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‘We're not beginning to… to… mean something?’: teaching Beckett's theatricality in a university drama department

Abstract Bereft of deposited messages or meanings (indeed, intent on questioning the validity and worth of meaning-making processes) and deploying theatrical convention as an integral part of the manner in which experience is conveyed and examined, Beckett's plays often frustrate strategies of literary appreciation and render some traditional manners of considering texts in the seminar room obsolete. Using approaches by which students might ‘ask questions practically’ of a dramatic text, such as performing a series of workshopped or rehearsed performative operations upon those texts, the theatricality of each work may be examined and new learning journeys may be defined in assisting students in their confrontations with Beckett's plays. This article explores these issues within a fictional dialogue between lecturer and student. It takes the form of, and borrows from Beckett's Duthuit Dialogues.