Beckett's musicals (Samuel Beckett)

Samuel Beckett, who inherited the fading Irish oral tradition of social performance and embedded it within his texts, was himself extremely musical. Considering language to be unreliable and self-referential while seeming precise, Beckett peopled his texts with performers, used music directly, and made it structurally and metaphorically determinative of many plays. Although decreasing traces of social intercourse appear in his plays, many of Beckett's characters, dehumanized and disintegrating as they are, remain trapped in "staged" roles; yet startling opposition to imposed rote performance occurs in the late plays.