When I began conducting interviews for Beckett in performance, I had no intention of publishing the transcripts as a collection. I intended only to compile primary material for a critical study, asking the same or similar questions of many actors and directors in order to collect a broad range of opinion on a number of controversial topics. In the course of conducting them, however, I discovered that many of the interviews were interesting in their own right, constituting conversations of publishable quality that augmented as well as supported the critical work. The following selected excerpts overlap at a few points with passages already quoted, but all of these bear repeating in their original, conversational contexts, both out of fairness to the artists and because these contexts reveal other meanings than the ones already pointed out.

All the transcripts have been edited and approved by the interviewees, and I have limited their brief introductions to lists of Beckett productions, the dates beside the titles being those of the premieres. In the case of Mabou Mines it is misleading to assign definite dates to productions, because that company's pieces evolve in performance over a span of time that often extends before and after the official premieres. Rather than giving no date at all for these productions, however, I have used in most cases the dates listed as premieres in a “Performance History” kindly provided me by the Mabou Mines Development Foundation, Inc.