The literature of the 20th century has been characterized by an intense awareness and reshaping of fundamentals. Just as the architectural vanguard led by Le Corbusier reinvented structural form, or the Cubists ‘made new’ visual space the writers working with narratives renewed and heightened their concern with how time worked in their art. Samuel Beckett was among those heir to the condition of modernity: he had seen evolution so rapid that it may be fairly termed a revolution in both the novel and the play. It is not surprising that he was among those writers who came fresh to the challenge, with his own experimental agenda. Yet the archetypal picture of a Beckett drama is one of a futile, meaningless existence, one pared down to its minimalist starkness, condemned to endless and pointless repetition. Do the plays of Beckett mark a nihilistic and joyless revolution, or do they articulate some new freedom of sorts? The critics stand divided. Judgments on Beckett’s ‘philosophy’ range from “no longer held hostage…towards a more fluid and variable mode” to the distinctly morbid “about death, sterility, disintegration of the individual…a perversion of the comic.”

        Samuel Beckett presents an image of existence as endless expectation. It is the frustration of linearity that underpins both his artistic experimentalism and its metaphysical implications, and will allow us – by examining time, narrative and ordering – to make some kind of judgement about the direction of Beckett’s work. In Act Without Words I, the conventions of drama have already been destabilized since the play is wordless: there is no language through which the plot can be articulated. Instead, Beckett uses the exaggerated style of mime to exploit repetition. A small amount of repetition is to be expected within a play, as it helps to structure the narrative. However, Act Without Words I, in the style of silent motion pictures, intensifies the repetition to show the hapless and futile actions of a single protagonist. There is something equally comic and equally tragic in the piece, as the Chaplinesque mime-artist stumbles through his routine, taunted by the mysterious off-stage presence, and then crumples to the floor, staring at his hands. Beckett leaves the last tone of that gesture open to interpretation, which furthers the ambiguity.

In an experimental-technical context, not only is a measure of generic fusion, breaking down the boundaries between different forms (although hardly avant-garde in a post-Brechtian world), but it plays with the idea that the characters are just slaves to the dramatist’s ordering hand. Just as the spotlight in Play deconstructs the relationship between audience and actor, Act Without Words I separates off the actor from the theatrical context, and makes him a victim. As for metaphysical ramifications, the offstage presence can clearly be viewed as an analogue to malicious fate, and thus the play articulates in a comic manner ‘Murphy’s Law.’ Yet the questions raised are deeper than that, and bring us back to the initial issue about Beckett’s pessimism. The ‘one player’ has already been seen as a puppet in the theatrical arena, but an extension of that ‘message’ leads to a dilemma. The character of the mime-artist – like the imprisoned protagonists of Play, or indeed (less obviously perhaps) Estragon and Vladimir – are trapped by the narrative of the stage. Yet modernity is about the fall of the narratives – is Beckett offering us a chance at liberating ourselves if we can only realise our shackles and enter an anarchistic, pluralistic experience of living? Or is he, conversely, making a comment about free-will, and the futility of the human condition, perhaps constrained by some kind of predetermined or malevolent fate? Beckett, using the stark essentials of dramatic narrative, is raising the starkest questions about what is art and what is life. It is a question which is complicated by the fact that the narrative has no effective closure – the man never reaches the glass, suggesting, perhaps, that the chaos of life is inimical to the tidy narratives of art.

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A useful comparison is Happy Days, which is far less concerned with theatrical self-reflexivity. Instead, the ordering principle concerns the peculiar life of the central character Winnie. The audience is party to a extensive series of repeated domestic actions, interspersed with poetic and philosophical musings and the surreal and repetitive fondling of a revolver. She is enslaved to the periodic ringing of a bell, and every day is considered to be the same litany of banality: “most strange [pause] never any change.” \l "_ftn4" A similar effect is achieved in Waiting for Godot’s catalogue of everyday actions (pulling on a boot, sharing ...

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