Victimised Actors and Despotic Directors: Clichés of Theatre at Stake in Beckett's 'Catastophe'

The essay focuses on 'Catastrophe', one of the last plays Beckett wrote, which the author sees as almost the culmination of his idea of the theatre. This 1982 play is the epitome of the demanding performance Beckett's theatre requires from the actors and of the great freedom and power paradoxically it gives them. By undermining, with a great sense of irony, himself and his working method, but even more radically the directorial function itself, in this play, Beckett, the celebrated 'tyrant-director' reveals the sole concrete reality of the production: that it is the realm of the actor.