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Beckett's Dramaticules

Beckett and Billie Whitelaw rehearsing Not I

Directed by Adam Paolozza

Produced by The Drama Centre at the University of Toronto

Created with the graduating class at the Drama Centre at U of T, Beckett's Dramaticules brings together five short works from the author's late period: Not I, Come and Go, That Time, Act Without Words II and A Piece Of Monologue. 

Towards the end of his career Beckett's works became increasingly terse and paired-down (he claimed he didn't want to waste people's time). He referred to these often fragmentary pieces as 'dramaticules': 

"Somewhere struggling in the void, neither out far nor in deep, Beckett’s plays make us confront pieces of experience as presences, signs rather than things signified, offering us isolated moments of beauty and simplicity struggling for life beneath a deceptively barren surface. Dramatizing moments of radiance rather than transcendence, the spectacle of Beckett’s images and sounds, his spectral shapes and his melodic lines, continues its assault against clearly impossible odds. In the process Beckett creates a new kind of drama in the scale of fragment, but a drama which carries beneath its amorphous texture the density and complexity of experience itself. It is Beckett’s raid on the inarticulate, but it is also a challenge in the theatre for transformation and renewal in a world of ever-shrinking possibilities." 

-Enoch Brater

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