The 1980s marked Beckett's overt return to mime, a return that drew together several strands of his theatrical work: Fin de partie, Krapp's Last Tape and the mimes of the fifties, the aborted “J.M. Mime,” which Beckett outlined in the sixties, and the near mimes of the sixties and seventies: Film, Eh Joe, That Time and Footfalls. Filmed for Sud-deutscher Rundfunk under Beckett's direction and presented on 8 October 1981, the twenty-minute Quad, written in English, may be Beckett's most formal work, as geometrical and symmetrical as the title suggests. One, then two, then three, then four figures, each clad to disguise, in pastel djellabas, appear in succession to describe a quadrangle to a rapid, polyrhythmic, percussion beat, then depart in sequence. Each figure describes the entire quad, and so each travels the square and its two diagonals fifteen times, tracing the incommensurability of side and diagonal. In Beckett's most vivid image of postmodern literary theory and literal decentering, each abruptly avoids the center, located mid way along the hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle, that is, along a “Matrix of surds” (Murphy, page 112).