This volume prints the texts of the media plays as forwarded by Samuel Beckett to his English language publishers (Faber and Faber in London and/or Grove Press in New York – and John Calder, for The Old Tune). Written over a period of over thirty years, originating variously in French and English (and often directed in German), and with production rather than publication as their primary objective, the texts vary in style, format, and accidentals. As Beckett gained experience in directing his own work, his scripts, while meticulously plotted, became something to be further shaped in production and post-production. While we have made every effort silently to correct minor flaws appearing in earlier editions, no attempt has been made to impose a rigorous consistency upon such diverse materials. Thus, for example, dimensions are given in feet for an American production of Film, but in metres for British/German television productions (sometimes abbreviated, sometimes not). Beckett's first radio play gives a formal cast list, while subsequent plays may or may not variously list characters or give an initial ('V', 'M') to indicate a voice or presence. It is possible that sometimes the word 'Cast' is deliberately omitted so as to avoid implying the actual or physical 'thereness' of ghostly presences who, like Ada in Embers or the Voice in Eh Joe, in Beckett's illimitable phrase, 'may not be quite all there'. In Film, the conveyance for O's photographs is variously referred to as a 'briefcase' and a 'case', and we have left such things alone.
More substantively, playscripts arrived at their publishers at various moments in their evolution: sometimes before production (in response to the publisher's request to have the text published at the time of broadcast), sometimes after production and incorporating modifications, or after production in one language and before production in another. Modifications made in French or German productions may or may not have been included in subsequent English editions (or incorporated into the British text but not the American – or vice-versa). For purposes of this edition, such labyrinths are noted incidentally but remain untrodden. That effort must necessarily await the multilingual variorum scholarly editions that will one day come, though not soon. In the interim the diligent reader is referred (for Eh Joe and What Where) to volume 4 of The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: The Shorter Plays (ed. S. E. Gontarski, Faber and Faber, 1999); to other editions noted in the footnotes; to the manuscript studies appearing in The Journal of Beckett Studies and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui; and to those monographs and collections of essays devoted to Beckett's media plays.
