‘Something Must Move’: Samuel Beckett’s Manipulated Objects of Habit

Abstract This article explores Samuel Beckett’s sustained preoccupation, across his dramatic work, with the interplay between physical object, habitual movement, and attempted corporeal redress. Focusing on Happy Days as a paradigmatic case, it argues that Winnie’s frequent interactions with the contents of her handbag do more than furnish character detail: they dramatize a kinetic economy of survival, in which objects anchor and extend the body’s diminishing capacities. These manipulated objects of habit are not passive props but dramatic agents that enable repetition, sustain routine, and shape performance itself. Drawing on Beckett’s production notebooks, early writings, and other plays including Act Without Words II, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Rockaby, the article situates habit on stage as a structure at once restrictive and sustaining—a choreography of constraint that inscribes itself onto both characters and actors. To the extent that Beckett’s theatre trains its performers through rituals of recurrence and responsiveness, it does so by foregrounding the capacity of objects to elicit action as much as they accommodate it. What emerges is a dramaturgy in which the object’s claim on the body cannot be ignored, and where agency is shared across subject and object through the repetitive grip of habit.