Beckett’s Power-Full Signifiers: the Semiotics of Power in Beckett’s Catastrophe

This article seeks to conduct a semiotic enquiry into the problematic issue of power in relation to aesthetic representation by demonstrating that Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe is a play that deals with the complexity of [re]presenting power rather than the representation of power per se. While a full discussion of the question of power as historically represented in theatre would eventually correspond to an ample investigation whose limits are unpredictable, the focus in this discussion is placed on how dramatic signs, verbal and non-verbal, are used to present an image of power as a phenomenon whose contours can never be fully or conclusively drawn. Accordingly, the article attempts to explain how power in Beckett’s Catastrophe is shown circulating through a series of signifying practices of a stage director who seeks to impose his will and point of view in presenting the image of a catastrophe to the audience. These practices are analysed and interpreted primarily as signs pertaining to various sign-systems, including the linguistic, the kinetic and the proxemic. What this article will demonstrate is that the forms of domination, coercion and the desire to control others as well as the forms of solidarity and resistance displayed through verbal, kinetic and proxemic action in Beckett’s Catastrophe are cultural signifiers, involving communicative, linguistic as well as pragmatic aspects and testifying to the intricacy of representing power and its complicated mechanisms