Scott Annett (English, University of Cambridge, UK)
A Space to be Serious: Witnessing Suffering in Samuel Beckett’s Act
Without Words
This paper will consider Samuel Beckett’s short mime, Act Without Words, alongside the writing of Arthur Schopenhauer in order to explore Beckett’s focus on the body of the performer and the role of comedy in determining the audience’s responses to the pain and suffering of the protagonist. The paper will suggest that throughout this mime Beckett deconstructs the theatrical space, reducing the audience members’ distance from the protagonist and so encouraging them to re-evaluate their ethical relation to the body before them. Attention to such questions will hopefully suggest an additional perspective from which we can consider the nature of beauty in a performance seemingly founded upon the suffering of another person.
Scott Annett is in the first year of writing a PhD in the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses primarily on Samuel Beckett’s pre-war writing and the importance of comedy, and in particular an understanding of Dantean comedy, to the development of Beckett’s work. His MPhil was in European Literature and Culture and his dissertation focused on smiles in the Commedia and their disintegration in Watt, Beckett’s final novel to be written in English.
