ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the mimes and the unpublished dramatic fragments constituted laboratories in which Beckett tried out possibilities of staging the body or a series of bodies. Beckett's mimes focus less on the virtuoso gesturality or plasticity of the body of the performer-author in the tradition of Etienne Decroux, the father of modern mime, and more on the interaction between body and stage environment. Endgame uses the motif of a chess game to suggest a system or environment that regulates the characters' interactions. Two fragments in particular, one from the early 1950s and one from the late 1960s, feature the recurrent motif of the regulated body as part of an intercorporeal 'system'. In the case of the mimes and dramatic fragments, their continual reworking of the vulnerable body caught in a system beyond the control of the conscious will constitutes a laboratory where Beckett explored the dramatic and compositional possibilities of the performer's body.
