Struggling to write at the midpoint of the twentieth century amid the cultural devastation and material depredation of post-occupation Paris, Samuel Beckett opened his novel The Unnamable with three questions: ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’ Tackling (respectively) the dynamics of space, embodiment and time, these questions, asked in a novel that takes the form of a long monologue, might make us think of theatre. They engage the reader in the process of building a world; they announce a voice striving to come into existence, emerging from an otherwise empty space. They expose the authorial condition directly to the audience, thus complicating the notion of ‘character’ as conventionally understood. Even while they stabilise the novel's beginning with the appearance of a logical progression, they also announce that identity, position and temporality are no longer part of ‘given circumstances’, but instead that all three are subject to radical instability (and not only in the realm of art). It was during this novel's composition that Beckett turned to the theatre – he said ‘to get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time’ – and wrote En attendant Godot in a matter of months.

It is no accident that Beckett, whose work has been variously classified and reclassified as avant-garde, high modernist, late modernist, postmodernist and sui generis outside all categories, becomes almost a patron saint of this volume's last pages (having already haunted many that came before). Part IV, entitled ‘Slippages’, represents a performative refusal to submit to strict boundary conditions: its theme is the persistence of temporal, spatial, embodied, conceptual, political, generic and technological slippages in what ‘defines’ modernist or contemporary theatre. Having already noted the capaciousness of the term ‘modernism’ and the challenge of attending to its historical specificity even as its vector travels into the ‘contemporary’, what this section highlights is the role of elasticity, porousness, fluidity, flexibility and transformation in how these concepts continue to operate. In this book's introduction, the editors returned to the affective character of modernism and underlined the embodied nature of its thought; previous sections have addressed the qualities of memory, reimagination and transmission as revealing the enduring impulses of modernism.