Henry James, whose struggle with the theatre left performative traces in the consciousness of his prose, wrote succinctly in one of his prefaces of the drama as an ado. There is in the brevity of the word an almost molecular view of performance, like the Freudian fort/da, the child's game of disappearance and return, played with a spool, in which by the repetitive deferral of pleasure the reality principle is enjoyed. According to Freud, the disappearance which is being performed is the departure of the child's mother. The fort/da is an ado which pivots on an absence. We know from Shakespeare that it is possible to make, in theatre, much ado about nothing; and we know from Beckett, and Zeami, that it is possible to perform the seeming absence of an ado as a precise nothing to be done.

Nothing may come of nothing, but it would also be precise to think of that replicated nothing as a substantive ado. For there is a crucial particle of difference – especially where nothing is concerned – between that and just doing, between just breathing eating sleeping loving and performing those functions of just living; that is, with more or less deliberation, doing the act of breathing, eating, sleeping, loving, like Didi/Gogo do the tree in Godot. It is a difference as distinct as the presence or absence of punctuation in the previous sentence.