Beckett's Theatre Research Articles

Posture de la prière, écriture de la précarité (, et ……)

Samuel Beckett's works describe many postures. One of them is particularly interesting and helps us to analyse some major problems: the praying posture. In Beckett's prose, theatre or TV plays, especially in the last works, we find obsessive, strange or comic invocations which mix spectral figures and body or memory fragments. In and ……, images of prayer are like furtive apparitions. They may also be signs of a paradoxical and ambiguous view on writing.

Samuel Beckett's Theater: Liminal Subjects and the Politics of Perception

Samuel Beckett's Theater: Liminal Subjects and the Politics of Perception

Beckett and Aesthetics (review)

Reviewed by: Beckett and Aesthetics Linda Ben-Zvi Beckett and Aesthetics. By Daniel Albright. London: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. 188. $65.00 cloth. Daniel Albright's Beckett and Aesthetics is one of those books that is so well written, so erudite—despite its brevity—so brimming with intelligent comments, interesting juxtapositions, and new points of departure, that even a reader like myself, not in agreement with some of his contentions and conclusions, can welcome it as an important addition to Beckett studies. Albright divides his discussion into three parts: "Stage: resisting furniture"; "Tape recorder, radio, film, television: resisting the human image"; and "Music: losing the will to resist." Rather than argue, as many scholars have, that Beckett was fascinated with the possibilities of new technology, Albright contends that Beckett's writings reflect the writer's conscious attempts to use technological forms "in deliberately awkward ways," the better to foreground not the potential of media but their "muteness, incompetence, non-feasance of transmission" (2). Albright ties Beckett's aesthetics directly to Surrealism. "Beckett spent his whole life under the spell of the Surrealist Exhibit," and "his instincts were Surrealist" (9), he states categorically in his introduction, "Beckett and Surrealism." He points out the family resemblances: that Beckett, like the surrealists, fractures planes and bodies, calls media used into question, and ironizes artistic struggles. Although Albright does not doggedly read Beckett through Duchamp, Breton, or other specific surrealists, as the title and assertions seem to promise or threaten, and although he says that Beckett tried to remain both "inside and outside of the Surrealism" (9), he does draw analogies between certain Beckett fictions and those executed by surrealist writers, [End Page 362] pointing out, however, that "only in Beckett's texts do the words feel like chunks of rock crumbling off friable surfaces, fragments of eroded grace" (210), an illustration of Albright's own grace with language and imagery as well as Beckett's. He also invokes the paintings of Magritte, Ernst, Tanguy, de Chiroco, and Mondrian to describe Beckett's theatre: "If a Beckett play were a painting, it would consist of Mondrian grids disfigured with splashes and spatters" (92); or "if Ghost Trio is a play at all, it is closer to Mondrian than to Strindberg, just a game with superimposed rectangles—the visual system is detaching itself from every human meaning" (136). Looking as he does at Beckett's dramas through surrealist lenses, even worn lightly on the nose, Albright tends to see structures, not people—Ghost Trio is "just a game"—and assumes that any citing of human beings in such "non-representational art" are only "flimsy, jury-rigged theatrical conveniences, all dreck and bricolage" (25). Or ooze. Albright graphically describes how everything and everyone "oozes" in Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot, and Endgame;the latter "burbles off into semi-narrative meta-undrama, play-ooze, before it stops dead" (65). All ooze in Beckett's world, according to Albright, but women seem to do it more and assume grotesque shapes. He sees Maddy in All That Fall, as "feeble, ignorant . . . a puddle of flab" (104); Winnie in Happy Days as a "mons-ster . . . kewpie Venus" whose sex organs are "dilated, engorged into a whole hot universe, a hideous jumble" (73); and M in Not I as a mouth whose "memories of rape are abstracted into a word-chase delivered by a clownishly isolated pair of lips" (6). Often Albright totally evacuates characters from the plays, describing Play as "a dazzling light show" (6), Footfalls as "a mode of reading" (80) foisted on the drama, and Rough for Radio II as a search for "a formula that will absorb all talk into écriture and thereby permit silence" (114). He also argues that there is no Joe in the television play Eh Joe, but rather "a technical simulacrum of a human being" (129), dissolving in the final close-up into "the flimsy pattern of dark and light dots on the screen" (129). While all Beckett's characters are fluid, mutating, and, especially in the later plays, presented as partial bodies, distorted in the manner of surrealist paintings, Albright—whose orientation is literature, music, and aesthetics, not live performance—seems...

"IT'S NOT MY FAULT SIR": The Child, Presence and Stage Space in Beckett's Theatre

This article examines the doubtful status of the Boy in as a 'character', and relates this to questions of the reduction of character as representation, the idea of being on stage as 'presence', and the relation of stage space to an off-stage. Exploring what it means for the Boy to be a child, seen as something secondary and dependent, will shed some light on these classic questions of criticism of Beckett's theatre.

THE RESISTANCE OF SEEING IN BECKETT'S DRAMA: Self-Perception and Becoming Imperceptible

It is widely assumed that perception is intrinsically implicated in the issue of existence in Beckett's theatre. In particular, the Beckettian act of seeing and the motion of the eye defy the binary opposition between the visible and the invisible. Krapp's gaze directed toward the darkness behind him () or the doubleness revealed by E's relentless stare into O (), for example, demand reformation of the ontological conception based on the dichotomy of presence and absence. By focusing on the complex interplay of the seeing and the seen in , I shall explore how Beckett problematises the perceiving/perceived connection.

‘A theatre of ruins’. Edward Bond and Samuel Beckett: theatrical antagonists

The playwright Edward Bond has long made known his antagonism to dramatists allied to Martin Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd. The work of Samuel Beckett has come in for particular criticism by Bond. Using published writings (and unpublished correspondence between myself and Bond), I hope to trace the development of this antagonism between ‘Bondian’ and ‘Beckettian’ views of theatre. However, this article will also set out to argue that both early work such as The Pope's Wedding (1962), and more recent work such as Coffee (1995), make use of motifs, characters and ideas from Beckett's theatre. The article will set out provisional reasons why Bond, despite his misgivings, is not averse to incorporating elements from Beckett's ‘theatre of ruins’, as he terms it, into his own work.

CRITIQUE AND FORM: Adorno on Godot and Endgame

The most common criticism of Beckett's theatre is its supposed obscu rity. Early defenders of Godot and Endgame were themselves criti cised as formalists for their inability to say what these plays were 'about' or 'meant'. Adorno's theory of the modernist artwork ex plained the historical development of art's opaque content and Beck ett's own reluctance to explain his plays, solving an impasse in Beck ett criticism with his account of the new historical role of aesthetic form as critique.

Critique and Form: Adorno on and

The most common criticism of Beckett's theatre is its supposed obscurity. Early defenders of and were themselves criticised as formalists for their inability to say what these plays were 'about' or 'meant'. Adorno's theory of the modernist artwork explained the historical development of art's opaque content and Beckett's own reluctance to explain his plays, solving an impasse in Beckett criticism with his account of the new historical role of aesthetic form as critique.

Dionysus since 69: Greek tragedy at the dawn of the third millennium

1. Introduction: Why Greek tragedy since the late 1960s? 1. DIONYSUS AND THE SEX WAR 2. Dionysus in '69 3. Bad women: gender politics in late twentieth-century performance and revision of Greek tragedy 4. Heracles as Dr Strangelove and GI Joe: male heroism deconstructed 2. DIONYSUS IN POLITICS 5. Sophocles' Philoctetes, Seamus Heaney's, and some other recent half-rhymes 6. Aeschylus, race, class, and war in the 1990s 7. Greek tragedy in cinema: theatre, politics, history 8. Greek drama and anti-colonialism: decolonising Classics 3. DIONYSUS AND THE AESTHETICS OF PERFORMANCE 9. The use of masks in modern performances of Greek tragedy 10. Greek notes in Samuel Beckett's theatre art 11. Greek Tragedy in late twentieth-century opera 4. DIONYSUS AND THE LIFE OF THE MIND 12. Oedipus in the East End: from Freus to Berkoff 13. Thinking about the origins of theatre in the 1970s 14. The voices we hear 15. Details of productions discussed

Shades of Beckett

Friedman, Alan Warren. Ed. Beckett in Black and Red: The Translations for Nancy Cunard's Negro (1934). University Press of Kentucky, 2000. xi + 207 pp. $34.95. Worth, Katharine. Samuel Beckett's Theatre: Life Journeys. Oxford University Press, 1999. 216 pp. $21.95. Here are two very different books on Beckett which, taken together, allow one to grasp the reasons why Beckett exerts today such a growing fascination among students, critics and researchers. These two books can begin to bridge the gap between textual studies focusing on Beckett as a translator, with their emphasis on the early prose and poems, and the detailed analyses of his theatrical experiments often starting from Beckett's production and rehearsal notebooks to end up discussing the endlessly varied adaptations his plays have elicited. The former book gives a good view of a young Beckett struggling between idioms and cultures (he was barely twenty-seven when he translated these articles), whereas the latter offers moving and sharp glimpses of Beckett in the last ten years of his life. The books are also different in tone and style. Friedman's book presents a complete file, the sixty three thousand words of translations from the French made by Beckett for the notorious Negro Anthology. Worth's book reminisces about her experiences as a director of a number of plays, moving back and forth in a "life journey" through a corpus that she knows intimately, reads closely and organizes thematically (most chapters are devoted to topics such as rhythm, scenery, ghosts, memory, and forgetting), Both books testify to the power of friendship: Friedman highlights the enduring friendship of Beckett and Nancy Cunard, which lasted until Cunard's death in 1965. Worth testifies to the friendship between the author and Beckett that provides a vivid personal connection. Worth started a correspondence with Beckett in 1975, met him a year later, and then saw a lot of him in London, Paris, Dublin, and elsewhere in the following years until she paid him a last poignant visit just one month before he died in 1989. Beckett's translations from the French cannot be understood without an awareness of the project of the Negro Anthology, and Friedman does a great job at sketching the complex personality of [End Page 161] Nancy Cunard. She is mainly known to Beckett readers as the publisher of "Whoroscope," a publication crowned with a prize she provided, and which if it did not yet launch Beckett's career helped him gain confidence as a poet at a crucial early stage. However, accounts and impressions diverge when it comes to her life's most ambitious project, an anthology whose aim was to record "the struggles and achievements, the persecutions and the revolts against them; of the Negro peoples." This huge program entailed reconstructing a whole history of the black people, in and out of Africa, documenting in detail customs, arts, cultures and political vistas of an incredible magnitude. Her own agenda was activist, as she was agitating against racial discrimination in the United States, and was moving closer to the Communist party—all of which explains why she was soon disinherited by her rich family. Anthropologists, historians, sociologists, musicologists, poets, journalists were enlisted—one counts a hundred and fifty contributors, among whom one discovers Zora Neale Hurston, Alan Locke, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois (with "Black America"), Walter White, Countee Cullen, next to William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound (on Frobenius), Louis Zukofsky, Carol Rakosi, Theodore Dreiser, Michael Gold and many others. Beckett did not contribute any original material but was in charge of the contributions from the French contingent made up of the "Surrealist group" as such, but more particularly the contributions from Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, and a few historians, critics and ethnographers specializing in African culture. Needless to say, such a direct involvement should bring new perspectives to the ongoing debate about Beckett's elusive political stance. In so far as this was a sort of compensated assignment...

Review: Samuel Beckett's Theatre: Life Journeys * Katherine Worth: Samuel Beckett's Theatre: Life Journeys

Journal Article Review: Samuel Beckett's Theatre: Life Journeys Katherine Worth : Samuel Beckett's Theatre: Life Journeys Get access Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 38, Issue 2, April 2002, Page 240, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/38.2.240-b Published: 01 April 2002

‘There's Our Catastrophe’: Empathy, Sacrifice, and the Stageing of Suffering in Beckett's Theatre

In his seminalThe Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin suggested that Samuel Beckett, in denying his characters individualized facets of humanity, achieved an ‘alienation effect’ that was more profound and assured than Brecht's. Here, Michael David Fox, while agreeing that Beckett denies actors and audiences the kinds of identification achieved in naturalistic drama through Stanislavskian techniques, argues that he demands a different quality of empathy from his audiences – not through the artifice of a character's simulated pain but through the actuality of the performer's physical suffering. While analyzing the demands and constraints upon actors which Beckett imposes in his better-known plays, he also re-evaluates the more ‘occasional’ pieceCatastrophe– written in 1982 ostensibly as a homage to the then-imprisoned Czech playwright Vaclav Havel – less as a critique of political terror than as an ironic and devastating self-critique of the terror of Beckett's own tragic representation. Michael David Fox is a doctoral student in drama and critical theory in the Joint Doctoral Program in Drama at the University of California, Irvine and the University of California, San Diego. His dissertation is on the production of empathy in Shakespeare's tragedies. He wishes to thank Robert Weimann, Wolfgang Iser, and Gabriele Schwab for their helpful and generous comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Samuel Beckett's Theatre: Life Journeys by Katharine Worth (review)

Samuel Beckett's Theatre: Life Journeys by Katharine Worth (review)

Samuel Beckett's theatre: life journeys

Note to the Reader Our Life Journeys in Beckett's Theatre: An Introduction Cosmic Scenery Heaven, Hell, and the Space Between Lifelines: Humour and Homely Sayings Taking the Life Journey and Telling It Be Again, Memory! Shared Words: The Camaraderie of Quotation Rhythms Magnetic Beckett Company Notes Index

Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Theater and Prose

Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Theater and Prose

In search of 'lessness': translation and minimalism in Beckett's theatre

In search of 'lessness': translation and minimalism in Beckett's theatre

Missing Persons: Character and Characterization in Modern Drama by William Gruber

300Comparative Drama ceedingly scholastic, and probably definitive biography of Wilde by Richard Ellmann stands as a silent rebuke to the aberrant publication here under review. JAMES COAKLEY Northwestern University William Gruber. Missing Persons: Character and Characterization in Modern Drama. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 222. $40.00. At a time when notions of the unified self have become increasingly untenable, a book that purports to "restore [the study of] character to dramatic criticism" (p. 2) is likely to encounter difficulties. But inasmuch as William Gruber focuses on character in modern drama as the definition or redefinition of "subjectivity, identity, [and] selfhood" on the stage (p. 1), readers may feel that he sets out to "restore" to dramatic criticism a central component of its discourse. Rather than taking issue with recent critiques of the self, he demonstrates that these critiques are actually played out in dramas themselves and observes a continued centrality of the issue of character for theater criticism. The five chapters of this book are divided between the modern and the postmodern. The first two chapters argue that the modern theories of drama of Edward Gordon Craig and Bertolt Brecht "rewrite" what Gruber calls "the grammars by which agents are understood to act" (p. 10). The final three chapters then explore how the works of Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and Maria Irene Fornes "exemplify some of the problems that Brecht or Craig dealt with on more theoretical levels" (p. 10). In short, the intent is to demonstrate how the modern continues to provide the conceptual framework for the representation of character in postmodern drama. The analysis of Craig seems to be more innovative than the treatment of Brecht. Gruber coordinates a reading of Craig's essay "The Übermarionette" with an examination of his illustrations for the stage. Gruber contends that Craig consistently attempted to "discount psychological representation as the source of meaning in theatrical performance " and that Craig's conception of character resulted from a combined emphasis on artificial actors and on what he called the "kinetic stage" (p. 27). The departure from psychological representation, Gruber argues, is evident in the image of the marionette or "artificial actor" which "moves in accord with powers external to it" (p. 15). In Craig's conception, however, this departure is accentuated by a lack of mimetic component in the "kinetic stage"—a lack that Gruber identifies in the often insurmountable two-dimensionality of his designs for the theater. Consequently, the representation of character for Craig assumes Reviews301 a paradoxical dimension: while it is contingent upon external forces or environment, the environment he provides cannot be realized. Character thus remains thwarted, suspended and ghost-like. Since this characterdefining "space" remains undefined, Craig's illustrations "are studies in the attrition of individualized characters" and thus are "elaborate denials of the possibility of representing individual experience" (p. 46). Whereas pictorial art is crucial to the analysis of the representation of character in Craig, narrative art is crucial to Gruber's analysis of the complexities of Brecht's conception of character. While both theoreticians represent character as the product of external, material forces, Gruber notes that Brecht understands these forces as "the roles the world obliges one to play" (p. 59). For Gruber, the difference between pictorial and narrative structures in the theories of Craig and Brecht facilitates the social implications of the latter's conception of character. Indeed, Gruber maintains that Brecht's emphasis on the actor's difference from his or her role parallels the individual's relation to the roles he or she must play in daily life. With regard to the assessment of character and its representation in contemporary drama, Gruber thus implies that it is conceived either along pictorial or narrative lines, and that the more narrative its structure, the more socio-political the drama's implications. In the final three chapters Gruber seems increasingly interested in socio-political aspects and consequently the favoring of the narrative rather than pictorial representation of character. After emphasizing the resemblance between Beckett's theater and Craig's, Gruber then distances Thomas Bernhard from his usual association with Beckett. Bernhard is given a more Brechtian hue, and also it would appear that...

Power, Self, and Other: The Absurd in Boesman and Lena

As the substantive body of criticism about Samuel Beckett's theatre attests, it is difficult not to impose a variety of contexts onto his work.(1) Athol Fugard's theatre, alternatively, restricts and focuses one's perceptions so that it is difficult to see more than a single context. More simply put, an audience reads its world into Waiting for Godot, while it reads another world out of and Lena. The authors' respective uses of absurdity have led to this state of affairs. and Lena is as explicit a title as Waiting for Godot. In the latter title, as numerous others have pointed out, unidentified individuals are for God. Control of the individual's fate is placed outside his/her hands into those of a deity; human responsibility is diminished. Others have offered less useful biographical interpretations: Godot is named after a French cyclist, or is the French slang word for boot (Bair 382). While offering an additional dimension to the punning that Beckett indulges in, these latter correlations are not particularly useful for those seeking to explicate the play. Beckett has insisted that the meaning of the title is unimportant (Bair 382). Flippancy, mischievousness, or authorial right may be invoked to explain or support Beckett's position, but the play is an act of communication, a dramatic utterance, which begins with a statement of import. The gerund waiting in Beckett's title alerts the reader/audience to the fact that if the communicative act is to mean anything, if grammar means anything, the state of is both subject and action of Beckett's play. What does it mean to wait; what is it like to wait? The prepositional phrase that completes the title specifies whom (or what) one is for. It clarifies the subject and the act. and Lena is simply the names of two characters in a play inhabited by three. Obviously the lack of identification of the third individual gives these two more importance than the unnamed African. More specifically, Lena's song illustrates that is not merely a name, it is also a label and an identification of one's culture: Boesman is 'n / Maar hy dra 'n Hotnot hoed [Boesman is a / But he wears a Hottentot's hat] (184).(2) Bushman is a political label, for the Afrikaners use it as a general term of abuse against the Africans and coloureds. That wears a Hottentot's hat should not go unnoticed because a is considered less civilized, and so lower on the social scale, than a Hottentot. Boesman, therefore, can be said to spurn his identity and falsely attempt to assume another to (re)gain a sense of dignity, albeit in the discourse and practices prevalent in the white scale of values, not his own. Lena, on the other hand, seeks a definition of her being: the questions she poses in this regard link her to him, and he to her, as inextricably as does the simple coordinating conjunction of the title. Where seeks validation of his assumed identity through Lena, Lena craves a witness to her existence through Boesman. An important final point on the titles is the remaining abstraction in Beckett's because neither spatial nor temporal concerns come into play. Fugard's title is more spatially specific, as the assessment of the name indicates. Lena's exclamation of Mud! Swartkops! (143) fixes the location further--they are in the barren Swartkops region of the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Temporally, and Lena are at one stage in a long cycle of walks: Redhouse to Missionvale . . . Missionvale to Bethelsdorp. Back again to Redhouse . . . Then to Kleinskool. Kleinskool to Veeplaas. Veeplaas to here. First time. After that, Redhouse . . . Bethelsdorp, Korsten, Veeplaas, back here the second time. Then Missionvale again, Veeplaas, Korsten, and then here, now. (196) It is the walking, not the temporary stops in the towns, that is most important. The absurdity of their condition is found in this incessant, pointless, repetitive cycle of walks. …

Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Works by Gordon S. Armstrong

Reviews361 Gordon S. Armstrong, Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Works. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1990. Pp. 268. $42.50. This book is divided into three parts, the first devoted to Samuel Beckett, the second to Beckett and W. B. Yeats, and the third to Beckett and Jack B. Yeats, the poet's artist brother. It is illustrated with five very good color plates and six black and white reproductions representing works by Jack B. Yeats. According to the jacket copy (which I cite for its concision), "The author argues that Beckett rejected W. B. Yeats's elaborate symbology and dramaturgy, which stressed the evocative power of language, for a spare, gesture-oriented theater in which language functions in limited and essentially literal ways—a theater that owes its conventions, to a remarkable degree, to the paintings and writing of the younger Yeats brother." Though I would challenge the claim that in Beckett's theater "language functions in limited and essentially literal ways" (the author's formulation, see page 10) , such a comparative study of Beckett and the Yeats brothers (especially, from my point of view, Jack B. Yeats the painter) is potentially interesting, and Armstrong's book, with its color reproduction of Yeats' powerful Two Travellers (1942) on the cover, looks initially very promising. Two Travellers is bound to be highly evocative for readers of Beckett, who will readily associate the two eloquent figures and the distinctive and powerfully rendered landscape they inhabit with all those characters, from Mercier and Camier on, whom Beckett has unforgettably depicted "stravaguing the roads." It is all the more frustrating and disappointing therefore to discover that, despite the prominent position the painting occupies in the volume (it is reproduced again facing the title page), Two Travellers is subsequently and unaccountably ignored in the text, where it is never discussed. I have singled out the treatment of Two Travellers because it is a dramatic instance of what I find problematic about Armstrong's book as a whole, for Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Words, despite its initial promise, turns out to be a profound disappointment , and this is largely because the intuition that appears to have inspired it, which has to do with a certain "Irishness" in Beckett, and the occasional flashes of insight it contains, are never satisfactorily developed. Thus, as with Two Travellers, the author will, periodically, introduce a compelling image or provide a glimpse of a promising line of inquiry but then, instead of pursuing it, will immediately embark on an apparently unrelated and comparatively banal discussion in the course of which the reader's interest is rapidly and effectively dissipated. Let me give some examples. "I needed to know where the 'Irish-ness' of Beckett's characters originated," Armstrong writes in his preface, "and how to account for his personal antipathy towards Ireland and his literary sympathy for it" (p. 9). While Beckett's relationship to Ireland is no doubt far more complicated than this statement would allow, and while it would be on Beckett's own Irishness, as it is expressed in his oeuvre, rather than on the alleged "Irishness" of his characters that one might wish to focus, 362Comparative Drama it is nonetheless true that the "Irish question" is of crucial importance to the interpretation of Beckett's work, as Armstrong intuits. But the implicit interest of this intuition, which, given Beckett's inscrutability, not to mention his contrariness, would call for delicate handling, cannot and does not survive the kind of unrefined analogies that the author then proceeds to draw between the plays of W. B. and Jack B. Yeats and Beckett's theater. Thus the quest for the origin of the "Irish-ness" of Beckett's characters is submerged in a quite literal-minded pursuit and identification of "influence": so strong an imperative in Armstrong's book that it all but eclipses, when it does not undermine, his opposing claim that Beckett actually rejected the symbolism of W. B. Yeats' theater. A further instance of the failure to capitalize on a potentially interesting discovery occurs on page 34, where Armstrong, discussing the "extraordinary lengths" Yeats was...

On the Meaning of Performance in Samuel Beckett's Not I

It is now commonplace to remark on Beckett's penetrating use of the dramatic medium. While critics may disagree over the significance of his effects, they are united in identifying their dependence on an exact use of the medium, and repeatedly warn the self-important director against the perils of an interpretation which distorts the means of performance. There is another side to this exigency. If the performers trust the dramatist, the apparent restrictions of his stage idiom allow an intense development of specific means of performance. They give the performer an indicator of style, the feel for "how it goes." Beckett's own widely quoted distinction between "fundamental sounds" and "overtones" encourages a critical interest in the execution of the works and in the way in which they are so intelligible in terms of an actor's physical performance, yet resistant to the explications of the critic. It may well be that the sense of "how it goes" is a good deal less impressive than scholarly hermeneutics, but as Susan Sontag persuasively argues, criticism, for its part, has not yet begun to come to terms with the sensual values of performance, and always risks distorting the meaning of works of art by divorcing sense and sensation. Among Beckett's theatre pieces none affords as intense a value to sensation as Not I.