Samuel Beckett was something of an accidental dramatist, or at least his earliest completed plays were written as something of a sideline, a diversion, a respite from the long narrative flights he was developing in something of a white heat in the aftermath of the Second World War, the grouping of French novels now loosely called The Trilogy. Theater, he would subsequently acknowledge, was “relaxing” because of its plasticity, its concreteness, its treatment of particular people (more or less)...