Amid the profusion and diversity of responses to the work of Samuel Beckett, a sense of the ‘Beckettian’ has nevertheless emerged. Indeed, ‘Beckettian’ is so familiar a term that we feel we can use it without prior definition, both within and outside of academic discourse. It is evocative of desolation faced with grim resolution, hollow irony and bitter pessimism: ‘“You laughed in a Beckettian way because you see our relationship as a barren wasteland,” she retorted.’1 Because this very desolation is faced so squarely and mercilessly, Beckettian sometimes also gestures to willpower and courage: ‘Really, it all comes down to that Beckettian fortune cookie: try again, fail again, fail better.’2 Beckett’s ‘fortune cookie’ has even been enthusiastically taken up by Silicon Valley and the capitalist avant-garde: Richard Branson attributes the above soundbite from Worstward Ho to ‘the playwright, Samuel Beckett, but it could just as easily come from the mouth of yours truly’.3