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.
Broadcast history
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.
Background
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."
The discarded work was "intended as a mime for two players (son and father or mother) who are described as naked under their coats. The stage is plotted out in a square, the four corners of which (lettered A-D) are to be marked either by two boots and two hats or by four boots, recalling the boots and hat found onstage in Godot;" the midpoints were lettered E-G, and the centre, O.
The idea goes back even further however, "indeed Quad may be regarded as the fulfillment onstage of the goal he had set himself in 1937 in the letter to Axel Kaun, the achieving of an entirely new means of expression through the elimination of language."
Synopsis
Quad I
"Quad is based on a geometrical figure and on permutations of regular movements. First one, then two, then three, then four figures, dancers or mime artistes, dressed in coloured djellabas (white, yellow, blue and red) appear one after another to scurry along the sides and across the diagonals of a square, shuffling in strict rhythm to a rapid percussion beat. Each figure then departs in the order in which he appeared, leaving another to recommence the sequence … Strikingly all of them avoid the centre which is clearly visible in the middle of the square."
The four series of six stages each produce a total of twenty-four stages suggesting, as in Lessness, the measurement of time.
According to the script each character was to be unique in a number of ways. Apart from the colour of the outfit, they were to be "[a]s alike in build as possible. Short and slight for preference … Adolescents a possibility. Sex indifferent." That said, each player's footsteps were to be distinctive, each was to be accompanied by their own musical instrument and illuminated by a light, the same colour as their outfit. For technical reasons, in the original broadcast, white light was used. To help the performers cope with the rhythmic chaos "[t]hey wore headphones under their hoods, so they could hear the percussion beats."
There is an element of chance in this piece in that Beckett does not indicate how the footsteps should differ nor which instruments should be used other than they should be percussive ("say drum, gong, triangle, wood block"). He also doesn’t specify a required sequence for the colors.