Quad (I and II), a play for television written in 1980, was staged by Beckett in 1981 for German television. Quad presents a fixed cinematographic shot and theatrical setting whose stability is disrupted by the successive entrances of four ghostly walkers at the four corners of the square. As often in Beckett, the “performers” exhaust logical series by combining all possible trajectories: one by one, one after the other, appearing in a tunic, hooded, head down, face hidden. The dramatisation is minimal, without any event other than the appearance/disappearance of the bodies and their obligation to avoid the “danger zone” in the centre with an abrupt lop-sided walk.

The idea is to understand how the decomposition at work in Quad provides a rhythm for a new type of ritual (spatial decomposition, but one that is also, in Quad I, audio and visual, with a specific percussive sound for each dancer and the allocation of a primary colour). The closed, repetitive structure effectively evokes the dance of a pagan ritual, the redemptive and poignant walk of monks in their cloister, or the comic and troubling movement of a nameless curse: thus, Beckett had cited Dante's Inferno concerning the movement of the walk of the damned who “always go left into Hell (the direction of the damned)”.

The bodies themselves appear to be dissociated and independent of any desire to move. Instead, the speed of their walk is governed by automatism, lending a mechanised, inhuman, systematic aspect to their dance, situated between life and death, humanity and inhumanity, mechanical automatism and the autonomy of the living, thus reflecting their uncanniness.

Guillaume Gesvret
Translated by Yves Tixier and Anna Knight