On one level "Act Without Words I" “seems a behaviourist experiment within a classical myth”, that of Tantalus, who stood in a pool of water which receded every time he bent to drink it, and stood under a fruit tree which raised its branches every time he reached for food. In the 1930s Beckett read Wolfgang Köhler’s book, "The Mentality of Apes" about the colony of apes in Tenerife, where experiments were conducted in which the apes also placed cubes on top of another in order to reach a banana” and is clearly referenced in this piece.