The Guardian reports on the Samuel Beckett Biennale, an ambitious 12-year festival organised by Seán Doran through his cross-border organisation Arts Over Borders, which aims to reclaim the playwright as a figure of both Ireland and Britain. Staging experimental "performed readings" at locations significant to Beckett's life — from Enniskillen, Belfast and Dublin to Folkestone, Reading and Snodland — the festival reframes a writer long regarded as one of Ireland's greatest exports yet never quite an "Irish writer". Its most striking commissions have already put tickets on sale for 2036 and beyond.

Among those headline events, the actor Samuel West will perform Krapp's Last Tape in 2036 at the age of 69 (Krapp's own age), playing back a recording of his own voice made in 2006 when he was 39 — the age at which the character taped himself; two years later Richard Dormer will do the same using a recording held in a BBC vault. The article traces Beckett's complex relationship with Ireland: born into the Protestant minority in affluent Foxrock, schooled in Enniskillen during partition, he emigrated to Paris after graduating from Trinity College Dublin in 1927 and never lived there permanently again, writing works such as Waiting for Godot in French and once banning Ireland from staging his plays over clerical censorship. It notes that as Ireland grew more secular from the 1980s — with the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993 and divorce in 1995 — the country moved back towards Beckett, a shift marked by the Gate theatre's 1991 festival of all 19 of his plays.