Editing Samuel Beckett (section)

===Late works===
{{Quote box |width=300px |lleft|quoted=true |bgcolor=#FFFFF0 |salign=center
 |quote =<poem>
time she stopped
sitting at her window
quiet at her window
only window
facing other windows
other only windows
all eyes
all sides
high and low
time she stopped
</poem> |source =From ''Rockaby'' (1980) }}
Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, Beckett's works exhibited an increasing tendency—already evident in much of his work of the 1950s—towards compactness. This has led to his work sometimes being described as [[minimalism|minimalist]]. The extreme example of this, among his dramatic works, is the 1969 piece ''[[Breath (play)|Breath]]'', which lasts for only 35 seconds and has no characters (though it was likely intended to offer ironic comment on ''[[Oh! Calcutta!]]'', the theatrical [[revue]] for which it served as an introductory piece).<ref>Knowlson (1997) p501</ref>

[[File:Samuel Beckett DCP 1341.JPG|thumb|left|upright|Portrait by [[Reginald Gray (artist)|Reginald Gray]]]]
In his theatre of the late period, Beckett's characters—already few in number in the earlier plays—are whittled down to essential elements. The ironically titled ''[[Play (play)|Play]]'' (1962), for instance, consists of three characters immersed up to their necks in large funeral urns. The television drama ''[[Eh Joe]]'' (1963), which was written for the actor [[Jack MacGowran]], is animated by a camera that steadily closes into a tight focus upon the face of the title character. The play ''[[Not I]]'' (1972) consists almost solely of, in Beckett's words, "a moving mouth with the rest of the stage in darkness".<ref>Quoted in Knowlson (1997) p522</ref> Following from ''Krapp's Last Tape'', many of these later plays explore memory, often in the form of a forced recollection of haunting past events in a moment of stillness in the present. They also deal with the theme of the self-confined and observed, with a voice that either comes from outside into the protagonist's head (as in ''Eh Joe'') or else another character comments on the protagonist silently, by means of gesture (as in ''Not I''). Beckett's most politically charged play, ''[[Catastrophe (play)|Catastrophe]]'' (1982), which was dedicated to [[Václav Havel]], deals relatively explicitly with the idea of dictatorship. After a long period of inactivity, Beckett's poetry experienced a revival during this period in the ultra-terse French poems of ''mirlitonnades'', with some as short as six words. These defied Beckett's usual scrupulous concern to translate his work from its original into the other of his two languages; several writers, including [[Derek Mahon]], have attempted translations, but no complete version of the sequence has been published in English.

Beckett's late style saw him experiment with technology to create increasingly transdisciplinary works. This sampling of a range of artistic mediums and styles – classical music, painting, sculpture, television, and literature – to create a new and original form, or genre, is evident in his television plays. In works like ''[[Ghost Trio (play)|Ghost Trio]]'' (broadcast in 1977) and ''[[Nacht und Träume (play)|Nacht und Träume]]'' (broadcast in 1983) Beckett uses a musical frame (taking excerpts from [[Ludwig van Beethoven|Beethoven]] and [[Franz Schubert|Schubert]], respectively) to structure his text and borrows well-known images from art history to create evocative stills that suggest themes of longing, ambiguity, hope, and suffering. Such experimentation with genre, music, and the visual arts, characterises Beckett's work during the 1970s and '80s.<ref>Jeffery, Lucy, ''[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Transdisciplinary-Beckett-Creative-Process-Company/dp/3838215842/ref=sr_1_7?qid=1705931575&refinements=p_27%3ALucy+Jeffery&s=books&sr=1-7&text=Lucy+Jeffery Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process]''. London; Hannover: ibidem, 2021. (pp. 165-231)</ref>

Beckett's prose pieces during the late period were not as prolific as his theatre, as suggested by the title of the 1976 collection of short prose texts ''Fizzles'' (which the American artist [[Jasper Johns]] illustrated). Beckett experienced something of a renaissance with the novella ''[[Company (short story)|Company]]'' (1980), which continued with ''[[Ill Seen Ill Said]]'' (1982) and ''[[Worstward Ho]]'' (1983), later collected in ''[[Nohow On]]''. In these three {{"'}}closed space' stories,"<ref>''Nohow On'', vii</ref> Beckett continued his pre-occupation with memory and its effect on the confined and observed self, as well as with the positioning of bodies in space, as the opening phrases of ''Company'' make clear: "A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine." "To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said."<ref>''Nohow On'', 3</ref> Themes of aloneness and the doomed desire to successfully connect with other human beings are expressed in several late pieces, including ''[[Company (short story)|Company]]'' and ''[[Rockaby]]''.

In the hospital and nursing home where he spent his final days, Beckett wrote his last work, the 1988 poem "What is the Word" ("Comment dire"). The poem grapples with an inability to find words to express oneself, a theme echoing Beckett's earlier work, though possibly amplified by the sickness he experienced late in life.