Specially for Television?

Abstract

Abstract This article analyses tensions between medium specificity and intermediality in Beckett’s first original drama for television, Eh Joe (1966), which exploits features of the medium such as the spatiality of the studio, monochrome images and close-up. But its visual motifs also echo Beckett’s cinema debut, Film (1964), and uses of sound and voice from his radio plays. The public promotion of Eh Joe centred on its relationships with Beckett’s theatre plays, while Eh Joe’s first audiences adduced frames of reference from both theatre and television. Eh Joe works with the porosity of media boundaries and performatively renegotiates them.