Waiting for Godot. London: Faber & Faber, 1956. First U.K. Edition, First Issue. With publisher’s note tipped-in. Pp, 94. Yellow cloth boards with title in red with original pictorial dust jacket. Off-setting to endpapers, jacket chipped with a little loss to head of spine, otherwise a nice bright copy.

A unique copy, with manuscript notes on the London stage debut, by Margaret Braund, with her ownership signature dated 1956 to front endpaper. 

Contains extensive contemporary notes by former owner Margaret Braund on the rear endpapers.  She recorded first-night audience reactions to the London production of the play  directed by Peter Hall, noting “yawns, ironic laughs, audience walking out attacked” and “interminable evening.”

An important association copy, of one of the most celebrated plays in modern theatre, with extensive contemporary manuscript notes chronicling British theatre goers first impressions of Godot.

Waiting for Godot – which has been famously described as a play in which nothing happens twice– scarcely seems recognisable as theatre at all. One memorable critical review by Benedict Nightingale commented:

(Margaret Braund taught at the Central School of Speech and Drama and at the ArtsEd drama schools in London).