Gontarski, who requested a dramatic piece to be performed at an academic symposium in Columbus, Ohio, in honour of Beckett’s seventy-fifth birthday.
It was first performed on 9 May 1981 at the Stadium II Theater; Alan Schneider directed with David Warrilow as "Reader" and Rand Mitchell as "Listener".
The characters "could have been borrowed from Rembrandt"[4] or from Gerard ter Borch's Four Spanish Monks [5] although no specific painting was suggested by Beckett himself as an inspiration.
The narrative, written in the past tense, tells a story of someone, possibly Listener himself, who in a “last attempt to obtain relief”[3] following the loss of a loved one, moves away to the Isle of Swans, a place where they never had been together.
In doing this he completely disregards their warning, when they appeared to him in a dream: “Stay where we were so long alone together, my shade will comfort you.”[10] He soon realises that he has made “a terrible mistake.
He explains that he has been sent by the man’s loved one to bring him comfort, at which point he pulls “a worn volume from the pocket of his long black coat and [reads from it] till dawn”,[12] after which he vanishes without another word.
For a time the two, who through the many nights of readings had grown “to be as one”,[13] sit on in silence buried in “profounds of mind … as though turned to stone”.
I’ve even imagined myself trudging out to her grave.”[18] “When he wrote Ohio Impromptu [his wife] was eighty years old [and although for some time they lived quite separate lives they] had nonetheless remained a couple for over forty years”[17] and “the thought of Suzanne dying was intolerable to him.”[19] The character in the story is plagued by night terrors and insomnia, as was Beckett.
[21] The title of the play deserves some comment: Ohio Impromptu is a “straightforwardly descriptive [title], marking occasion and genre – impromptus à la Molière and Giraudoux (which were metatheatrical or self-reflexive exercises) – or more like the intricate little solo pieces Schubert, Chopin and Schumann called impromptus.
Beckett theatre specialist Anna McMullan claims that "[i]n both Rockaby and Ohio Impromptu the speaking of the text becomes a rite of passage which enacts a transformation – from loss to comfort, from life to death and from speech to silence.
"As with Company, the author again returns to a theme he has portrayed many times, that loneliness and nostalgia are too personal, after a certain age, to be shared with any being other than oneself.
The location may have had a certain meaning for Beckett-the-person but Beckett-the-writer chose it more for its geographical features, the two rivers merging into one and also the fact that a smaller version of the Statue of Liberty stands on the isle representing the literal New World that Ohio is part of and the metaphorical new world that Listener moves to.
"[27] The divided self[28] is a common means of approach to Beckettian texts and has been applied to Krapp’s Last Tape, Footfalls, That Time and even Waiting for Godot.
"[29] Others suggest that Reader is the "shade", some kind of spectral emissary, despatched by Listener’s dead lover to help him through the grieving process.
In Charles Sturridge's 2002 film adaptation of Ohio Impromptu for the Beckett on Film project, modern cinematic techniques allowed Reader and Listener to both be played by the same actor (Jeremy Irons), literally fulfilling Beckett's instruction that the two characters should be "as alike in appearance as possible" and following the interpretation that they are really elements in the one personality.
Anna McMullan criticized this filmic interpretation of Ohio Impromptu as being "led once again by a psychologized approach to performance [since] Jeremy Irons plays both parts and the ‘ghost’ fades away at dawn".