Performance

Performance, as practice and discourse, may be traced in Beckett’s work in several ways. It might be seen as one of the central discourses that have helped shape our understanding of Beckett’s writing; this article will offer a survey of the most significant literature in this regard. This article will also consider some of the most important contemporary approaches to performing Beckett’s dramatic writing, including cross-genre and -media adaptations, experimental / laboratory work, and intercultural exchanges. Finally, I will address the ways in which investigation into Beckett and performance also illuminate performance itself, laying bare the nature of the theatrical medium and exposing something about how the world – politics, culture and so forth acts performatively upon the embodied subject.
This exploration will centre on the performing body in the Beckettian corpus and develop toward an understanding of how Beckett’s work highlights the potentially radical and unpredictable instability that embodied performance introduces, the ways in which performances of a text can shift, almost literally, its political ground. I will conclude with a critical investigation of the ways in which performance itself, understood within the frame of contemporary neo-liberal ideologies, may be interrogated and critiqued in and through close examination of Beckett’s work for and about the theatre.