Beckett, Performance and the Miming Body in Theatre, Film and Television
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A01=Jonathan McAllister
Author_Jonathan McAllister
Category=DSBH
Category=DSG
deconstruction
embodiment
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forthcoming
performance theory
phenomenology
Samuel Beckett
twentieth-century drama
twentieth-century mime
Product details
- ISBN 9781399551298
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Jonathan McAllister is a supervisor in English Studies at the University of Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD in 2024. His research focuses on twentieth-century theatre and performance, with a particular interest in the politics, aesthetics and philosophies of the body. He has written theatre and book reviews for the Journal of Beckett Studies, Theatre Survey, The Beckett Review and The Modernist Review.
