Rough for Radio I and II by Samuel Beckett (1961)

Samuel Beckett and radio plays

Samuel Beckett is best known for his stage plays (Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days) and his novels (Murphy, Watt, Malone Dies), but he was also fascinated by the medium of radio. Between 1956 and 1963, Beckett wrote no fewer than seven radio plays (six original scripts, and an Irish-flavoured reimagining of Robert Pinget’s French play, La Manivelle). In his words, these are plays designed ‘to come out of the dark’.

To many critics, the radio plays are the quintessential Beckett. Stripped of the distractions of stage settings and decor,  or having to arrange for actors’ positions and movements, the two Roughs consist of voice alone, almost of language alone, performing. As his career progressed, Beckett’s writing became more intimate and experimental, filled with internal monologues and unseen ghostly voices and, at this point in his career, radio allows this stripped-back style to the fullest.

Rough for Radio I and II are two experimental works in this style, attempts to see how what dynamics can be achieved by voice and sounds – and silences, and long silent pauses – alone.

Rough for Radio I consists of 5 pages of text and lasts about 15 minutes when dramatised. It is an incomplete ‘sketch’ of a sort of encounter between a disembodied male and female voice for the first half, which then switches to the male character by himself having a series of three phone calls – each step in the two halves punctuated by bursts of very loud music, as if from a machine or continuum of loud mad sound which never ceases.

Rough For Radio II feels like a very different beast. Although only ten pages of text, it lasts about 25 minutes when dramatised, and has something much more like a conventional setting and scenario, namely some kind of interrogation room in which a female stenographer reads back a record of the previous day’s proceedings to the man in charge of torturing a prisoner tied to a chair, while an unspeaking henchman, Dick, occasionally whips the poor victim. Even so, though it sounds and is grim, it is written in a peculiarly mannered mannered and distancing style, which makes it more absurdist than political in impact.

Rough for Radio I

Beckett wrote this brief sketch (it is 5 pages long in the Collected plays) in 1961. Rough for Radio I is the only Beckett radio play never to be produced by the BBC. He left it untouched for years before translating it into English, and publishing it in Stereo Headphones magazine in 1976 as ‘Sketch for Radio Play’.

None of his plays are conventional narratives or traditional plays, but Rough for Radio I is a more experimental sketch than most. It is an aural and psychological ‘experience’ more than a conventional drama. It weaves together dialogue, music and abrupt sound effects to create a dislocated, distant feel. In its mashing up of music and voices it sounded, to me, like avant-garde opera and music-theatre pieces from the 1960s, and a bit like the sampling that came in in the 1980s music culture.

This is a live recording of an American production. In my opinion the very long silences kill any dynamism or interest the play may just about have.

Plot summary

Two voices, a man and a woman. Huge silent gaps between their fragmented dialogue. She asks if the music goes on all the time. He confirms it all in a bleak Dantesque kind of way (at one point the dialogue specifically references Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso). He continually calls her ‘madam’, in an aggressive, almost facetious way. (I wonder if anyone says ‘Madam’ nowadays.) She asks to sit on a cushion. She asks if these are the two knobs and turns one. Sudden burst of sound. In the olden days this burst would have been from a radio, in the style of John Cage’s early pieces for random radio, but nowadays it could be any type of sound or music from any number of gadgets.

Is it live? she asks. His only reply is to tell her to turn it to the right. This instruction and these bursts of music are repeated a few more times, then, after less than 3 pages, she leaves. There’s a rare moment of comedy, the kind of broad physical comedy which suddenly erupts in Waiting For Godot, when she apparently nearly bumps into the garbage outside the building.

Now alone, the man becomes more desperate and makes a series of staccato outbursts. With the woman departed, the interplay is now between the man and what, in the stage instructions is described as MUSIC. In the American production this is taken as loud bursts of modern music like rock or rap. They all seem to drive the male voice mad. Between these bursts he makes a series of increasingly desperate phone calls.

The phone calls appear to be to a hospital where he is asking of news, the second call mentions ‘confinements’. Obscurely, it seems as if MUSIC herself might be having a baby?? Is this all a satire on the pointlessness of giving birth and the horror of existence? Or an obscure allegory about the state or purpose of music as a form?

The male character’s words are in the familiar Beckett style – fragments of language with a heavy sense of pointlessness, endlessness, decline, collapse, repeated, in this production, against the abrupt, aurally violent backgrounds of the various musical interludes. One time he slams down the phone yelling ‘slut’. Next time he gets enraged and slams down the phone yelling ‘swine!’

The phone rings a third time and he appears to be being told not to expect the doctor before noon the next day; he has two births to attend to, one of which is breech. The voice and music then trail off into silence.

You can see why it isn’t performed very often. Most critics consider that the ‘ideas’ in the fragment, such as they are, were more successfully developed in Words and Music, a radio play he wrote soon afterwards and addresses the interplay of the two forms more fully.

Rough for Radio II

Rough for Radio II is more obviously plot-driven than Rough for Radio I. It is a princely ten pages in the Faber paperback edition.

As so often, it’s a piece for just two characters. In this case the two speaking characters, Animator and Stenographer, appear to be torturing and interrogating Fox, an enigmatic character who says hardly anything and then bursts into frantic, almost meaningless tirades.

The text mostly consists of Animator asking Stenographer to read back an account of the day before’s interrogation, interspersed by his heavy-handed criticisms and repeated commands to non-speaking Dick to whip Fox with a bull’s pizzle. The play opens as Animator instructs Fox’s gag and blindfold to be removed.

The following production was made at the Rocky Mount Imperial Centre, which appears to be in America, featuring Ivan Price as A, Brooke Edwards as S, Ben Griffith as Fox and  and directed by Brook Edwards. It hasn’t been viewed many times but, listening and reading the text alongside, it appears to be a completely faithful animation of the play as written, and is well-acted in the style the play calls for.

From everything I’ve read about torture, this play is nothing remotely like the process. Instead it seems to me as stylised and conventional as a Baroque painting of a saint looking up to heaven with baby angels fluttering in the sky. What I mean is it is full of arch and contrived mannerisms, which bespeak the ideology of a very particular time and place which later ages will find ridiculous.

1. For example, the real relationship isn’t between torturer and victim but the much more mannered and stylised relationship between Animator and Stenographer. Not least when he invites her to take off her overalls and then ejaculates: ‘Staggering! Staggering!’ at the result. Sounds more like a 70s soft porn movie. Animator heartily wishes he was forty years younger. Carry on Torturing.

2. It is peculiar that Fox appears to be whipped and tortured but rarely makes the sound of someone being tortured, no moans, only a few, rare cries of pain. The reverse. The piece is punctuated when Fox gives voice not to screams but to sudden outbursts of demented verbosity:

That for sure, no further, and there gaze, all the way up, all the way down, slow gaze, age upon age, up again, down again, little lichens of my own span, living dead in the stones, and there took to the tunnels. [Silence. Ruler. ] Oceans too, that too, no denying, I drew near down the tunnels, blue above, blue ahead, that for sure, and there too, no further, ways end, all ends and farewell, farewell and fall, farewell seasons, till I fare again.

These don’t sound like the confessions of anyone being tortured but, the reverse, exactly like the meaningless loquacity of the characters in The Beckett Trilogy, that source of much of Beckett’s style and manner which he mined and repeated for the rest of his career. As stylised as a Gothic statue or an eighteenth century wig.

3. The sexual theme is rather surprisingly repeated towards the end when Animator orders the Stenographer to revive Fox by kissing him, which she proceeds to do at great length while he eggs her on. I’m going out on a limb here, but I suspect kissing is not a common torture technique, except maybe in BDSM porn movies. The stripping, the kissing, have infinitely more to do with that mood of stylised sexual grotesquerie which you find in so many avant-garde plays. Same when the interrogation turns a few minutes later to the subject of breasts heavy with milk. Stripping women, kissing, full breast.

4. But above all, the pauses…. It seems as if, in the 1960s and 70s, Beckett and Harold Pinter between them managed to persuade large numbers of theatre goers that having their characters speak in fragments, never utter complete sentences, and punctuate everything with loooooong pauses, created a more dramatic effect, or was in some mysterious way more lifelike. We were forced to read Pinter when I was at school and he drove me to paroxysms of boredom. It seemed to me then and seems to me now the use of these techniques is contrived and lifeless.

Mannerisms

Taken together, Rough For Theatre I and 2 strike me mostly as being excellent examples of how long, long, loooong pauses between would-be portentous fragments of dialogue kill everything we usually mean by drama, dialogue or character, completely stone dead.

This collection of mannerisms – not obvious or abstract scenarios, unnamed characters, fragmented dialogue, long silences, bursts of manic music or speech (as in Fox’s frantic tirades) – was, I think, genuinely revolutionary and wildly innovative in the theatre of the 1950s dominated by the stiflingly realistic drawing room dramas of Terence Rattigan and Somerset Maugham. This experimentalism became more popular and widespread during the 1960s and, by the time I started reading seriously in the 1970s, it had become the dominant style of not only much drama but of the films Pinter wrote scripts for, heavy with portentous fragmented dialogue.

It had become a heavy, claustrophobic manner and, when we were forced to read it at school, I found it much more alienating and unreal than Milton or Chaucer or Shakespeare who spoke to me far more directly and immediately about my actual life and feelings. Plus, the Beckett / Pinter style was smarmily approved by my middle-aged English teacher, who nodded approvingly at its fragmented dialogue, wilful repetitions, long pauses. It was the cultural equivalent of the approved polytechnic radicalism which Malcolm Bradbury satirises in The History Man. Dad drama.

In this respect the Absurdist or Beckett style was very much like post-war serialist or International Style of serious music, as promoted by Stockhausen, Boulez, Xenakis et al – which was astonishingly radical in the late 1940s and 50s, spread across universities and music colleges in the 1960s, was used as the jagged soundtrack to umpteen experimental movies, but had become a formula and an over-dominating manner by the mid-1970s, and so was ripe to be replaced by minimalism and returns to more traditional forms and harmonics by various individual composers (Gorecki, Ligeti et al).

These fragments are interesting as examples of Beckett experimenting with the International Style he helped define in Waiting For Godot and Endgame, experimenting with its elements in the relatively ‘pure’ medium of radio, uncluttered by visuals. Possibly they are both failures, but they’re interesting failures, and studying them informs your understanding of, or feel for, a lot of the drama of the 60s and 70s, notably the GCSE set text plays of Harold Pinter.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

1 Comment
by Simon on December 7, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Play, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on December 7, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/12/07/rough-for-radio-samuel-beckett/

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1 Comment

  1. Jonathan

     /  January 9, 2021

    I wondered if Fox was supposed to represent Beckett….producing words when punished/whipped….and then analysed and ‘corrected’ by the ‘critics’ Animator and Stenographer.

    Reply

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