Quad (play)

Quad is a television play by Samuel Beckett, written and first produced and broadcast in 1981. It first appeared in print in 1984 (Faber and Faber) where the work is described as "[a] piece for four players, light and percussion" and has also been called a "ballet for four people."

It consists of four actors dressed in robes, hunched and silently walking around and diagonally across a square stage in fixed patterns, alternately entering and exiting. Each actor wears a distinct colored robe (white, red, blue, yellow), and is accompanied by a distinct percussion instrument (leitmotif). The actors walk in sync (except when entering or exiting), always on one of four rotationally symmetric paths (e.g., when one actor is at a corner, so are all others; when one actor crosses the stage, all do so together, etc.), and never touch – when walking around the stage, they move in the same direction, while when crossing the stage diagonally, where they would touch in the middle, they avoid the center area (walking around it, always clockwise or always anti-clockwise, depending on the production). In the original production, the play was first performed once, and then, after a pause, an abbreviated version is performed a second time, this time in black and white and without musical accompaniment. These are distinguished as Quad I and Quad II, though Quad II does not appear in print.

The play was first broadcast by the Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany on 8 October 1981, as Quadrat I + II. Beckett himself directed ("assisted by Bruno Voges"). The four performers, all "members of the Stuttgart Preparatory Ballet School", were, Helfried Foron, Juerg Hummel, Claudia Knupfer and Susanne Rehe. The same performance was rebroadcast on 16 December 1982, by BBC Two.

As far back as 1963 Beckett had thought of creating a geometrical mime. He tried to write a piece for Jack MacGowran (generally referred to as J. M. Mime) but abandoned it "in the absence of all inner need."

"Beckett’s initial conception … was to have [a pair] of characters walking along Quadrants in all possible paths starting from O (a central origin) and returning to O. But in its final realization almost twenty years later, the mime begins and ends with the void, an empty quad, and travellers deflect their steps away from O."

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