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Introduction: Beckett’s Disabled Bodies

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Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance

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Abstract

What does it mean to stage Samuel Beckett’s plays as disability performances? What do such performances reveal about these playtexts’ persistent concern with the conditions of embodied existence, and with the impaired body and mind? This introduction addresses these questions with reference to historic disability performances of Beckett’s work, and introduces the idea of Beckett’s “disability aesthetic”, arguing that disability performance offers a powerful opportunity to investigate the treatment of the body and related concerns in Beckett’s stage plays. These performances emphasise or re-work previously undetected indicators of disability in the scripts, revealing how Beckett’s writing compulsively interrogates alternative embodiments, unexpected forms of agency, and the extraordinary social interdependency of the human body.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Examples of such scholarship include Petra Kuppers’s Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape (2011), many of the essays in Amanda Stuart Fisher and James Thompson’s Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Performance (2020), and Matt Hargrave’s Theatre of Learning Disability: Good, Bad, or Plain Ugly? (2015), which includes an extended consideration of the distinction between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ disability performance. There is also a rich vein of contemporary community- and therapy-focused disability performance of Beckett’s work, including Rosetta Life and Stroke Odyssey’s collaborative project This.Here, a 2019–2020 performance piece responding to Beckett’s work devised with stroke recovery patients led by performance maker and Beckett scholar Lucinda Jarrett (https://rosettalife.org/project-film/this-here/), and Echo’s Bones, a new 2021 performance responding to Beckett’s short stories devised by young autistic people, led by film and performance artist Sarah Browne (http://www.sarahbrowne.info/).

  2. 2.

    Individuals with a disability or long-term illness have significantly lower rates of arts attendance than non-disabled individuals (Smith 2017, 40). Regarding disabled practitioners, Arts Council England recently reported that disability-led arts organisations make up just over 1% of their portfolio and receive less than 0.5% of their funding expenditure (Verrent 2015). See also Sandahl (2005) and Johnston (2016, 37–58).

  3. 3.

    For the history of the expression “Nothing about us without us” in disability activism and scholarship, see Charlton (1998, 14–25).

  4. 4.

    For further exploration of the cultural stereotyping of disabled individuals, see Clare (2017), Mintz (2007), Wilson and Lewiecki-Wilson (2001), Garland-Thomson (1997), and Longmore (1987).

  5. 5.

    Even metaphorical interpretation that is not explicitly negative risks occluding the material reality of disability—for example, Odette Aslan’s argument that the “crippling infirmities” which “attack” Beckett’s characters “are symbolic” and that it is the job of the Beckett actor “to transform these primary physical handicaps into symbols” (1988, 44), or Elaine Wood’s recent exploration of what she terms the “metaphoricity of disability” in Happy Days (2015, 219).

  6. 6.

    See the debate between disability scholars Lennard J. Davis (2014, 18–20) and Carrie Sandahl (2004, 581–584) on this potential reading of Davis’s concept of “dismodernism”.

  7. 7.

    For an influential early discussion of terminology in disability studies, see Linton (1998, 8–33).

  8. 8.

    For further discussion of person-first versus identity-first languages, see Bedell et al. (2018), Gernsbacher (2017), and Dunn and Andrews (2015).

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    Hannah Simpson

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Simpson, H. (2022). Introduction: Beckett’s Disabled Bodies. In: Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance. New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04133-4_1

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