in staging the play, he found that he was unable to place the Auditor in a stage position that pleased him, and consequently allowed the character to be omitted from those productions. However, he chose not to cut the character from the published script, and whether or not the character is used in production seems to be at the discretion of individual producers. As he wrote to two American directors in 1986: "He is very difficult to stage (light--position) and may well be of more harm than good. For me the play needs him but I can do without him. I have never seen him function effectively." In the 1978 Paris production he did reinstate the character but from then on abandoned the image concluding, as he had once said, that it was perhaps "an error of the creative imagination." It has been suggested that the image of the Auditor was inspired by the image of a djellaba-clad "intense listener" seen from a café in Tunis; Beckett was in Morocco for a month from February to March 1972. James Knowlson conjectures that this "figure coalesced with [Beckett’s] sharp memories of the Caravaggio painting" mentioned above. In this painting there "is an old woman standing to Salome's left. She observes the decapitation with horror, covering her ears rather than her eyes" a gesture that Beckett added in the 1978 Paris production. When Schneider questioned him as to whether the Auditor was Death or a guardian angel, Beckett shrugged his shoulders, lifted his arms and let them fall to his sides, leaving the ambiguity wholly intact. Significant productions 22 November 1972 Forum Theatre, Lincoln Center, New York, directed by Alan Schneider, with Jessica Tandy (Mouth) and Henderson Forsythe (Auditor): Various dates have been offered for the first performance of the play from September (quoted in the Faber text) to December 1972. The review in the Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1 (March 1973), pp. 102–104 states the date as 1 November. The date above however is from Damned to Fame (p. 592) by James Knowlson who was Beckett’s friend for over twenty years and is regarded as an international authority on the man. It is also the date given in The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett. Jessica Tandy found the experience of acting Not I terrifying. At first she had problems remembering the text and had to rely on a TelePrompTer