Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Drama

McMullan, Anna

doi:10.4324/9781003060611

Cited by 8 publications

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“…Ridout, 2006;Bailes, 2011), we could conclude that Beckett's treatment of failure takes on a number of ambiguous and indeterminate roles within culture, many of which directly contradict each other or cancel themselves out. This, of course, is imbued with Beckett's own sense of creative failure as a writer who composed drafts across multiple manuscripts, generating texts that resisted simplistic interpretations and in turn encouraged theatre artists to 'vaguen' his writing in performance as a special condition of their embodiment (Pountney, 1988;McMullan, 2010).…”

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Heron¹

2021

Journal of Beckett Studies

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Recalling Beckett's treatment of failure ( Three Dialogues, 1949; Worstward Ho, 1983), this article considers ‘fidelity to failure’ as a performative and political issue. In dealing with both the aesthetics and ethics of Beckett's failure, the article is informed by recent publications and events within the field ( Kenny ; Morin ; Maprayil; 2020 ). These interventions build upon a body of literature on Beckett ( McMullan, 1994 ; Calder, 2001 ; Anderton, 2016 ; Thomas, 2018) and culture ( Bersani and Dutoit, 1993 ; Ridout, 2006 ; Bailes, 2011 ; Halberstam, 2011 ). The article examines the phenomenon of failure within Beckettian production and wider ethical implications surrounding the (mis)appropriations of ‘failing better’. Having established the uses – and misuses – of this phrase, the article proceeds in three interlinked parts: a) experimental failure in the theatre work, from Beckett's own practice of generative failure in rehearsals (e.g. Play, 1964; dir. Devine) through to his legacy in experimental theatre cultures; b) performance more broadly, including intersections with disability culture (e.g. Not I, 2017; dir. Pountney) and public acts of failure within contemporary politics, from Brexit in Europe to the US Presidential Election; c) communities that enact Beckett's writing online, intersecting with the ‘queer art of failure’ ( Halberstam, 2011 ) and Black Lives Matter ( West, 2020 ).

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Section: Try Againmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Heron¹

2021

Journal of Beckett Studies

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“…I'm interested in the plurality and complexity of embodiment in both writers' work, where the binary between the live body and the textual or visual body is breached because, as I have argued elsewhere in relation to Beckett's later dramaturgy, the subject is both embodied and also generates embodiments which may be written, staged, imagined, ghostly or fantasmatic. 7 So the third dialogue looks at approaches to theatre and performance across both writers' late work. Nonetheless, I am wary of presenting a linear narrative chronology because there are also many connections and correspondences across these different dialogues.…”

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Barthes, Beckett and the Theatre: Three Dialogues

McMullan¹

2022

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Although Roland Barthes never wrote a play, ‘theatre’ or related terms such as ‘scenario’ or ‘theatricality’ recur throughout his oeuvre from the 1950s to the late 1970s. He wrote many reviews of theatre, but theatre and performance also became integral to much of the theoretical concerns of his later work. During this same period, Samuel Beckett’s dramaturgy was evolving from his first full-length play, Eleutheria, to the later ‘dramaticules’ such as Not I, which premiered in 1973. Barthes did comment on Beckett a few times in his theatre criticism, mainly in relation to En attendant Godot or avant-garde theatre, but there is little overt interchange between them. However, this essay creates a series of ‘dialogues’ by juxtaposing selected plays from different moments in Beckett’s dramaturgical evolution with different moments in Barthes’s writings about theatre: firstly, the reaction against and deconstruction of post-war mainstream French theatre; secondly, theatre’s engagement with history; and thirdly, performance as a paradigm and site for staging multiple versions of the self.

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Samuel Beckett and the Language of Subjectivity

Tubridy

2018

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How It Is and What Where After L'Innommable Beckett found himself at an impasse. In a letter to Aidan Higgins in February , Beckett indicates that the novel marks an endpoint in his writing, 'there being nobody left to utter and,. .. nothing left to utter about' (LII ).  L'Innommable 'seems about the end of the jaunt as far as I am concerned', he asserts.  Just over a week later, writing to Bram and Geer van Velde's sister, Jacoba van Velde, Beckett elaborates on his predicament: 'I haven't been able to do anything since L'Innommable. It's the bottom of the barrel. Perhaps you'll understand why when you read it. I twist and turn, but to no purpose' (LII ).  These twistings and turnings would become Beckett's thirteen Textes pour rien, short prose pieces 'torn off the placenta of L'Innommable ',  begun, in fact, over a year before those letters were written.  In addition, Beckett undertook freelance work, translating Octavio Paz's Anthology of Mexican Poetry for UNESCO, and Georges Duthuit's study Les Fauves. He was also reading and translating Maurice Blanchot's work, an interest which began in  when Duthuit sent him one of Blanchot's articles.  By  Beckett had read Blanchot's Lautréamont et Sade (), commenting that there are 'some very good things in it. A few tremendous quotations that I did not know, in the style of the one I knocked up for you from the  Days. Hard to single out one passage to translate, but I managed to and started on it' (LII ).  Beckett began to translate Blanchot's book, announcing to Duthuit on  January : 'I have finished the Blanchot. It makes  pages of

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Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Drama

Cited by 8 publications

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Barthes, Beckett and the Theatre: Three Dialogues

Samuel Beckett and the Language of Subjectivity

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