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Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance

Hannah Simpson author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Springer International Publishing AG

Published:21st Aug '22

Should be back in stock very soon

Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance cover

Beckett’s plays have attracted a striking range of disability performances – that is, performances that cast disabled actors, regardless of whether their roles are explicitly described as ‘disabled’ in the text. Grounded in the history of disability performance of Beckett’s work and a new theorising of Beckett’s treatment of the impaired body, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance examines four contemporary disability performances of Beckett’s plays, staged in the UK and US, and brings the rich fields of Beckett studies and disability studies into mutually illuminating conversation. Pairing original interviews with the actors and directors involved in these productions alongside critical analysis underpinned by recent disability and performance theory, this book explores how these productions emphasise or rework previously undetected indicators of disability in Beckett’s work. More broadly, it reveals how Beckett’s theatre compulsively interrogates alternative embodiments, unexpected forms of agency, and the extraordinary social interdependency of the human body. 


Winner of the TaPRA David Bradby Monograph Prize, 2023. 

ISBN: 9783031041327

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

229 pages

1st ed. 2022