Video and Audio: Samuel Beckett's Late Teleplays

The article discusses Samuel Beckett's plays Ghost Trio (1976), ...but the clouds... (1977), Quad (1984), and Nacht und Traume (1984) as examples of "teleliterature," where the levels of the presence and proportional significance of the word is related to the nonverbal components of the television production suggested by the text. The plurimedial overlays of music and words, the splitting of the character into their television image and their television voice, the geometry of movement and immobility on paper and screen, and the uncertainty of the video and audio dimensions of the broadcast world lay the foundation of television theater in Beckett's textologically unstable works. A close reading of Beckett's teleplays makes it possible to clarify the genre differences between drama and plays for television and underscores the performativity of the experience of reading teleliterature.