"[2] It consists of four actors dressed in robes, hunched and silently walking around and diagonally across a square stage in fixed patterns, alternately entering and exiting.
[4] The four performers, all "members of the Stuttgart Preparatory Ballet School",[5] were, Helfried Foron, Juerg Hummel, Claudia Knupfer and Susanne Rehe.
"[6] "Beckett’s initial conception … was to have [a pair] of characters walking along Quadrants in all possible paths starting from O (a central origin) and returning to O.
But in its final realization almost twenty years later, the mime begins and ends with the void, an empty quad, and travellers deflect their steps away from O.
The idea goes back even further however, "indeed Quad may be regarded as the fulfillment onstage of the goal he had set himself in 1937 in the letter to Axel Kaun,[9] the achieving of an entirely new means of expression through the elimination of language.
First one, then two, then three, then four figures, dancers or mime artistes, dressed in coloured djellabas[11] (white, yellow, blue and red) appear one after another to scurry along the sides and across the diagonals of a square, shuffling in strict rhythm to a rapid percussion beat.
Each figure then departs in the order in which he appeared, leaving another to recommence the sequence … Strikingly all of them avoid the centre which is clearly visible in the middle of the square.
"[14] There is an element of chance in this piece in that Beckett does not indicate how the footsteps should differ nor which instruments should be used other than they should be percussive ("say drum, gong, triangle, wood block"[13]).
While watching technicians test the image quality for reception by monochrome receivers, Beckett was struck by the look of the tape slowed down and in black and white.
[16] "The fast percussion beats were … removed and the only sounds that were heard were the slower, shuffling steps of the weary figures and, almost inaudibly, the tick of a metronome.
"[17] The director Alan Schneider wrote to Beckett (13 November 1981) after viewing the television program several times: "much moved, especially by the slower section.
"[20] These are fascinating remarks considering the fact that Beckett takes no real advantage of the many televisual techniques available, no close-ups, freeze frames, pans, cuts, zooms, slow-motion shots or split screens – simply a fixed camera "far South of the circle, overlooking it"[21] that might represent any member of a theatre-going audience.
In this respect, action and dialogue differs from that of Come and Go, where it is shaped by the mathematical sequence, a series of ritual movements: as one character leaves, another moves up into the vacant centre.
"[31] We instinctively avoid facing the full consequences of the meaningless nature of life, through what Camus calls an "act of eluding.
When Sidney Homan was rehearsing his version of Quad, to learn more about the piece the players improvised, what one of the actors called "a real ending, something more than the final character’s just disappearing"[35] where the last character about the leave the stage, halts, turns, removes her hood and then, as if being beckoned by the centre, hesitantly makes her way there where the lights fade down on her.
During filming Beckett "spoke to the SDR cameraman, Jim Lewis about the difficulty that he now had in writing down any words without having the intense feeling that they would inevitably be lies.
"As Susan D. Brienza indicates, in … Quad the four characters rhythmically draw mandala pictures that reveal concentric circles and include four quadrants.
The deliberate avoidance of contact with each other, though present in the same square of light, is also a familiar theme in Beckett, whose characters frequently choose isolation as with Krapp or the Listener in That Time.
With this in mind the players following their prescribed course of movements around a square could be seen as 'doing time' in the most literal sense of the term and exercising within the precise limits of the prison yard.
While Quad was originally a TV play, it has been performed on stage on occasion, first in 1986, by the Noho Theater Group (directed by Jonah Salz and choreographed by Susan Matthews).