Human Machines Petrified: 'Play''s Mineral Mechanics and 'Les statues meurent aussi'

'Play' is usually regarded as the starting point of Beckett's late theatre, introducing a radically new approach to the body and language that set a benchmark for subsequent plays such as 'Not I', 'That Time' and 'Footfalls'. Building on 'Krapp's Last Tape' and 'Happy Days', 'Play' dehumanizes its characters by means of the audiovisual technologies that Beckett was experimenting with at the time. In this process, his human subjects are increasingly reduced to mechanical devices or mouthpieces for the conveyance of speech, instead of represented as recognizable and sentient beings of flesh and blood. The nonhuman aspect of 'Play' is enhanced by its foregrounding of Beckett's long-standing fascination with the mineral, with the characters' faces being ‘so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part of the urns’. Whereas, separately, the influence of radio, television and cinema on 'Play' has received some critical attention, and James Knowlson, Claire Lozier, Mark Nixon, Jean-Michel Rabaté and Conor Carville, among others, have noted Beckett's fascination with the sculptural arts and the inorganic, this paper aims to merge those two strands by discussing docufilm 'Les statues meurent aussi' (1953) by Alain Resnais as a potential but overlooked source of inspiration. By combining the technological and the sculptural in 'Play', Beckett stages a ‘mineral mechanics’ verging closely on the nonhuman without being fully dehumanized, as characters continue to laugh and hiccup, barely retaining a trace of their humanity. This oscillation from the human to the nonhuman and vice versa is clearly traceable in the genesis of the text, as well as its French translation ('Comédie'). The result, 'Play''s iconic stage image, is marked by the familiar Beckettian trope of in-betweenness: between life and death, between the organic and the mineral, between the natural and the technological.