ABSTRACT
In the 1960s Beckett began to take more responsibility for directing his own plays, and the late drama is shaped by his concrete experience in the theatre. There are parallels between the late television drama and the late theatre: the ghostly figures, the darkness surrounding the figure or face, the separation of body and voice. Many of the late plays stage or perhaps rehearse the last moments of a life, where the performance of the subject's story is a rite of passage that produces or imagines the ending of both story and life. The late theatre incorporates an interplay of selves and others, where performers and witnesses multiply, with interior as well as exterior spectators or listeners. The body in Beckett's late theatre is presented as both sign and site, engine or matrix of production (of stories, semblances, voice, footfalls or hiccups) and fabric to be composed and recomposed with limited materials.
