Eimear McBride’s mouthpieces and the uses of a Beckettian dramatic structure for meaning

Abstract

This article investigates Eimear McBride’s collected mini-plays published as Mouthpieces in their written form. Although we do not examine the performance of the plays, radio production of the plays by RTÉ’s Drama On One with actors Eimear McBride and Aoife Duffin sheds light on this discussion. The aim of this study is to delve into how the pieces stand compared to Samuel Beckett’s legacy in terms of genre and dramatic structure for the construction of their meaning. Furthermore, the presence of elements from other dramatic traditions are highlighted as well, with a quick view over how they influence the texts’ structure. The research also inspects how the hybridity of genres of the pieces, described by McBride as two performances and one prose/performance, influence the topics and meanings of the text, and vice-versa, how the content of the work forms and informs its structure for the creation of meaning. Moreover, there is a brief analysis on how the pieces stand apart and together as three pieces of a single work, offering insight on McBride’s newest publication.

Keywords

• Eimear McBride
• Mouthpieces
• radio plays
• Samuel Beckett
• hybrid genres