Act Without Words I

It was written in 1956 following a request from the dancer Deryk Mendel and first performed on 3 April 1957 at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

He “takes the sound for some kind of call, and after a bit of reflection, proceeds in that direction only to find himself hurled back again.

Over the course of the play other items are lowered from above: three cubes of varying sizes, a length of knotted rope and – always just out of reach – a “tiny carafe, to which is attached a huge label inscribed WATER.”[5] The rest of the sketch is a study in frustrated efforts.

Beckett is here drawing on his viewing of the silent screen comedies of the like of Buster Keaton, Ben Turpin and Harry Langdon all of whom would have encountered objects on-screen apparently with minds of their own.

From this point on he refuses to ‘play the game’ any further; even when the carafe of water is dangled in front of his face he does not make to grab it.

The situation is similar to that of the narrator in Beckett's 1955 The Expelled, whose story begins with him being jettisoned from the place he was living (“The fall was … not serious.

“As Beckett told Barney Rosset, his longtime U.S. publisher, in 1957: he is just ‘human meat or bones.’”[14] When he first looks at his hands it is “”as though [he is] noticing his own body for the first time … Having become cognisant of his Dasein … [he is willing to] accept the presence of various Seiendes”,[15] as Heidegger calls existing objects, that start to appear beginning with the tree.

When the scissors arrive the man begins to trim his nails “for no other reason than the sudden availability of the correct object.

The climactic ending of the mime may signify not a pathetic defeat, but a conscious rebellion, man’s deliberate refusal to obey.