Fundamental Sounds- Recording Samuel Beckett's Radio Plays.pdf

Fundamental Sounds: Recording Samuel Beckett's Radio PlaysAuthor(s): Everett C. FrostSource: Theatre Journal, Vol. 43, No. 3, Radio Drama (Oct., 1991), pp. 361-376Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207590 .

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Fundamental Sounds: Recording Samuel Beckett's Radio Plays

Everett C. Frost

Don't look, said Mercier. The sound is enough, said Camier.

--Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier

In 1955 the BBC, intrigued by the international attention being given to the Paris production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, invited the author to write a radio play. Beckett was hesitant, but he wrote to his friend, Nancy Cunard, "Never thought about radio play technique but in the dead of t'other night got a nice gruesome idea full of cartwheels and dragging of feet and puffing and panting which may or may not lead to something."' It led to All That Fall -and four other plays written specifically for the radio medium during the next twenty years: Embers, Words and Music, Cascando, and Rough for Radio II.2 It led also to a translation of Robert Pinget's Manivelle into what the BBC described as a "conversation piece for radio,"3 That Old Tune, and to cooperation with the BBC and Radio France in creating radio productions of his stage plays and readings from his poems and prose texts. It is significant that Beckett's considerable reluctance to allow works written for one medium to be adapted to another probably has been more often and more casually relaxed for radio than for any other medium, including stage. Perhaps this is because, as Enoch Brater has pointed out,4 there is a sense in which all of Beckett's readers are listeners-a sup- position made explicit in the staging of Ohio Impromptu. Once hooked, Beckett

Everett C. Frost is a Professor in the Department of Film and Television, New York University.

'No Symbols Where None Intended: A Catalogue of Books, Manuscripts, and Other Materials Relating to Samuel Beckett in the Collections of the Humanities Research Center. Austin, Texas: Humanities Research Center, 93.

2Correspondence at the BBC and a discussion with the author confirmed that Rough for Radio I is an early attempt at the play that became Cascando. In 1985 Beckett described it to me as "unfinished and now unfinishable" and requested that we not include it in The Beckett Festival of Radio Plays.

3Beryl S. and John Fletcher, A Student's Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 145.

4Enoch Brater, "Editor's Introduction," Beckett at 80 / Beckett in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 5.

Theatre Journal 43 (1991) 361-376 c 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press



362 / Everett C. Frost

approached the challenge presented by radio with considerable enthusiasm, with an astute and innovative clarity about the unique characteristics and possibilities of the medium, and without condescension. Each of the radio plays is a landmark in pi- oneering the development of acoustic art. The experiments in radio also exerted a continuing influence on his writing for other media, making them a significant, not incidental, part of his work. As the distinguished critic and former Head of Radio Drama at the BBC, Martin Esslin, has observed:

Samuel Beckett's work for broadcasting is a highly significant part of his oeuvre and far less fully discussed in the mounting literature on Beckett than his other output, far less readily available, also, in performance, which alone can bring out its full flavor. But beyond that, Beckett's experience with broadcasting, and above all radio, has played a significant and little-known part in his development as an artist.5

The radio plays mark the beginning of his continuing interest in writing for the media and led directly to successful scripts and productions for television and film-an interest that continued until the end of his life. In the years preceding All That Fall, Beckett had been writing exclusively in French. Radio provided the opportunity to write in English again, which marked an important moment in his development. When he returned to his native language, he was able to use material drawn from his youth in Ireland.

The radio plays are contemporaneous with the most prolific period of his writing for the stage. They appeared shortly after the first productions of Waiting for Godot and the completion of the script for Endgame, and they were interspersed with the writing of Krapp's Last Tape, Happy Days, and Act Without Words. Not surprisingly, there is a good deal of crossover-of strategy, imagery, and thematic concerns- which the radio plays help to clarify. If, for example, a play could "appear" on a tape recorder, why could not a tape recorder appear in a play? While writing Krapp's Last Tape, Beckett wrote to the BBC asking for details about how the thing worked-- anticipating by several years the now common practice of introducing electronic recording apparatus into stage productions. Within a year of the broadcast of his first radio play, he was describing a stage play (Endgame) to his American director, Alan Schneider, in words that still evoked the depths of his involvement with radio:

My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.6

II

Many people have had the idea that Samuel Beckett's radio plays ought to be produced for broadcast in America, but Martha Fehsenfeld is to be credited with

5Martin Esslin, "Samuel Beckett and the Art of Broadcasting," in Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett, and the Media (New York: Grove Press, 1982), 125.

6Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 109.



RECORDING BECKETT'S RADIO PLAYS / 363

having pulled together the initial forces that made it possible to do so, and she served as the project's first administrative director.7 In recording them, we set out to create lively, contemporary, productions that fully exploited their possibilities as radio plays and, insofar as this could be determined, adhered to what Beckett intended the plays to sound like. Such had been the general design of Martha Fehsenfeld, the project's originator, and Louise Cleveland, who did the work of directing the project in its

7AII That Fall was produced under the fiscal agency of Soundscape, Inc., with Dr. Louise Cleveland as its Executive Producer. The cast included Billie Whitelaw as Maddy Rooney, with David Warrilow as Dan, and Alvin Epstein (Mr. Slocum), George Bartenieff (Mr. Tyler), Jerome Kilty (Christy, Mr. Barrell), Susan Willis (Miss Fitt), Melissa Cooper (Female Voice), Lute Ramblin' (Jerry, Lynch twin), and Christine Eddis (Lynch twin) in supporting roles.

The Berlin, West German radio station, RIAS (Rundfunk in Amerikanische Sektor) co-produced the play, with Dr. Gotz Naleppa, then Head of the Horspiel Abteilung (Radio Drama Department), as the Administrative liaison. It was distributed in the United States and Canada by American Public Radio (APR) on Samuel Beckett's eightieth birthday, 13 April 1986, and was subsequently broadcast on RIAS and on the German-speaking Swiss radio station, ZDF. Major funding was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, with additional funds from RIAS and New York University.

The Beckett Festival of Radio Plays was produced under the fiscal agency of Voices International, with Dr. Everett C. Frost as Project Director and Faith Wilding as Co-Director, and it was distributed as a five-part series by National Public Radio in April 1989, with a subsequent release in February 1990. It included:

The All That Fall production initially broadcast in 1986, with the addition of a half-hour documentary produced by Dr. Cleveland.

Embers, with Barry McGovern as Henry and Billie Whitelaw as Ada. Words and Music, with an original score for the production by Morton Feldman conducted by Nils

Vigeland, featuring David Warrilow as Joe and Alvin Epstein as Croak. It was co-produced with Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR, Cologne), with Dr. Klaus Schoning, Head of the H6rspiel Studio Akustische Kunst, as the administrative liaison.

Cascando, with an original score for the production written and conducted by William Kraft and performed by Speculum Musicae, featured Alvin Epstein as Voice and Frederick Neumann as Opener. It was co-produced with Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR, Cologne), with Dr. Klaus Sch6ning, Head of the H6rspiel Studio Akustische Kunst, as the administrative liaison.

Rough for Radio II, with W. Dennis Hunt as the Animator, Amanda Plummer as the Stenographer, Barry McGovern as Fox, and Charles Potter as Dick.

The plays were directed and produced by Everett Frost. David Rapkin (All That Fall) and Stephen Erickson were the production engineers. Documentaries accompanying the broadcast of all the plays in the Festival except All That Fall were produced by Charles Potter, who also created the studio sound effects for All That Fall, Words and Music, and Rough for Radio II. The project was advised by a team of humanist scholars that included, at various times (in addition to Martha Fehsenfeld and Louise Cleveland), Lois More Overbeck (Humanist Coordinator), Enoch Brater, Thomas Bishop, and Wallace Fowlie. In addition to the assistance from Samuel Beckett, there was considerable help from his American representative, Barney Rosset, and from Walter Asmus, Antoni Libera, and Linda Ben-Zvi. Major funding for the series was again provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, with additional funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), New York University, and the Arts and Performance Fund of National Public Radio.

Cassette copies of The Beckett Festival of Radio Plays productions were being made available through the cassette division of National Public Radio. Without prior warning, in mid-September 1990, NPR announced the termination of its Cassette Division, effective the end of the month. As this issue goes into production, we expect to keep cassettes available via the Pacifica Program Service, 3729 Cahuenga Blvd. - West, N. Hollywood, California 91604, phone: 800/735-0230.




initial stages, before it had come to include me-and it was one in which I heartily concurred. In inviting me to direct the plays, and ultimately the project as well, they gave me one of the most meaningful experiences of my life, and I shall be forever grateful to them for it.

As is well known, Beckett had very firm convictions about what ought and ought not to be done with his work, and since he was kind enough to meet with me to discuss the project as it developed, I was particularly concerned, insofar as possible, to follow his intentions as they currently appeared to him -variously twenty to thirty years distant form his involvement with the original BBC or French Radio productions of his works. In the end, as I shall discuss below, there were some departures- resulting from our production circumstances or imposed by funding difficulties that spread the project over a six-year period and interfered with its cohesion-but such was the general strategy at the outset, and it informed every aspect of the project, from selection of actors and composers through final editing and post-production mixing.

It should not, however, be inferred from this description of our design that we were attempting to create museum pieces or that the productions were in any sense "Beckett directed" or that they can claim any special authority in that regard. In our first meeting (in July 1985) I invited Beckett to direct any of the productions he wished or to attend the recording or production sessions, which I offered to schedule in Paris or Stuttgart for his convenience. (When I suggested that he come to New York for the purpose, where he had been only once before, at Barney Rosset's invitation, to direct Film, he replied with a mischievous grin, "No, ... they'd eat me alive.") I also offered to create the productions under his specific instructions. He considered each alternative carefully but felt unable to make the effort that would be required. He gave careful attention to my inquiries concerning a great many minute particulars and was generous with his counsel-and, of course, I tried to follow it as best I could. But I am solely responsible for all the directorial choices that were made. There is no sense in which Beckett "shadow directed" the plays or The Beckett Festival productions are, for all of his genuinely helpful assistance, a Beckett-authorized last word on the subject, and it would be risky to try to learn very much about how Beckett did things from these productions. But while our approach was a conservative one, it was not a restrictive one and did not inhibit our efforts to create vigorous, lively, contemporary realizations of the radio plays--which is what Beckett himself clearly wanted us to do and towards which his advice consistently tended.

I also felt no particular need to emulate or recreate the original BBC productions. Since Beckett had taken an active interest in them, these productions and the correspondence between Beckett and the BBC directors, Donald McWhinnie and Martin Esslin, served as an indispensable guide to preparing to direct the radio plays. Except Rough for Radio II, the BBC had produced each of the plays as soon as they were written, and all of them were recorded at a time when Beckett's interest in them was more current and active than it could possibly have been after the twenty to thirty years that elapsed before The Beckett Festival undertook them. In the early days of the project, I listened to each of the BBC productions as part of the process of thoroughly familiarizing myself with the plays, but I deliberately ceased to do so as the project progressed, so as not to have their "sound" in my head as a "model."




They sometimes served as a useful point of departure for discussions with Beckett. There were some things that he wanted to have preserved in the new productions, such as the impressionistic character of the sound effects in All That Fall. There were other things he wished might be given a "fresh approach": for example, he asked that we use recordings of the animals specified for the rural sounds in All That Fall, not humans imitating them; that we not attempt an electronic drone under the waves in Embers; and that we not try to emulate the closing chamber door supplied by the BBC at the beginning of Rough for Radio II. Almost invariably, the correspondence at the BBC Written Archive Center confirmed that Beckett was reiterating to me the preferences he had indicated at the time to the BBC.8 There were many things which it pained him to be unable to remember and in which I was encouraged to follow out my own

instincts--and to follow the text. In some instances, the correspondence

between Beckett and the BBC provided the help I had sought.9

The determination to adhere, as far possible, to Beckett's intentions and also to approach the plays as radio-specific led to the major casting decisions, and we were extremely fortunate in recruiting such distinguished veteran Beckett actors as Billie Whitelaw, David Warrilow, Barry McGovern, Alvin Epstein, Frederick Neumann, and George Bartenieff. Each of them had had considerable experience in wrestling with Beckett's texts, rhythms, and pauses and had developed a pace and style for his works that were similar to those I had heard in listening to Beckett's oral recitations from the texts of the plays. All of them had done radio before, and most of them had previously done Beckett on radio. In several instances it provided them with their first opportunity to meet and work with each other. Though heavily pressed with other responsibilities, they were each deeply invested in contributing their skills to the success of the project and eager to extend their work in Beckett to the relatively under-used medium of radio, in which audience attention could be concentrated on the nuances of Beckett's exquisite language. It is one of the beauties of radio drama that performers do not need to memorize the scripts; therefore, it does not require weeks of preparation and rehearsal, as with stage, or lengthy shooting schedules, as with film. Actors tend to like the opportunities afforded by radio because it can give them meaningful things to do that they might not be able to do onstage and it is flexible and can fit around--when necessary - dodging in and out of other schedules.

III

Samuel Beckett's radio plays are best approached when not thought of as regrettably diminished by confinement to radio, like Rapunzle in her tower, with only her voice

8The BBC Written Archive Center is located in Reading, England. BBC policy does not allow its materials to be quoted without permission of both the author and the BBC. Clas Zilliacus drew the same conclusions from the letters long prior to my perusal of them. ("Beckett and Broadcasting," Acta Academiae Aboensis, Series A (Vol. 51), No. 2, pg. 69).

9The BBC's Sound Designer for the original productions, Desmond Briscoe (whose experience with Beckett's radio plays led him to develop the internationally respected Radiophonic Workshop at Maida Vale, from the directorship of which he is now retired), also very generously gave me invaluable descriptions of the technical strategies employed in realizing the plays.



366 I Everett C. Frost

to woo, waiting for some fairy prince (from the theater or public television) to discover her and liberate her beautiful form. Thus I approached them as works specifically intended for the radio. Each of the productions in The Beckett Festival was dramaturged and prepared from the beginning within the context and aesthetic and production requirements of the radio medium.

Beckett was a modernist rather than a postmodernist in his classicism with respect to genre and was, therefore, at least in principle, resistant to attempts to move his works from one medium to another, even though he himself had, from time to time, either cooperated in or capitulated to such demands. "In the main," remarked Ruby Cohn, "Beckett wants his works to be performed in the medium for which they were composed.""1 His radio plays are so thoroughly immersed in the medium for which they were written that they cannot be extracted from it without leaving something of their essence behind. They made difficult and unconventional and innovative uses of the radio. Working them through meant, constantly, learning new things, new possibilities, for the art of radio. They masterfully exploit those evocative powers that are intrinsic to a sound medium and that cannot be translated into a visual one without altering the essence of the work, like turning the prince into a frog with a kiss, and they are no more impoverished for being made wholly out of sound than Act Without Words is impoverished for being a mime. Beckett's admonition, quoted by Clas Zilliacus as the frontispiece to his Beckett and Broadcasting, states his position very clearly:

All That Fall is specifically a radio play, or rather radio text, for voices, not bodies. I have already refused to have it "staged" and I cannot think of it in such terms. A perfectly straight reading before an audience seems to me just barely legitimate, though even on this score, I have my doubts. But I am absolutely opposed to any form of adaptation with a view to its conversion into "theatre." It is no more theatre than End-Game is radio and to "act" it is to kill it. Even the reduced visual dimension it will receive from the simplest and most static of readings . . . will be destructive of whatever quality it may have and which depends on the whole thing's coming out of the dark ... Frankly the thought of All That Fall on a stage, however discreetly, is intolerable to me. If another radio performance could be given in the States, it goes without saying that I'd be very pleased.

Now for my sins I have to go on and say that I can't agree with the idea of Act Without Words as a film. It is not a film, not conceived in terms of cinema. If we can't keep our genres more or less distinct, or extricate them from the confusion that has them where they are, we might as well go home and lie down.

In the mid 1980s he had not changed his mind. As Thomas F. Van Laan has remarked, "Beckett's view of All That Fall-a view that is borne out by the work itself--makes clear that interpretations of it must take into account its condition as a radio text, must see this condition as an essential aspect of its nature and meaning.""1 In preparing the American production, then, it seemed essential to identify those qualities of All That Fall and the other radio plays that specifically depended upon their emerging from the dark.

The point of view from which All That Fall unfolds makes it unstageable and a radical plunge into the medium of radio. The play seems "realistic" only when it is

'oRuby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett's Theatre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 208. "Thomas F. Van Laan, "All That Fall as 'a play for Radio,' " Modern Drama 29: 1 (1986): 39.




perceived as the story of Maddy Rooney's walk to the Boghill Railway station to meet her blind husband, Dan, and their walk back home, culminating in the revelation by the boy, Jerry, of the tragedy that delayed the train and the dissolution of Maddy and Dan in the "tempest of wind and rain." That is a wonderful drama, and there is nothing to prevent it from being staged or filmed other than, perhaps, Beckett's reluctance--or outright refusal. But this is not All That Fall. After some considerable effort, I could find no other approach to the play that accounted for everything in it than to understand it not as the main character's journey to and from the Boghill Railway station but as that journey as it is perceived by Maddy Rooney from within the mind of Maddy Rooney as she is in the process of experiencing it. For example, the enigmatic "rural sounds" that open the play cannot, if Beckett's instructions are adhered to, be produced in a way that creates the realistic ambience of a rural soundscape for Maddy Rooney to walk into:

Rural sounds. Sheep, bird, cow, cock, severally, then together. Silence. MRS. ROONEY advances along country road towards railway station. Sounds of her dragging feet. Music faint from house by way. "Death and the Maiden." The steps slow down, stop. MRS. ROONEY: Poor woman. All alone in that ruinous old house.12

The sounds make perfect sense, however, when they are heard as the cacophony of the natural world, not as it "is," but as Mrs. Rooney experiences it--she is a Cartesian victim whose reality cannot be divorced from her perception of it. She not only experiences and therefore is, she is what she experiences, and, alternatively, her experiences define--create?--her very existence. She comes into existence for the audience as an assemblage of the sounds she hears: rural sounds, labored footsteps, and then the distant strains of "Death and the Maiden," prompting the lyric asso- ciation and contrast of herself with the "poor woman" -the first words of the play, not uttered but thought. This is difficult on radio (it requires the audience to remain in the dark about what is going on until the play progresses long enough for auditors to assemble her out of her own perceptions), but it is impossible on the stage, screen, or television, in which the visual, physical, presence of Maddy necessarily must either precede, be simultaneous with, or lag behind the sounds - sounds which, from within her own mind, create her for the audience. In other words, the visual perception of her existence would proceed independently of the sonic assemblage of it. But this is impossible if the central method--the "point" --of the play is to be preserved. This principle is consistently adhered to throughout the play.

Billie Whitelaw brought decades of exacting work with Beckett on the performance of his texts to bear on her creation of the role of Maddy Rooney. In an interview with Louise Cleveland during the recording sessions for All That Fall, she remarked:

There are certain things that I've done in this play, All That Fall, which have come out of a shorthand--out of years of working with him. And I have now in my little Beckett box what I call a scream button and I also have a laugh button. And I think when Beckett writes a laugh, certainly with the ladies I seem to play, it's usually a laugh that comes piercing into the air out of nothing and stops dead. And it's the same with the scream-

12All That Fall, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 12. All quotations from Beckett's radio plays are taken from this edition.




the scream just comes out of nothing. And-he spoke on the phone just before I left to come here--I said I'm just assuming that when Mrs. Rooney laughs, it's the laugh button, and when she screams, it's the scream button, and he said, yes, yes, the scream button and the laugh button, that's it. And, well, that said it all. We don't have to discuss it any further.

Since his death, Whitelaw has come to describe herself as "like a canvas who has lost the paintbrush."'3 She prepared and discussed her roles as Maddy Rooney (All That Fall) and Ada (Embers) with Beckett before our rehearsal periods began. She came to the rehearsals with notes for me that she had taken down from conversations with Beckett about the play, responses to further inquiries I had made, and information about her characters and roles.14 She had an uncanny ability to absorb herself into the role:

The work with Sam has been trying to get the right music, the right sound, the right color; these are words that he uses a lot: Color. He'll say, "That's too much color." I think he's terrified that actors will start acting, and so he always says "no color, start with no color," and gradually it starts to build and starts to roll and nine times out of ten one ends up with an absolute powerhouse of emotion. . . . And of course this lady is getting more and more in a state of exhaustion and panic and distraughtness. Sam described her as-oh, he had a marvelous expression for it, what was it?-in a state of abortive explo- siveness.

IV The major developments in audio technology that have occurred since the original

productions of the plays created new production possibilities. The introduction of stereo broadcast opened up another spatial dimension, making such things as the relationships among characters more readily intelligible. The availability of multi- track recording and production methods gave us more control over timing and the balance of forces, particularly in Words and Music and Cascando. High-quality portable tape recorders and a variety of specialized microphones reduced the need to rely on "canned" sound effects and allowed field recordings of them that were tailored to the production: for example, the rural sounds in All That Fall and the waves in Embers. Dolby (A) noise reduction made possible the virtual elimination of background tape hiss as the tapes were dubbed and redubbed during the production process.

But none of these technical developments made the plays less of a challenge than they had been when they were first written. Martin Esslin, former Head of Radio Drama at the BBC, has described the task presented by All That Fall for the BBC:

'3New York Times, 2 September 1990. 14It was in this way that we learned that "hinnys whinny" in All That Fall, which contrasts with

the "true donkey" that brays later in the play. A good dictionary will tell you that a hinny is a cross between a mule and a horse, and in the BBC production (which its director, Donald McWhinnie, had discussed with Beckett in great detail), Christy's hinny brays, though Maddy says clearly that it whinnies, and, since in these rural particulars, I'm barely able to tell a cow from a horse, I was puzzled. See also Martin Esslin, "Samuel Beckett and the Art of Broadcasting," 129.




Alvin Epstein struggles with "Voice" in Cascando. Photo: Faith Wilding.




Beckett's script demanded a degree of stylized realism hitherto unheard of in radio drama, and new methods had to be found to extract the sounds needed (both animal and me- chanical- footsteps, cars, bicycle wheels, the train, the cart) from the simple naturalism of the hundreds of records in the BBC's effects library. [Desmond] Briscoe [the Sound Effects Designer] (and his Gramophone operator, Norman Baines) had to invent ways and means to remove these sounds from the purely realistic sphere. They did so by treating them electronically: slowing down, speeding up, adding echo, fragmenting them by cutting them into segments, and putting them together in new ways. These experiments, and the discoveries made as they evolved, led directly to the establishment of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. Beckett and All That Fall thus directly contributed to one of the most important technical advances in the art of radio (and the technique, and indeed technology, of radio in Britain).15

In the years that have elapsed since the BBC production, such things as the electronic manipulation of sound have become routine. Special effects that once were innovative (slowing down or speeding up tape speeds, the addition of echo effects, and, shall we say, "deconstructive" tape editing) have become the cliches of the popular music recording industry and commercial advertising. For this reason, though such devices are used throughout, I decided at the outset to employ them as little as possible, and we relied heavily on acoustic rather than electronic effects.

Another major departure from the techniques of the original BBC productions was in the recording methods. Prior to the invention of audiotape, radio drama was performed straight through, from beginning to end, live on the air. In the 1950s, when the BBC produced All That Fall, audiotape was relatively new to British radio drama. Recording a drama essentially meant running the play more or less straight through from beginning to end and recording it onto the tape for subsequent broadcast, which provided the opportunity to stop and start, to back up and repair things. (With a resident acting company permanently on call, it is a practice that has more or less continued at the BBC until now.) Thus, several days were devoted to rehearsing All That Fall straight through, followed by recording at the end of the rehearsal period, with sound effects being put in both live in the studio and from the "grams" (gramophone records). But, audiotape also allows for a radio play, like a film, to be broken up into "shooting" (recording) scenes, which can be grouped, out of sequence, according to symmetries of microphone placement, acoustics, and actors included. Sound effects can be produced in the studio and recorded along with the action, "Foleyed" (produced in the studio in synchronization with the voice track played back after it has been recorded and the actors have gone home), or mixed in later from stock or field-recorded sources. These were the methods I employed for All That Fall and the other radio plays (except that Words and Music and Cascando required yet further variations to accommodate the music, which are beyond the scope of this essay).

"5See also Donald McWhinnie, The Art of Radio (London: Faber and Faber, 1959); and Desmond Briscoe (Sound designer, BBC production, and originator of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop) in conversations with Everett Frost, August 1985.




V

To a greater extent than is the case with any other play to leave Beckett's hands, the script for Words and Music is-intentionally-only partially complete. An entire character, and consequently about half the play, is left for someone else, a composer, to write. In this respect Words and Music differs radically from Cascando, the other radio play requiring music, which was written at about the same time. In Words and Music, the music has a name (Bob) and, decidedly, a personality. Through dialogue, Bob interacts with his companion Joe (Words), thereby taking part in the action as a distinct character. In Cascando, the music has no name (and the name of its verbal counterpart, "Voice," is less anthropomorphic than the "Joe" of Words and Music). The music augments, follows, and counterpoints Voice's monologue with a "monologue" (in musical form) of its own. It restates (or, at the end, anticipates and sets the pattern for) Voice in another, more abstract, language, but it does not have a name and does not take up a part in the dialogue.

Words and Music was created in response to a commission from the BBC obtained, not by the author, Sam Beckett (who disliked the restriction of working to meet an externally imposed obligation), but by the composer, Beckett's cousin John. Their collaboration took place in circumstances that allowed close consultation. The script for "Joe" and "Croak"-and instructions for the insertion of "Bob" and about what he was expected to do at any given moment-had, necessarily, to be written first. Thus, Samuel Beckett established the overall structure and "drama" of the play. When the music was written, the play then would leave the author/composer team's collaborative hands, having been completed under their combined authorial control, and its full script would consist of both Samuel Beckett's words and John Beckett's music--written partially in words and sentences and partially in notes and measures.

Unfortunately, the music satisfied neither collaborator and was withdrawn soon after the original BBC and subsequent French Radio productions, and the published text of Words and Music now consists only of Samuel Beckett's part of the collaboration. The play remained incomplete and therefore unperformable until new music (the other half of the script) could be supplied, and by a composer who was not involved in the collaborative process as it was originally conceived. In 1985 Beckett reconfirmed that it would be "impossible" to use the original music, and he consented to let me commission a new score for the American production. However, by that time Beckett was 79, and he made it clear to me that he felt too distant from the original impetus of the work to enter yet once again into the collaborative process as he had done with his cousin.

Yet he had, it seemed to me, a special fondness for the play. I think the reason was, in part, because the action of the play requires that Words and Music, Bob and Joe, achieve a genuine cooperation that is emotionally powerful enough to affect Croak-and, necessarily, therefore effective enough to move the audience also, so that, dramatically speaking, the audience is satisfied that Croak is appropriately and not sentimentally motivated. This dramatic necessity required Samuel Beckett either




to create or to insert some of the most exquisite lyric lines he had ever written. He was very fond of them and could recite them from memory:16

Age is when to a man Huddled o'er the ingle Shivering for the hag To put the pan in the bed And bring the toddy She comes in the ashes Who loved could not be won Or won not loved Or some other trouble Comes in the ashes Like in that old light The face in the ashes That old starlight On the earth again. Then down a little way Through the trash Towards where All dark no begging No giving no words No sense no need Through the scum Down a little way To whence one glimpse Of that wellhead.17

It may have been his affection for the poem and the desire to have it experienced in its dramatic context that prompted him to allow us to, as he said, "give it a fresh go," even though that meant that the collaboration required to complete the play would occur at some remove from his control, and he suggested Morton Feldman as the composer. The two men had met in the mid-1970s, when Feldman used Beckett's short text, Neither, as the basis for a lengthy work commissioned by the Rome opera. They shared a distaste for opera, and Feldman's setting had pleased Beckett greatly. He felt that Feldman could be relied upon not to turn Words and Music-a dramatic work involving music-into an opera.

Feldman readily accepted the commission to write the music, subsequently describing it as "the happiest of all the things I've done":

16Much of my direction of that play and the others was informed by listening to Beckett read or recite passages from them. It told me more than any discussion could about the beats, pauses, and

inflections--about how the texts sounded to him. Beckett was exceedingly good as an oral interpreter

of his own works, reading flawlessly in an exquisite French-accented English that still carried a hint of Irish inflection. For the record: I brought neither tape recorder nor camera with me to our meetings (though both were back at my hotel), not by prearrangement (it had not been discussed) but out of respect for his privacy and consideration for what I came to believe was shyness, not reticence. He had consented to provide me with such help as he could with his plays, not to an interview. Knowing that I would be faulted if I did not presume upon the privilege of asking to record a reading or interview, I did ask once, and I received the anticipated reply, "impossible."

17Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays, 131.




I had an emotional vested interest in this-almost as a tribute to Beckett-because Beckett has been very much a part of my life since the 50's. You know, he was actually for us, and my generation, a 50's writer, because when he was with Barney Rosset and Grove Press, that really brought him to New York for us. And so, I feel he's a contemporary, although he's twenty years older than me. So, I was very excited in doing the project; it meant a lot to me. It was a labor of love, as they say.'"

Feldman felt a strong and deeply emotional affinity for Beckett's work, and he un- derstood its implications:

It's beyond Existentialism, you see, because Existentialism is always looking for a way out, you know. If they feel that God is dead, then long live humanity. Kind of Camus and Sartre-I mean, there's always a substitute to save you in Existentialism. And I feel that Beckett is not involved with that, because there's nothing saving him. For example, the opera (Neither)-it really wasn't an opera; it was just a poem that I extended into an opera length -the subject essentially is: whether you're in the shadows of understanding or nonunderstanding, I mean, finally you're in the shadows. You're not going to arrive at any understanding at all; you're just left there holding this hot potato which is life.

Once immersed in the project, he found it extremely difficult--requiring all his

discipline--to subject himself to the radical concisions required by the piece. At that time his own music was moving in a quite different direction--toward lengthier and more extended forms than could be permitted for "Bob," the musical character in Words and Music.

When you get a world like ... Beckett's, the reference, to some degree, is closed to any other experience but his own. Now, to me the exciting thing is that . . . (long pause) Beckett is not narcissistic: you don't feel the sense of an egoism there. But at the same time you feel a really, a complete and closed artistic experience. That is the contradiction. And that's the contradiction that I identify [with]. I feel that I too am not open to musical experiences other than my own. Then, what happens is what a psychoanalyst might call adult compromise, in terms of the appropriateness of how I would bend, for example, and try to attempt to realize essentially someone else's experience. That's what happens in something like this.

I had mapped out for him the approximate duration of each of the music cues, including the time it would take to perform the portions of text that were to be

accompanied by music, which would have to be adhered to if the completed work were to move at the pace Beckett's text seemed to me to require for it and if a temporal coherence were to be achieved. We found no difficulties in our shared understanding of the play, and, once Feldman had begun working on the music, we rarely discussed it directly. What seemed to help him most was reading lines from the play back and forth to each other (almost always on the telephone) as we heard them in our heads.

18Morton Feldman's remarks are transcribed from the interview I recorded with him on 10 March 1987, immediately after we had finished the post-production mixing of his music for Words and Music. Tragically, it was the last interview he ever gave. He died of cancer the following September. Portions of the interview are included in the documentary, produced by Charles Potter, that ac- companies the broadcast and cassette of our Words and Music production.




If I would use his terminology, that he would use in asking for music, I never could have written it, because I don't know what that terminology means. I know what it means in terms of Puccini. If he (Beckett) says he wants something sentimental, I have no idea what that means, because it's like a "thump." I mean, what kind of "thump?" You see, you think, with Beckett, you realize how much you don't understand the simplest word like "thump." It's as if you're with someone you love dearly, and you're listening to them: you don't want to be patronizing, but, you know, at the same time, language is not telling you, you see. You're looking in the eyes, you're looking at the body language, you're for everything in Beckett other than his directions; because if I was looking for his directions and if I saw the word sentimental, it would be like a John Ford (laugh) movie on an island or something.

As the composition of a great artist in his own right, Feldman's score struggles under the collaboration with Beckett's text, and, in the face of the imposed concisions, it struggles with that struggle, much as, in the play itself, Bob struggles with Joe- ironically living through the story of the play in the process of creating a production of it.

So I took it to the quintessence of it, the fact and the sense that, um, um. .... In very prosaic terms, as if there was a situation where two people were having some problems, you know, as prosaic as that. And, ah, music essentially had to bend, had to be there. At the same time the presence of music is always there and has terrific power, even though it's incongruous to some degree. Not all the time. But it's incongruous the minute you get away from cliche-type of responses. See, literature could be universal. When music is universal, it never gets beyond the level of, say, a Shostakovitch. It's, it's freshman universal. (Laughs).19

I have no reservations about "our" Words and Music as a completion and interpretation of the play. I find Feldman's contribution to it emotionally powerful and "haunting." However, The Beckett Festival production is not solely the realization of the self- contained drama established by Beckett's words. In this respect it is unlike any of the other radio plays, including Cascando, in which the music functions as a nonverbal extension of the text, and, for that matter, unlike any other Beckett play. The Beckett Festival production indicates the kind of results that can be achieved by drawing upon the creative genius of a great composer with a distinctive voice of his or her own to complete the play.

There are other approaches. I would like to see what would happen if I tried it with music that carried echoes of the circus or carnival or dance hall rather than the concert hall, exploiting musical riffs of the kind used to sustain vaudevillian sight gags and the like. In suggesting such an alternative, I do not mean to imply that I

19Tragically, what long-term effect the collaboration on Words and Music might have had on Morton Feldman's subsequent career will never be known. The conductor for Words and Music, Nils Vigeland, a former student of Feldman's, remarked that the music was radically different from anything Feldman was currently doing, and in our interview, Feldman himself remarked:

If you noticed, all the musicians said "It's you and it's not you." In other words, if I approached it in terms of style, then it'd be more me. Well, they know my music, you see. And I thought that, too, it is me and it's not me.

His last composition, and the only one to be completed after Words and Music, was an orchestral work for the Holland Festival in June 1987, entitled simply, "For Samuel Beckett."




am in any way regretful of the direction our "fresh go" took or of Morton Feldman's music. Such is emphatically not the case. But with this play more than the others, it will take several productions with a variety of musics before we can feel reliably that we have begun to get to the bottom of its complex and interesting possibilities.

As with All That Fall, these possibilities must be explored in radio -to move Words and Music to some other medium would be to alter it radically. The character "Bob" is music. He includes not only the performance of music (what is done by an ensemble and its conductor) but also the entire process of creating the music (the process Morton Feldman went through in composing the score, and which would have to be repeated by any other composer). The former can, of course, be staged, but the latter cannot, and the visual implication that the performance ensemble and conductor comprised all of Bob would be reductive and incorrect. Similarly, the character "Joe" cannot be reduced to the process of uttering the words. He "is" the entire process of creating those words as well -the process Samuel Beckett went through in writing the text. It is a point emphasized in the script when Croak prompts Joe to abandon the Aristotelian reiteration of the same words for the topic "Love" that he has just employed for Sloth.20 Evidently, the successful collaboration with music requires something more than the recitation of a known text. It requires the improvisation of an as yet unknown one. On the stage or on the screen, Joe would be confined, by the physical presence of an actor, to being represented as the performance of the words.

VI

Although the audience does not need ever to have seen it to appreciate the plays, All That Fall, Cascando, and Embers are minutely rooted in the Irish landscape, and it helped me to envision it in directing them.21 But even apart from the landscape, words like strand, hinny, gobstopper, up mail, fixture, jaegers, and the Ladies Plate and such things as Dan's comic calculations in shillings and pence precluded transposing these plays to an environment with which Americans would be more familiar. Words and Music takes place in a more abstract mental landscape, but the long disquisition on Sloth, the "tower," and the exclamation "My Lord" suggest a setting that is not and cannot be made American.

Beckett could describe in vivid detail the particulars of the landscape surrounding his boyhood home in Foxrock, and he often did so in response to my inquiries about Maddy's walk to the station in All That Fall, Woburn's journey in Cascando, and Henry's seaside mutterings in Embers. In Embers, Henry says:

That sound you hear is the sea. [Pause. Louder.] I say that sound you hear is the sea, we are sitting on the strand. [Pause.] I mention it because the sound is so strange, so unlike

20Bob tries something similarly reductive in responding to the announced theme of "Love" with, Loud rap of baton and as before fortissimo, all expression gone, drowning WORDS' protestations. Pause. (Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays, 128.)

21With grateful thanks to Barry McGovern for his invaluable help in guiding us to all the right places.




the sound of the sea, that if you didn't see what it was you wouldn't know what it was. [Pause.]

[93]

Whatever else it may be (a passage that illuminates Henry's attempt to have a conversation with his dead father), this piece of monologue near the very beginning of the play sets the scene for the audience and is clearly a production instruction for the soundscape. When asked what to do, Beckett would give no advice other than a long remembrance of taking the tram out to the last station on the Hill of Howth (where Henry's father disappears into the sea) and about the strand (Killeney Beach) near his boyhood home in Foxrock. In Embers Henry says to his (dead) father,

You would never live this side of the bay, you wanted the sun on the water for that evening bathe you took once too often. But when I got your money I moved across, as perhaps you may know.

[95]

A visit to the strand near Foxrock answered the question of what to do. Killeney Beach is diagonally across Dublin Bay from the Howth peninsula (Henry moves into a more fashionable neighborhood with his father's money). The beach is steeply raked and composed of pebbles that move continuously in the waves -creating what is, in fact, the unusual "sucking" sound described by Henry in the play. We recorded these beach sounds for the waves in Embers. They balance and complement the carefully honed Beckettian nuances and pacing, which Barry McGovern has exqui- sitely mastered and which he delivered with his Irish inflection.

In the long scene with Ada, we had to place Billie Whitelaw in an isolation booth to achieve the required separation from the other voices. This was the only way to ensure that the production would not indicate whether or not Ada, like Henry's father, is dead. The script doesn't tell you. [Beckett's script specified "no sound (effect)" when she moves; yet she, unlike Henry's father, does answer him, at least for a while.] When asked if she was alive or dead, Beckett's reply was a sympathetic shrug of his shoulders. Billie Whitelaw reported that he had once responded to the direct question, "Look, am I dead?" in reference to Ada and other characters with "Let's just say you're not all there," which seemed to satisfy all of us. (For the unsatisfied, there's always the aspirin bottle). It was difficult, however, for the performers to cue each other in their timings, when it all had to be done through headphones, but they did it. Later Stephen Erickson, the production engineer, helped me blend the waves to their voices, almost literally painting them in, wave by wave. Then he spent, I no longer know how long, cutting all the little pieces together. Now that it is (finally) over, and I have a chance to reflect on it, The Beckett Festival of Radio Plays was one of the most powerful and moving experiences of my life. One hopes that we have done them at least well enough for the audiences to experience something of their remarkable power.



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