During the late 1950s when staying in London, Beckett often met with Barbara Bray, at the time a script-editor with the BBC. A small and attractive widow in her thirties, she was also intelligent and well read. “Beckett seems to have been immediately attracted to her and she to him. Their encounter was highly significant for them both, for it represented the beginning of a relationship that was to last, in parallel with that with of [his long-time partner] Suzanne, for the rest of his life.”[19] In short time their association became “a very intimate and personal one.”[20]
“In a visit to Paris in January 1961, Barbara ... informed Beckett that she intended to move [there] to live permanently”[21] “a move which had been discussed more than once with Sam.”[22] His response was unusual. In March he married Suzanne in a civil ceremony in the seaside town of Folkestone, England. Ostensibly this was to ensure if he died before her Suzanne would “inherit the rights to his work, since, under French law, there was no ‘common-law wife’ legislation … Or he may simply have wanted to affirm where his true loyalty lay. Whatever the reason, the marriage made it clear … that he was unwilling to leave the woman with whom he had already lived for more than twenty years.”[21]
For all that, in June 1961 Bray still decided to move and despite his recent marriage “[a]lmost every day [he went] round, often spending a good part of the day or a large part of the evening there.”[22] “Oddly enough, this side of his life was [not well] known about in Paris ... [Beckett’s] natural reserve and well-developed sense of decorum were allied to his fear of giving offence to Suzanne.”[23] Anthony Cronin notes that strangely – or perhaps not so strangely – during this time he was often to be found talking “fervently and seriously about suicide.”[24] Despite his unwillingness to do much about it he was clearly suffering badly from guilt.
To comply with the law Beckett “was obliged to be in residence in Folkestone for a minimum of two weeks to allow him to be married in the Registry Office there”[25] and this time spent there observing the locals may well have influenced the “middle class, English, ‘Home Counties’” setting of Play though James Knowlson also points to two visits to Sweetwater about the same time.[26] “Ash and Snodland” are both towns in Kent.[14]
An important point to mention here is that it was during the first London production that he encountered Billie Whitelaw for the first time. “Whitelaw’s deep brooding voice caught so many inflections that Beckett found himself at times listening to her instead of rehearsing the play.”[27]
