The Stuff of Performance: Beckett, Theatre Marginalia, and the Archive

The idea of the archive has been thoroughly explored in Beckett Studies since the mid 1990s; we are now very used to the idea of a 'grey canon' (to borrow a term from Gontarski) which extends far beyond those works published in Beckett's lifetime. However, it cold be argued that our study of the Becjettian archive is centripetal; that is, that the investigations lead us back to the figure of Beckett. This paper proposes another way to read the material in the archive, at least in relation to the 'stuff' (Boscagli) produced in relation to performance. This reading is centrifugal, taking us from the performance itself to the interaction between the performance and the wider world.