Yet another of Beckett’s unique works is a very compact and brief television ‘play’ called Quad. It was first written, produced and broadcasted in 1981.  The production was very brief-brief enough to last for just 13 minutes. It was depicted and talked about as a ‘piece for four players, light and percussion’ in 1984 and famously named a ‘ballet for four people’.

Production and Stage Directions

The play was initially performed once for the first production. After a pause, an abbreviated version was performed for the second time, where it was performed in black and white and sans the musical accompaniment. These are renowned and noted as Quad I and Quad II. Quad II does not make its appearance in print.

The stage direction of Beckett is frequently termed as “minimalist”, “lessening” and “barren” replacing the cluttered stage of naturalist drama with that of existentialist theatre. Quad presents us with four actors who are clad in robes, hunched and walking around silently and diagonally with fixed patterns across a square-shaped stage.

They alternately enter and exit the set. This walking is the preoccupation in many of  Beckett’s plays. It is said that Becket was extremely pleased with the routine concerning pacing movements as he saw through a monochrome monitor in Quadrat I&II, that he decided to take up the task of making a “sequel,” happening “a hundred-thousand years later.”

The time frame of the sequel is shorter than its prequel, the pace is gradual, there is less vibrant or dull lighting to be precise, and the colour is reduced to all four figures wearing white, and individual percussion sounds are eliminated so that only sound heard is of the droning shuffle of feet. Production of Quad, in its entirety, including Beckett’s sequel, is framed to last for only fifteen minutes.

Plot

A description of Quad contributes very little to the piece’s effect. Critic Patrice Pavis writes in his Languages of the Stage, “To speak of mime—or, worse still, to write on mime—is to dwell awkwardly on a few moments of gesture.” Through the appearance and structure of a mime, it explores and traces Quad’s elementary structure of “what” and “how,” before launching into questions concerning the “whys.”

Samuel Beckett’s Quad is essentially described as “[a] piece for four players, light, and percussion.” Each actor is wearing a unique coloured apparel, a robe which is in white, red, blue, and yellow and a unique percussion instrument accompanies them. The actors walk together syncing their movements. This is an exception in case of entry or exit.

They repetitively walk on one among the four paths appearing to be symmetric paths and they do not touch. They move and try to they avoid the central area. They move in the same direction but while crossing the stage in a diagonal fashion, where they are about to touch each other in the middle, they take a turn about and walk around it, either clockwise or always anti-clockwise,  and this usually depends on the kind of production.

Themes

Perhaps walking about could represent the mundane life and its routine. It takes the appearance of a mathematical experiment which focuses on pattern and timing. The ritual might be an attempt at allegorizing a sacred principle or giving deference to god. Beckett’s work primarily aims to bring out the meaninglessness of existence in keeping with the absurdist tradition and perhaps this is what he has tried to achieve with Quad as well.

Quad represents a drifting away from the qualified structuralism of language towards a radically post-humanist regime of the television signal.

Conclusion

Graley Herren is of the opinion-

“Beckett’s most innovative work is not hammered in gold, nor does it spring from the idealized union of art with artist described above in “Sailing to Byzantium.” Rather, at its best, it is forged from antithesis and tension.”

Beckett uses conflict that is waged sometimes between characters, more often between the “I” and the “Not I,” and almost always between language and the “unnamable “.

Such conflicts as witnessed are conspicuously missing from Quad. It rather displays “Beckett’s own gilt Byzantine bird in all its unruffled splendour, sans conflict, sans pain—sans drama.” (Graley Harren) The resulting mime is actually enough to keep the spectator awake through its brilliant avant-garde theatre approach – that the spectacle of these four faceless figures shuffling through their endlessly repeating routine which is addictively weird and unsettling.

FAQs

What is the ‘quad’ in drama?

Quad in drama is mysterious, geometric and symmetrical, it is an intricately choreographed work and is a very short television ‘play’,  written and first produced and broadcast in 1981 – the production was so short that it lasted just 13 minutes by Samuel Beckett. The quad consists of four actors dressed in robes, hunched and walking around silently and diagonally across a square stage.