The face on the modern stage

What is it about?

Illegibility of face is the leitmotif of Samuel Beckett’s work from page to stage. Paring down the face to its barest minimum, divesting it of identity and expression, dislocating it from its usual carriage, and, in some instances, dismantling it altogether, Beckett’s work turns the face unrecognizable, evoking a condition experienced by people suffering from prosopagnosia, commonly known as face-blindness, which is a neurological disorder with varying specificities. The usual set of significations embodied by the face, i.e. identity, expression, sex, age, and direction of attention, is variously thwarted in Beckett to cultivate an aesthetic of inscrutability. Beckett’s experimentation with facial reduction, manifest both in the strategic obscuration of the face with layers of gauze in What Where and in the plastered faces in Play, where he suggests reducing them to “grey disks” underscores the liminal status of the face between organic and inorganic, and prompts a prosopagnosic visual experience.

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Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The article offers an interpretation of Samuel Beckett’s sustained engagement with the face as an aesthetic and perceptual problem. By linking Beckett’s systematic reduction and obscuration of the face to the neurological condition of prosopagnosia, it provides a conceptual framework for understanding how his work disrupts conventional associations between the face and identity. This interdisciplinary approach clarifies Beckett’s broader artistic project of cultivating inscrutability.

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