Painful Productions: A Review of Hannah Simpson's Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness

Abstract: In Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness , Hannah Simpson orients our attention to the multiplicities of pain found in and disappeared from the postwar theatrical productions of Samuel Beckett. She demonstrates how the central themes of Beckett's oeuvre—corporeal (dis)functioning, the impotence of language, the (im)possibility for intersubjective understanding—are illuminated through the manner in which Beckett writes and stages pain. Simpson contrasts Beckett's treatment and representation of pain with those of some contemporaries; plays by Camus, Picasso, Ionesco, and Duras figure in respective chapters. Simpson's methodologies are varied, ranging from medical approaches to pain management and diagnoses to theories of trauma and witnessing.