Beckett, Performance and the Miming Body in Theatre, Film and Television

Explores Samuel Beckett’s use of the miming body across theatre, film and television as a philosophical meditation on mid- to late twentieth-century being

• Offers unique insights and analyses of the miming body found in Beckett’s theatre, film, and television plays
• Spans Beckett’s postwar dramatic œuvre, drawing on published and unpublished sources
• Emphasises the role of performers in the collaborative work of dramatic production
• The first book to use Beckett’s mimes to frame a wider reading of the dramatic works
• Contributes to theoretical work on the body in performance, drawing on scholarship in philosophy, linguistics, and history

Taking Beckett’s mimes as a departure point, this book questions the value of his close attention to and choreography of the body for performance. It examines how Beckett’s encounters with the traditions of twentieth-century French mime impacted his theatrical imagination and directorial practices, exploring his uses of the miming body across a wide range of postwar works for theatre, film and television. Investigating the significances of movement, gesture and posture, the study emphasises what is embodied, kinetic and performed in Beckett’s work, keeping a steady gaze on the peculiarities of miming bodies to tease out and turn over their expressive capacities. Drawing on phenomenological philosophy, poststructural theory, performance analysis and historical literature, Jonathan McAllister argues that Beckett’s dramatic works provide a bodily commentary on being in mid- to late twentieth-century Europe: they constitute an embodied philosophical inquiry into the questions and anxieties for a generation experiencing a profound crisis of meaning.