Bill Irwin’s ‘On Beckett’ at STC is simply sublime
It’s a master act from a master actor and world-class clown.
By Susan Galbraith -
“Irwin interrogates the legacy of Beckett’s works, noting that Beckett’s plays are frequently categorized as “plays where nothing happens” and labeled with academic terms like “alienation” and existentialism.” Irwin cautions that reducing Beckett’s work in this way takes the lifeblood out of his work. Instead, Irwin shows that violence is present in Beckett’s plays and that they are indeed political. He performs the climactic monologue of Lucky from Waiting for Godot most stunningly. The character seems no more than a beast of burden, enslaved to the tyrannical, whip-bearing Pozzo, when at a central moment the luckless fellow is ordered to think, and what follows is a dazzling monologue, a stunning tour de force for any actor.
Theater Review: Bill Irwin’s “On Beckett” — A Splendidly Literate Treat
By Bill Marx
“According to Samuel Beckett biographer James Knowlson, in the early ’70s the renowned writer dropped into rehearsals at the BBC for a recording of all of his Texts for Nothing. The reader was actor Patrick Magee, the director Martin Esslin, who recalls:
Beckett sat in the back and said to me: “He’s still doing it too emphatically, it should be no more than a murmur.” So I stopped it and Pat came in and he told him too: “More of a murmur,” until finally the engineer said: “If it becomes any more of a murmur, there’s nothing there.”
Should an author famous for creating characters who are desperate to utter a final word, but can’t, be given the final word when it comes to how performers speak his words? Obviously not….
Irwin…pays homage to the master’s language. These words often emerge from the lips of attenuated consciousnesses, lost souls riffing, rocking, or stepping along the knife’s edge of oblivion. For me, what’s most important in a performer’s delivery is summed up by actress Lisa Dwan in her 2016 program notes to her evening of Beckett plays (performed at Arts Emerson): “Beckett has shown me that sentimentality isn’t truthful — it is the language of gangsters.” That is the challenge for the oh-so-likeable physical comedian as he delivers brief selections from Beckett’s texts (two from Texts for Nothing) and plays (a chunk of Lucky’s monologue in Waiting for Godot). [+Watt + The Unnameable] Interspersed among the performances, Irwin talks about the mystery of the writer’s acerbic vision, and his significance to him as an actor. (He admires Beckett’s use of pronouns, for instance.) Irwin underlines the Irishness of Beckett’s speakers and the early influence of James Joyce, but he comes at these speeches with an American vitality, an energy driven by his belief that Beckett’s speakers may be trapped in some sort of hell but, in their contorted ways, they are struggling to escape, or at least verbally shape, the contours of their prison. Via their tongues, they are treading water. The delusive goal is to either glance at the stars or arrive at the peace of oblivion.
Irwin notes Beckett’s political side, pointing out the writer and his wife’s engagement in the French resistance against fascism in World War II. He points specifically to Pozzo’s tyrannical treatment of Lucky in Waiting for Godot, though that play’s desiccated landscape may well reflect the aftermath of a nuclear war, a barren world that resonates today with the catastrophic effects of climate breakdown. Irwin also makes some provocative points about betrayal in Waiting for Godot, wonders if Beckett’s characters suffer from mental illness, and finds some subtle suggestions of domestic abuse in the prose. He also mentions an online site that juxtaposes lines from Beckett’s work and pictures of cats.
Hillrag Bill Irwin On Beckett
By Andrew Lightman
“…Irwin explores his relationship with Beckett both as a clown and as an actor. Absurdly, he begins by reading several excerpts from Beckett’s “Stories and Texts for Nothing.” These pieces of prose are not for the faint of heart. Their language is dense and oft recursive. Listeners struggle with their lack of conventional meaning. The experience is much like watching a melting ice statue, whose form disappears under the audience’s gaze.
Recognizing the dramatic challenge, Irwin employs clowning as punctuation to both illustrate the texts’ absurdities and to maintain his audience’s focus on the beauty of the text despite the absence of “meaning.” He then pivots to a lengthy discussion of his relationship as an actor to “Waiting for Godot.” Employing his entire body as a comic canvas, he draws out the humor inherent in Beckett’s masterpiece.
For those who find Beckett obtuse or impenetrable, Irwin serves as a guide to understanding the author’s irony and humor.
. . . . .
"Beckett and His Interpreters" is the same as Esslin's
Introduction to SAMUEL BECKETT : A COLLECTION OF
CRITICAL ESSAYS
Beckett's Novels:
“In Beckett's great trilogy we witness the process of the exploration We start with fiction and we end in the most ruthless self-revelation, the agony of a soul in search of its own identity. There has been speculation as to why so many of the names in Beckett's novels start with
M: Murphy, Molloy, Malone, MacMann, Mahood; there have been those who thought M may have stood for Man. This is to underrate the subtlety and complexity of Beckett's mind-and of his real theme.
In fact the M is a Greek sigma stood on its side. The sigra stands for Becket's own first name: Sam. And so, of course, the other way about, does the W of Watt and Worm…
L'Innommable is thus the culminating point of a progressive exploration of the self: it reveals, in the end, that very center of nothingness, that state of pure potentiality by which Sartre defines Being-for-Itself.
The multitude of characters and personalities which the narrator's voice can assume and conjure up from the void represent so many choices of being, but the core of the self is pure potentiality, le néant, that very nothingness that Murphy delighted in when he had escaped from all his commitments, that pure potentiality represented by Worm, man about to be born.
“There is no evidence to indicate, and it seems unlikely, that Beckett has ever been consciously influenced by Sartre's philosophy. His genius is far too personal, his method of creation far too compulsive, to allow him to model his writing on some philosophy he may have heard of or read about. It is all the more remarkable that, without doubt, Beckett is the greatest creative writer ever to have put this aspect of existential philosophy into the concrete shape of a work of art. It is as though by some mysterious osmosis the currents of abstract thought and creative vision in our time had inter-penetrated each other.
[notes on this book further below…]
Theatre Review: ‘On Beckett’ created and performed by Bill Irwin at Shakespeare Theatre Company
Posted By: Teniola Ayoolaon:
,
“…invite(s) the audience into the same essential task: extracting meaning from apparent absurdity.
Irwin acts as a guide, translating, contextualizing, and illuminating Beckett’s ideas without flattening their complexity…affirms what theater at its best can do: help audiences see something in art, in society, or in themselves that they might not have seen alone.
That parallel feels fitting. In “On Beckett,” Irwin does precisely what the audience is doing alongside him: attempting to decode the language, philosophy, and silences of Samuel Beckett, the 20th century Irish playwright whose work later came to define what is now called “The Theatre of the Absurd.” Irwin does not merely recite Beckett’s texts, he performs them, embodies them, interrogates them, and then pauses to share what they have come to mean to him after more than three decades of immersion.
At the top of the show, Irwin offers a disarmingly plain roadmap. The evening will move between passages from Beckett and Irwin’s reflections, repeated over the course of the performance. He calls this reassurance, a line that lands as a joke and earns an early laugh. The simplicity of the structure, however, masks the intellectual and emotional range of what follows.
…This is neither an academic lecture nor a conventional solo show. It is a conversation between artist and influence, filtered through memory, body, and breath.
Throughout the performance, Irwin weaves Beckett’s writing together with discussions of existentialism, theories of consciousness, and the “middle-of-the-night questions” Beckett returns to again and again. He touches on Beckett’s identity as a French modernist who translated his own work into English, shaping what Irwin describes as an “Irish voice.” References to “Dante’s Inferno,” language of hats, even phonological debate on producing “Godot” as God-oh versus Go-doh, all enter the frame.
Irwin’s exploration of Lucky’s monologue in “Godot” becomes one of the evening’s most striking interpretations. Lucky, a literal beast of burden tethered by a rope, is commanded to think and responds with a torrent of language that grows increasingly unmanageable for those around him. When his hat is removed, his thinking stops. He is returned to silence, to labor, to obedience. “That sounds political to me,” Irwin observes, letting the implication linger.
Clown theory, unsurprisingly, plays a central role. Irwin demonstrates classic clown shtick through repeated attempts at climbing stairs, donning a jacket incorrectly, and misjudging physical space, with each failure building toward laughter through precision rather than chaos. A particularly memorable sequence involves an automated podium system that raises and lowers the speaker instead of the microphone, spiraling into a physical gag that nearly swallows Irwin whole. The moment recalls a widely circulated mishap from the 2025 Academy Awards, when a stage platform malfunction left a presenter visible only from the waist up. That balance between humor and inquiry defines the show.
What makes “On Beckett” especially generous is its accessibility. Audiences do not need to be Beckett scholars, classicists, or students of French or Irish literature to engage with the material. While those with academic familiarity may recognize references more quickly, Irwin acts as a guide, translating, contextualizing, and illuminating Beckett’s ideas without flattening their complexity.
…a deliberately spare production to further bridge that gap. The minimal design supports the performance rather than distracting from it, allowing theatergoers to leave not only entertained, but newly aware of Beckett, of performance, and perhaps of their own interpretive instincts.
In the end, “On Beckett” affirms what theater at its best can do: help audiences see something in art, in society, or in themselves that they might not have seen alone…
Bill Irwin’s ‘On Beckett’ at STC is simply sublime
It’s a master act from a master actor and world-class clown.
By Susan Galbraith -
“Irwin interrogates the legacy of Beckett’s works, noting that Beckett’s plays are frequently categorized as “plays where nothing happens” and labeled with academic terms like “alienation” and existentialism.” Irwin cautions that reducing Beckett’s work in this way takes the lifeblood out of his work. Instead, Irwin shows that violence is present in Beckett’s plays and that they are indeed political. He performs the climactic monologue of Lucky from Waiting for Godot most stunningly. The character seems no more than a beast of burden, enslaved to the tyrannical, whip-bearing Pozzo, when at a central moment the luckless fellow is ordered to think, and what follows is a dazzling monologue, a stunning tour de force for any actor.
Theater Review: Bill Irwin’s “On Beckett” — A Splendidly Literate Treat
By Bill Marx
“According to Samuel Beckett biographer James Knowlson, in the early ’70s the renowned writer dropped into rehearsals at the BBC for a recording of all of his Texts for Nothing. The reader was actor Patrick Magee, the director Martin Esslin, who recalls:
Beckett sat in the back and said to me: “He’s still doing it too emphatically, it should be no more than a murmur.” So I stopped it and Pat came in and he told him too: “More of a murmur,” until finally the engineer said: “If it becomes any more of a murmur, there’s nothing there.”
Should an author famous for creating characters who are desperate to utter a final word, but can’t, be given the final word when it comes to how performers speak his words? Obviously not….
Irwin…pays homage to the master’s language. These words often emerge from the lips of attenuated consciousnesses, lost souls riffing, rocking, or stepping along the knife’s edge of oblivion. For me, what’s most important in a performer’s delivery is summed up by actress Lisa Dwan in her 2016 program notes to her evening of Beckett plays (performed at Arts Emerson): “Beckett has shown me that sentimentality isn’t truthful — it is the language of gangsters.” That is the challenge for the oh-so-likeable physical comedian as he delivers brief selections from Beckett’s texts (two from Texts for Nothing) and plays (a chunk of Lucky’s monologue in Waiting for Godot). [+Watt + The Unnameable] Interspersed among the performances, Irwin talks about the mystery of the writer’s acerbic vision, and his significance to him as an actor. (He admires Beckett’s use of pronouns, for instance.) Irwin underlines the Irishness of Beckett’s speakers and the early influence of James Joyce, but he comes at these speeches with an American vitality, an energy driven by his belief that Beckett’s speakers may be trapped in some sort of hell but, in their contorted ways, they are struggling to escape, or at least verbally shape, the contours of their prison. Via their tongues, they are treading water. The delusive goal is to either glance at the stars or arrive at the peace of oblivion.
Irwin notes Beckett’s political side, pointing out the writer and his wife’s engagement in the French resistance against fascism in World War II. He points specifically to Pozzo’s tyrannical treatment of Lucky in Waiting for Godot, though that play’s desiccated landscape may well reflect the aftermath of a nuclear war, a barren world that resonates today with the catastrophic effects of climate breakdown. Irwin also makes some provocative points about betrayal in Waiting for Godot, wonders if Beckett’s characters suffer from mental illness, and finds some subtle suggestions of domestic abuse in the prose. He also mentions an online site that juxtaposes lines from Beckett’s work and pictures of cats.
Hillrag Bill Irwin On Beckett
By Andrew Lightman
“…Irwin explores his relationship with Beckett both as a clown and as an actor. Absurdly, he begins by reading several excerpts from Beckett’s “Stories and Texts for Nothing.” These pieces of prose are not for the faint of heart. Their language is dense and oft recursive. Listeners struggle with their lack of conventional meaning. The experience is much like watching a melting ice statue, whose form disappears under the audience’s gaze.
Recognizing the dramatic challenge, Irwin employs clowning as punctuation to both illustrate the texts’ absurdities and to maintain his audience’s focus on the beauty of the text despite the absence of “meaning.” He then pivots to a lengthy discussion of his relationship as an actor to “Waiting for Godot.” Employing his entire body as a comic canvas, he draws out the humor inherent in Beckett’s masterpiece.
For those who find Beckett obtuse or impenetrable, Irwin serves as a guide to understanding the author’s irony and humor.
. . . . .
"Beckett and His Interpreters" is the same as Esslin's
Introduction to SAMUEL BECKETT : A COLLECTION OF
CRITICAL ESSAYS
Beckett's Novels:
“In Beckett's great trilogy we witness the process of the exploration We start with fiction and we end in the most ruthless self-revelation, the agony of a soul in search of its own identity. There has been speculation as to why so many of the names in Beckett's novels start with
M: Murphy, Molloy, Malone, MacMann, Mahood; there have been those who thought M may have stood for Man. This is to underrate the subtlety and complexity of Beckett's mind-and of his real theme.
In fact the M is a Greek sigma stood on its side. The sigra stands for Becket's own first name: Sam. And so, of course, the other way about, does the W of Watt and Worm…
L'Innommable is thus the culminating point of a progressive exploration of the self: it reveals, in the end, that very center of nothingness, that state of pure potentiality by which Sartre defines Being-for-Itself.
The multitude of characters and personalities which the narrator's voice can assume and conjure up from the void represent so many choices of being, but the core of the self is pure potentiality, le néant, that very nothingness that Murphy delighted in when he had escaped from all his commitments, that pure potentiality represented by Worm, man about to be born.
“There is no evidence to indicate, and it seems unlikely, that Beckett has ever been consciously influenced by Sartre's philosophy. His genius is far too personal, his method of creation far too compulsive, to allow him to model his writing on some philosophy he may have heard of or read about. It is all the more remarkable that, without doubt, Beckett is the greatest creative writer ever to have put this aspect of existential philosophy into the concrete shape of a work of art. It is as though by some mysterious osmosis the currents of abstract thought and creative vision in our time had inter-penetrated each other.
January 23, 2025
This one’s from a dump, left by someone theatrical and terribly smart a couple of months ago near my house. 240 pages seemed like a good way back into reading—not too overwhelmingly long for my almost-forgotten patience. It turned out to be an extremely and pleasantly insightful read on two of the most important playwrights of the 20th century. Part on media somehow was both naïve, as I expected from something written so long ago (from a time when Britain had three TV channels), and yet unexpectedly relevant, it managed to be even more insightful than I thought possible.
The writers’ portraits are precious, not because the author tries to capture these giants fully, but because they show them in fragments—pieces of works or works about their works. This only magnifies the effect of the text.
The essay on media offered a fresh (at least to me) view of TV as a kind of new folk art, reflecting communal psyche. Reading the book also convinced me of the importance of radio plays, which I’d barely considered before.
Won’t list any quotes—lazy—just read it. A bit of trivia for myself: the BBC Radiophonic Workshop started by making animal sounds for Beckett’s play.
The writers’ portraits are precious, not because the author tries to capture these giants fully, but because they show them in fragments—pieces of works or works about their works. This only magnifies the effect of the text.
The essay on media offered a fresh (at least to me) view of TV as a kind of new folk art, reflecting communal psyche. Reading the book also convinced me of the importance of radio plays, which I’d barely considered before.
Won’t list any quotes—lazy—just read it. A bit of trivia for myself: the BBC Radiophonic Workshop started by making animal sounds for Beckett’s play.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews