A Dream and Its Legacy

This book tells the fascinating history of the plans to build an innovative theatre in Samuel Beckett's name in Oxford, the site by St Peter's College, the designs and the problems. It is a narrative which takes in artists such as Francis Bacon and Henry Moore, famed architects Norman Foster and Richard Buckminster Fuller, politicians and royalty including Edward Heath, Richard Kennedy and Prince Charles, as well as a range of playwrights, composers, actors and directors (including Benjamin Britten, Richard Burton, Peter Hall, John Osborne, Harold Pinter, John Piper, Kathleen Raine, Sir Herbert Read, to name a few). Beckett's influence upon British theatre and culture is often dispersed, refracted. A Dream and its Legacies reveals a number of surprising, interwoven histories, and shows how such histories also have the power to inform, even drastically change, how we read certain of Beckett's texts. The book includes a collection of previously unpublished letters by Samuel Beckett.