Title : Body and Space Evasion in the Theatre of Samuel Backett

Author(s) : Nootchanart Smathakarnagsorakij

Pages : 39-62

Abstract in English : Stuck between an impossible life and an inadmissible death and condemned to suffer from their empty existence, the wretched protagonists in Samuel Beckett’s theatrical work desperately seek an escape in a symbolic and metaphorical body and space: a foetus in the uterus. Aroused by the nostalgia for mother, they constantly strive to create or live in the conditions analogous to those in the womb: the world absent of excitements, dark, and protective where their idle bodies can curl up serenely in the intermediary state of non-life and non-death until the desired end actually comes.