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In 2036, the actor Samuel West will take to the stage to perform Krapp’s Last Tape – Samuel Beckett’s pensive monologue in which an old man, hunched over a reel-to-reel recorder, listens back to the voice of his younger self. West will be 69, the age of Krapp in the play. And remarkably, the tape he plays will feature the sound of himself as a younger man, recorded in 2006, when he was 39 – the age Krapp was on the night he made the recording. Two years later another actor, Richard Dormer, will do the same, using a similar recording that’s currently locked away in a BBC vault.

These are the most improbable commissions of the Samuel Beckett Biennale, which promises to deliver experimental “performed readings” of the playwright’s works in pockets of Ireland and Britain over the next 12 years. It is organised by Seán Doran and run through his cross-border organisation Arts Over Borders. Events will unfold at locations of significance to Beckett’s life and legacy – from Enniskillen, Belfast and Dublin to Folkestone, Reading and Snodland – tracing his footsteps across Britain and Ireland.

That the Biennale should claim him on both islands is apt. Best remembered for his absurdist and teasingly obscure stage plays – Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy Days – Beckett is considered one of Ireland’s finest exports, but a question mark has always hung over how Irish Beckett really was. After graduating from Trinity College Dublin in 1927, Beckett emigrated to Paris, never to live permanently in Ireland again. He didn’t set foot in the country for the last 21 years of his life, and is buried at Paris’s Montparnasse Cemetery. Remaining in France during the second world war, he wrote to his mother that he preferred France at war to Ireland at peace. He subsequently wrote several of his most-loved works, including Waiting for Godot and Endgame, in French before translating them into English – a fact that led the Irish literary critic Vivian Mercier to quip “Samuel Beckett is an Irishman but not an Irish writer”.

His sense of alienation from his homeland no doubt sprang from his upbringing as part of the ruling Protestant minority in an overwhelmingly Catholic country. Raised in the affluent Dublin suburb of Foxrock, he and his brother were sent away to boarding school in Enniskillen, and were studying there during the nation’s partition, when Enniskillen became part of the newly recognised Northern Ireland. The bitter fragmentation may well have influenced – as he put it – his “chronic inability to understand … a phrase like ‘the Irish people’”. It is no accident that the Biennale opens in Enniskillen.

But Beckett’s rejection of Ireland was more likely driven by the country’s theocracy, which he found stultifying. When clerical censorship demanded the removal of works by his contemporaries Seán O’Casey and James Joyce from the 1958 Dublin international theatre festival, Beckett responded by banning the country from staging his plays for two years.

London, meanwhile, couldn’t get enough of the arch pessimist’s bleak portraits of existential angst, with the Royal Court, the National Theatre and the West End’s Arts Theatre all staging his plays in the 50s and 60s. There, Beckett was a modernist before he was an Irishman: an absurdist, a European formalist, a writer of the universal human condition rather than of any particular country.

Still, scholars have pointed out the distinctly Irish traces in Beckett’s characters and landscapes. His 1956 radio play All That Fall is unquestionably set in Ireland. And when the first Gaelic translation and subsequent staging of Waiting for Godot was mounted in 1971, it was with the playwright’s blessing. It is also well documented that Beckett’s preference for writing in French was not a dismissal of his mother tongue but a desire to “write without style”, thereby achieving rawness and simplicity.

For most of Beckett’s life, the only Ireland on offer was the one he had fled: Catholic, censorious, hostile to the godless and difficult modernism he practised. A country that banned John McGahern’s coming-of-age novel The Dark for obscenity was never going to gather Beckett to its chest. But from the 1980s onwards, that Ireland was in retreat. The Church’s authority drained away, while membership of the European project, the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993 and the passage of divorce in 1995 remade the national self-image as secular, plural and outward-looking. As Ireland made its peace with doubt, exile and irony, it made its peace with Beckett. But Beckett did not edge back towards Ireland; Ireland edged towards him.

In 1985, Dublin’s Gate theatre staged a trilogy of Beckett’s postwar novels under the name I’ll Go On. But it was the following year, when the Gate’s artistic director Michael Colgan discovered that there was not a single Irish representative at a conference organised to mark Beckett’s 80th birthday in Paris, that he decided to take more definitive action. In 1991, the Gate held a Beckett festival staging all 19 of his plays. “It really felt as though it was a national conversation, and a national reclamation of one of our greatest writers,” recalls Anne Clarke, producer of Irish theatre company Landmark Productions, who was working at the Gate at the time.

With Beckett having died two years earlier in 1989, there could be no objections to such an initiative – so long as the plays were staged by the book. His estate is strictly managed by his nephew Edward. Not so much as a stage direction can be changed in professional productions of his works.

“That doesn’t restrict the possibilities of doing it differently,” says Doran, who established a trusting relationship with Edward while running the Biennale’s predecessor, the Happy Days Enniskillen international Beckett festival, from 2012 to 2022.

Doran has managed to get around the rigidity somewhat, thanks to the experimental, “laboratory” approach to the projects in his festival, which constitutes “performed readings” rather than full-scale productions. While the programme is still being fleshed out, two events have already taken place: a Krapp’s Last Tape held in Greystones in County Wicklow, in which the actor Malcolm Sinclair performed opposite an AI-generated recreation of his own younger voice, and an Ulster-Scots translation of Waiting for Godot performed in Derry.

Among the highlights still to come are Samuel West and Richard Dormer’s performances of Krapp’s Last Tape. “Beckett would never have expected it,” Doran says. Doran recalls West’s initial embarrassment listening back to his earlier recordings, and insisting this kneejerk reaction was exactly why he shouldn’t re-record; surely it’ll add flavour to the older Krapp’s embarrassment at the voice of his younger self if the actor is feeling something similar.

It was Doran who commissioned the pre-recorded tapes, asking the BBC to look after them over the 30-year wait. He’d originally wanted to record three actors. “I was hedging my bets,” he chuckles wryly. It’s a wise approach, not least because the third actor he approached was Philip Seymour Hoffman, who turned the request down long before his death in 2014. To plan a production three decades out is to gamble on the health of those involved.

“Richard is worried about that … He’s told me he smokes and drinks too much,” Doran half jokes. While he acknowledges they’re “over the halfway mark” now, 10 to 12 years is still an anxious wait. Despite not yet having dates or venues for the performances, extremely early-bird tickets have already gone on sale, hundreds of which have been bought.

In the meantime, you can watch the breathless monologue Not I, performed by the disembodied mouth of opera soprano Claire Booth, directed by former artistic director of the National Theatre Rufus Norris. “It’s incredibly rich and totally singular, unlike anything I had directed before. And fear is a great creative motivator,” says Norris. Not only is this the first time he’s directed a one-person performance, but it’s also his first Beckett. The production is running at Reading University, where Beckett’s archive is held, in September. Another talking point will be Love, Sam, a staging of Beckett’s letters in Wexford.

The 2028 biennale will be a more international affair. Doran is commissioning a Waiting for Godot involving four homeless actors from the countries represented by the play’s characters. Directed by the Portuguese documentary filmmaker Marco Martins, it will feature a French Estragon, a Slavic Vladimir, an Italian Pozzo and an English Lucky.

With his work still staged and celebrated across the continent – and now claimed, in his own Biennale, by Britain and Ireland at once – perhaps Beckett is best remembered not as Mercier’s “Irishman but not an Irish writer”, but as something the man himself might have found easier to live with: a quintessential Irish European.

Not I is on at Reading University, 19 to 20 September. Krapp’s Last

Tape is on at the Théâtre de la Ville,

Paris, 3 to 7 November.