Images of Beckett - Index of

sources, his remarkably retentive memory meant
that he had no need to ‘revisit’ a particular painting
in order to draw on it for inspiration, shaping his
own images in the light of earlier works of art, yet
making them entirely his own.
As a student in the 1920s, Beckett regularly used
to go with friends to plays at the Abbey Theatre in
Dublin. According to one of them, he once
remarked how much a principal actor, Michael
Dolan’s ‘hands came into expressing his feelings’
when he played the role of a modern Job in T. C.
Murray’s play, Autumn Fire. 62 Later, when lecturing
on the plays of Molière at Trinity College, he
stressed how essential the ‘muscular dialogue
generated by gesture’, which Molière had himself
inherited from the commedia dell’arte tradition, was
to the success of seventeenth-century theatre. 63
But, above all, Beckett seems to have been
fascinated by the expressive, frozen gestures seen
in paintings: hands raised in prayer or
outstretched in compassion; a finger raised in
blessing or admonishment; a man holding an
open book; a lady intent on what she is writing; a
hand raised to the breast, chin or brow; a woman
playing cards or making lace.
Beckett carried over some of the force of these
gestures into his own theatre. Gestures in his plays
are restrained rather than grandiloquent, but
nonetheless they appear stark and powerful
Detail of grotesque figure in Pieter Brueghel the Elder,
The Parable of the Blind
IMAGES OF BECKETT 75