Fundamental Sounds: Recording Samuel Beckett's Radio Plays

Abstract

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 supposition made explicit in the staging of Ohio Impromptu. Once hooked, Beckett