Born in Dublin, Beckett spent his early years in Ireland before moving permanently to France in the late 1930s. Following graduation from Trinity College, Dublin, Beckett initially tried school teaching and university lecturing (in Dublin and Paris). However, the academic life was soon abandoned for a career as a writer.

During the 1930s, Beckett’s early writing focussed on academic criticism, poetry and prose, publishing a philosophical essay collection ‘Proust’ (1931), and the novels ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’ (1934) and ‘Murphy’ (1938).

As a member of the Resistance in Paris during the Second World War, he narrowly escaped being caught by the Nazis. While in hiding, in southern France, he worked on the novel, ‘Watt’, which was published in 1953. After the war, he published a major prose trilogy: ‘Molloy’, ‘Malone Meurt’ and ‘L’Innommable’ (1951–53).

Beckett’s major breakthrough came when he began experimenting with expressing meaning in a world that no longer appeared to offer any meaning. His bleak vision of what it is like to be alive, and how we try to cope with it, first found dramatic expression in his tragi-comic masterpiece, ‘Waiting for Godot’ (first performed in 1953). The play opens with a summary of itself, and Beckett plays generally:

Estragon: Nothing to be done.

With no settings or plots, and often unrecognisable and incoherent characters, who, uninfluenced by the world about them, suffer a meaningless, nightmarish existence, Beckett tossed aside traditional theatrical convention.

In a succession of works for stage, radio, television and cinema, Beckett pursued ever new and radical treatments of theatrical space, language and characterisation.

Progressively, Beckett's scripts became startlingly minimalist. Indeed, eventually, he discovered that absence of both dialogue and character (as in ‘Breath’) effectively expressed his vision. His final play, ‘What Where’, concludes characteristically: ‘That is all. Make sense who may. I switch off’.