Eleutheria (play)

Eleutheria (sometimes rendered Eleuthéria: see image) is a play by Samuel Beckett, written in French in 1947. It was his first completed dramatic endeavor (after an aborted effort about Samuel Johnson). Roger Blin considered staging it in the early 1950s, but opted for Waiting for Godot, because its smaller cast size made it easier to stage. At this point, Beckett suppressed the manuscript. Beckett later recycled the name "Krap" (with two Ps) for his play Krapp's Last Tape.

In 1985, Beckett's longtime American publisher, Barney Rosset, was fired after a buyout of Grove Press. Beckett offered to help Rosset, and proposed translating Eleutheria into English for him to publish, and gave him a copy of the manuscript. But according to the American edition of the play, Beckett was clearly reluctant to sanction publication of the work, and Rosset held off publication.

After Beckett's death in 1989, Rosset set out to publish Eleutheria in English. It was his view that, like other work that Beckett suppressed but eventually published, he would have changed his mind again had he lived. But Jérôme Lindon, Beckett's French publisher and literary executor, was against publication. After much wrangling and some legal threats, Lindon and the estate reluctantly allowed Rosset to publish, and issued their own edition in the original French. The estate will not grant performance licenses; however, a few private shows have been done.

The American edition, published in 1995 by Rosset's new company Foxrock, is translated by Michael Brodsky, himself a novelist and playwright. The first English translation had a mixed reception; one critic wrote "the new translation of the long unavailable play will delight Beckett scholars and aficionados alike" (playwright and journalist Jack Helbig writing in Booklist), but as might perhaps be expected the French publisher criticized the translation as "too American." It contained a few translation errors, such as the phrase Ton canotier avait un couteau, which is rendered as 'Your oarsman had a knife'; a canotier is a straw hat and couteau, here, means 'osprey feather'. A British edition was published in 1996 by Faber and Faber, translated by Barbara Wright.

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