WHEN Bettina Jonic breezed into town, I met her for a quick coffee in Fitzer's on Dawson Street. The Yugoslavia-born singer is in Dublin for a few days to discuss the sale of the letters exchanged between herself and Samuel Beckett until his death in 1989. Bettina, who met the playwright through her ex-husband, Beckett publisher John Calder, first received a note from Beckett in 1958 when they were both resident in Paris, and their correspondence, continued throughout a time at which he and Jonic were "very close".
After time spent working with director Peter Brook in Paris, she is now resident in London, and is director of the Little Garden, a charity that evolved out of the work she was doing with actor and singer development in the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. She has staged a number of prestigious soirees in the past and is currently working on a reading of Beckett's Stirring Still and Oscar Wilde's De Profundis by actor Alan Rickman. Rickman, who is half-Irish, is working on bringing the piece to Dublin after its London showing in the autumn.