1949

Inspired by George Orwell's title for his novel, 1984, published in 1949, I raise two points about the year 1949: Martin Esslin's friendship with Beckett started from the time he brought the playwright a Grundig TK-5 tape-recorder from London to enable him to listen to the tape of his 1957 radio play All That Fall, as Beckett had complained that he wasn't able to listen to the BBC World Service broadcasting of the play due to bad windy weather. Beckett was so fascinated by the machine that it inspired him with the idea to write next year Krapp's Last Tape where in the winter 1973 Royal Court Theatre production, Albert Finney, headstrongly doesn't turn his head slowly. How come that Beckett was unaware of Arthur Miller's 1949 play, Death of a Salesman where there is a tape-recorder! I saw the Lyric-Shaftesbury Avenue Death of a Salesman during my July, 2005 Reading visit when I met you. Ruby advised me agaist seeing it. I, however, went to see it. Ruby was right. In 1956, in Telkaif, a village in Northern Iraq where the family lived, we had a Grundig TK-5 tape-recorder which my father bought to record his voice singing


This is point 1, point 2 is

In 1949, using the East Berlin ruins for a setting, Brecht staged a memorable production of his own Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder. During my visit to Eric Bentley in his Manhattan suite in July 2004, Bentley told me that he attended that show. In his The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner mentions that he was at that show, too. One wonders if Beckett knew of that, or perhaps attended the show, especially that he was a frequent visitor to Germany?