Back when I was with the Curtis Brown agency, one of my agents handled the Samuel Beckett estate and was regularly obliged to engage with theatre companies who wanted to revise or reinterpret the plays in some radical manner. At which point the producers usually put out a press release portraying her as an enemy of artistic freedom.

But Beckett was very specific in his instructions for what can and can’t be done with the material while it’s in copyright, and the basic position that she was obliged to take was, You want Sam’s license, you have to do it Sam’s way.

I just always thought it was funny to hear her call him Sam.