Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre

Beckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha. In this monograph, David Lloyd explores what Beckett saw in their paintings. He explains what visual resources Beckett found in these particular painters rather than in the surrealism of Masson or the abstraction of Kandinsky or Mondrian. The analysis of Beckett’s visual imagination is based on his criticism and on close analysis of the paintings he viewed. Lloyd shows how Beckett’s fascination with these painters illuminates the ‘painterly’ qualities of his theatre and the philosophical, political and aesthetic implications of Beckett’s highly visual dramatic work.

Reviews of Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre

"This highly original constellation of critical dialogues will galvanise Beckett Studies. David Lloyd both disturbs and enhances emerging debates in and among philosophical, ethical, aesthetic and political discourses, as they respond to pressures arising from neo-liberalization on understandings of human subjectivity and its representability. This book reconfigures how Samuel Beckett's work will be seen and read across a range of fields of enquiry." – Victor Merriman, Edge Hill University