Beckett’s work has become increasingly topical. Over the past six months, comparisons between the British government’s Brexit negotiations and Endgame have cropped up regularly in the press, and Waiting for Godot has been staged at the Irish border between the counties of Cavan and Fermanagh. Prior to that, Beckett’s canonical plays on stasis, inaction and circularity were regularly evoked in accounts of the Syrian Civil War and articles describing the endless plight of Syrian refugees. And prior to that, the idea that ‘this’ – any international crisis or difficult episode in European or American politics – ‘is like Waiting for Godot’ provided many journalists with some convenient one-liners. Everyone is waiting, nothing happens, and no one knows what to do: who else but Beckett can help us think about that?

The great paradox is that, on the surface, there seems to be little about Beckett’s work that might enable us to think about politics. His texts deal with uncertainty, displacement and postponement – ideas that are not easily compatible with other types of writing that openly define themselves as political. He has long been thought of as someone who had a deeply abstract way of thinking and was only interested in pure philosophical problems, rather than the problems of the world in which he lived. However, to many among his acquaintances, he came across rather differently: as someone who had an instinctive and deep understanding of pain and suffering, and as someone who knew that times of genuine political tension also bring to light many otherwise hidden truths. He was deeply interested in those moments when what appears to be the set course of history is overturned, and witnessed many such moments over the course of his lifetime.