Beckett always referred to Waiting for Godot as his second play even though he never had any intensions of having Eleutheria ever produced. As such, for the sake of being a completist, I include my first play. I'd not even looked at it in almost twenty years and I only kept a copy because I keep a copy of everything I write.

Reading over it again I have to admit it shows its age. Or at least my age. It is of some interest because of two things: firstly, it presents two opposing characters, an old, cynical mid-management civil servant and a young, inexperienced clerical assistant and secondly, the dénouement, such as it is, climaxes in a hug; I had quite forgotten. Towards the end of Milligan and Murphy I wrote a very similar scene involving the two brothers and a prostitute.

When my daughter turned seventeen she expressed an interest in the theatre which pleased me. Not that she asked me to but I began to think about a piece she might get her teeth into should decide she was serious about the whole thing. As it happens she never pursued her interest after leaving school but that didn't stop me writing Living Will.

The idea behind the play was a simple enough one, a young girl in her early teens gets her hands on her dad's camcorder and sits down to record a message for the future. I imagined it very much as a Krapp's First Tape.

Whilst writing The More Things Change I absorbed myself utterly in the writings of Samuel Beckett, not that the novel copies his style, but so many of its elements are drawn from Beckett's work. When I finished the book my mind was still totally Beckett-logged. The result was a one-act play, a sequel to Waiting for Godot which finds the two protagonists dead and still waiting.

No one was more surprised than me when I wrote it. I took it very seriously and said not a word to anyone lest I jinx the thing. As little as a week later the play was done.

I wrote it as a radio play first of all because all I heard in my head were voices and it's still the way I think about the piece but afterwards, just to see if it was practicable, I added stage directions. The title is, of course, a nod to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead which itself is frequently compared to Waiting for Godot.