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The Old Tune by Samuel Beckett (1960)

GORMAN: Miss Bertha so sweet and good.
CREAM: Sweet and good, all right, but dammit if she doesn’t take me for a doddering old drivelling dotard…

The Old Tune is a free translation by Samuel Beckett of Robert Pinget’s half-hour-long 1960 radio play La Manivelle (The Crank). In Pinget’s original play two garrulous old Parisians, Toupin and Pommard, meet in the street and spend half an hour reminiscing about the old times and each other’s families. Beckett turns the Parisians into two old Dubliners he names Mr Cream and Gorman. The Old Tune was first broadcast on BBC on 23 August 1960 with Beckett stalwarts Jack MacGowran as Mr Cream and Patrick Magee as Gorman.

They’re good, aren’t they, MacGowran and Magee. MacGowran’s voice is very effectively that of a bluff old codger even though, when you actually see him, he’s quite tall and thin, and Magee’s voice has something of the weedy vulnerability which made him, in my opinion, so sensationally haunting in Beckett’s radio play, Cascando, written the year after this production. Both bring out the Irish flavour of the language and setting.

A plot of sorts

An old organ grinder, Gorman, is struggling to keep his knackered barrel organ playing on a street in Dublin. It plays a few bars, falters and he thumps it, it plays a few bars more and then lapses into silence. At that moment who should come down the street but old Mr Cream who recognises Gorman as an old friend and they start talking and reminiscing. Beckett had free choice of the tune the organ was to play since none is specified by Pinget and chose The Bluebells of Scotland, presumably suggested by the mention of a bank of bluebells near the start of the play (see my comments about the play’s title, below).

Pinget and translations

It might seem odd that Beckett, by now a name to reckon with, should have undertaken a translation of someone else’s work, but a) he had worked as a professional translator before and after the war and, of course, composed half his own works in French and then translated them back into English, so was very used to moving between versions of texts in different languages; b) he was good friends with Pinget, who had himself translated Beckett’s radio play All That Fall into French; indeed, Pinget’s play Lettre Morte was presented on a double bill with Krapp’s Last Tape at the Théâtre Récamier in Paris. So the more you look into it, the less surprising it becomes.

Anyway, it was less a favour to a friend than an opportunity. What’s striking is how utterly Beckett makes the originally French play by someone else sound as Irish as himself and the two garrulous old men sound entirely like Beckett characters, wittering on about the perils of motor cars and how it all used to be country round here and the lack of compassion of the young, tut tut, in the manner of Beckett’s countless gaga old men.

In fact the basic structure – two old codgers misremembering and bickering over trivia – is a primal element in Beckett’s works, from Mercier and Camier in the novel named after them, to Vladimir and Estragon in Godot, to Hamm and Clov in Endgame.

As to content, well it consists of a steady stream of senile old reminiscence marked by extreme attention to banal detail: Cream explains he is now a widower and had been living with one of his daughters, Daisy, but how, since her death, he has moved in with the other daughter, Bertha (Mrs Rupert Moody). Gorman tells us that his wife is still alive. Both men, we learn, are in their seventies, Gorman is seventy-three, Cream is seventy-six, and on they rattle, swapping reminiscences and half memories, about cars, about serving in the army, about an old law case, and so on.

Looking in a bit more detail you see that, as in so much Beckett, although the actual content is trite and trivial, the interest is in the treatment. Two aspects stand out, the repetition and the gaps.

Repetition

The verbal repetition of the play is both a kind of naturalistic depiction of the highly repetitive speech rhythms of the old and forgetful, but at the same time a highly stylised dissection of language and the dislocating effect created by incessant repetition, repetition which threatens to empty language of meaning.

CREAM: 1903 , 1903 , and you 1906 was it?
GORMAN: 1906 yes at Chatham.
CREAM: The Gunners?
GORMAN: The Foot, the Foot.
CREAM: But the Foot wasn’t Chatham don’t you remember, there it was the Gunners, you must have been at Caterham, Caterham, the Foot.
GORMAN: Chatham I tell you, isn’t it like yesterday, Morrison’s pub on the corner.
CREAM: Harrison’s. Harrison’s Oak Lounge, do you think I don’t know Chatham. I used to go there on holiday with
Mrs Cream, I know Chatham backwards Gorman, inside and out, Harrison’s Oak Lounge on the corner of what was the name of the street, on a rise it was, it’ll come back to me, do you think I don’t know Harrison’s Oak Lounge
there on the comer of dammit I’ll forget my own name next and the square it’ll come back to me.
GORMAN: Morrison or Harrison we were at Chatham.
CREAM: That would surprise me greatly, the Gunners were Chatham do you not remember that?
GORMAN: I was in the Foot, at Chatham, in the Foot.
CREAM: The Foot, that’s right the Foot at Chatham.
GORMAN: That’s what I’m telling you, Chatham the Foot.
CREAM: That would surprise me greatly, you must have it mucked up with the war, the mobilization.
GORMAN: The mobilization have a heart it’s as clear in my mind as yesterday the mobilization, we were shifted
straight away to Chesham, was it, no, Chester, that’s the place, Chester, there was Morrison’s pub on the corner and
a chamber-maid what was her name, joan, jean, jane, the very start of the war when we still didn’t believe it,
Chester, ah those are happy memories.
CREAM: Happy memories, happy memories, I wouldn’t go so far as that.
GORMAN : I mean the start up, the start up at Chatham, we still didn’t believe it, and that chamber-maid what was her name it’ll come back to me. [Pause.]

The repetition of themes, or of names and snatches of phrases, this repetition with variations, can be compared to the way music is composed, with the statement of certain themes which are then subjected to elaborate variations. It’s certainly not snappy dialogue designed to convey information, the opposite – it is a fog of misinformation which is more concerned with the music-style twirls and repetitions of key phrases and words.

Silent pauses and noisy traffic

There is an obvious correlation between the misfunctioning of the barrel organ which stops and starts and then sputters out a sentimental tune, and the misfunctioning of the two men’s minds, as if their brains, like the machine, require thumps and bangs to make them function.

More than that, in the handful of places where it intrudes into the narrative, the fragmented tune played by the barrel organ almost suggests that, in some eerie way, it is somehow underpinning reality itself. At several points not only the tune stops but the entire play stops with it, everything stops, and there is dead silence.

GORMAN: Do I remember, fields it was, fields, bluebells, over there , on the bank, bluebells. When you think … [Suddenly complete silence. 10 seconds. The tune resumes, falters, stops. Silence. The street noises resume.] Ah the horses, the carriages, and the barouches, ah the barouches…

It’s relatively understated, for Beckett, but I think this eerie, almost science fiction element, is suddenly apparent, in one or two haunted moments…

Different titles

One other point, Beckett clearly added entirely new content or the English equivalent of the French original content, such as naming British Army regiments and pubs in English towns (Chatham, Caterham etc). But it’s worth pausing a moment over the change in titles. Pinget named his play La Manivelle which translates as The Crank. I’m not sure whether this refers to the person or to the metal tool you’d use to hand-crank something like a barrel organ, or whether there is a deliberate play on words to refer to both. Either way, Beckett has chosen for his title something completely different, referring to neither a character nor the machine, but to the music itself. He has brought to the fore the role of music in the play.

Now the barrel-organ music doesn’t actually occur many times during the performance so it’s easy to think that Beckett, also, intends a pun, and that he is using the phrase ‘the old tune’ not only to refer to the piece of music the barrel organ plays, but to the entire style of doddery reminiscence of the two old boys.

On this reading, the title becomes a sly reference to the super-familiar Beckett idea that people just talk and talk and talk to fill the space, to give themselves the strength to go on, to fill up time, to create their own being; it is talk which means nothing and gets nowhere and changes nothing, which defines the self but is as impoverished and empty as that self.

The words ‘the old tune’ sound innocent enough, indeed they have an unusually sentimental ring for a Beckett title. But at the same time they allude to the world of bleakness, emptiness and struggle to go on, which is Beckett’s core concern.

Pauses and traffic

Back to the idea of the two eerie silences in the play and the numerous pauses the text contains. Having noted them, it’s worth going on to say that there are, in fact, not nearly so many pauses in The Old Tune as in Beckett’s other radio plays of the period. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the pauses aren’t so pointed and stylised. Although the stage direction ‘[pause]’ occurs regularly, it is placed to as to reflect realistic pauses in the ebb and flow of two old geezers’ garrulousness, rather than to interrupt the action altogether, in the self-consciously disruptive way which we find in his other plays of the time.

In fact the flow of words is interrupted more by a positive, intrusive element than by the negative element of silences and pauses, and this is the incessant roar of passing cars. This is something the audience can very plainly hear and which the pair of codgers directly comment on in a passage devoted to noisy traffic and the precise brand of car they’ve seen whizz by, before the drop the subject and move onto others. But every few minute before and after this passage, another car roars by, interrupting their maunderings (‘bloody cars!’).

So many times that it makes you reflect that the two old men are almost literally (and, as we’ve observed, rather eerily) tied to the outdated and clapped-out Victorian technology of the barrel organ, stuttering stopping and starting as it does, while the modern world – in the form of the steady stream of shiny, noisy motor cars – is literally passing them by (‘bloody cars!’).

Irishry

The commentary points out that Beckett drew on the stylised language of John Millington Synge, who had a similar middle-class upbringing to him, along with the verbal excesses of Seán O’Casey, who had a more working class provenance. The listener is certainly struck not only by the Irish accents but the Irish locutions used throughout:

GORMAN: Slipping along what would you want slipping along and we only after meeting for once in a blue moon.

I’m not familiar with Synge but I studied O’Casey’s play, Juno and the Paycock at school, and I remember the way the characters use a high heroic diction which contrasts with their shabby, impoverished circumstances. It’s a contradiction which is both comic and tragic at the same time, and you can think of that fundamental dichotomy – between characters who are physically and mentally impoverished using not only highfalutin language but invoking high philosophical concepts or dropping references to Dante and so on – as a really basic structural idea which underpins Beckett’s entire oeuvre, typified by the characters in The Beckett Trilogy crawling through the mud, pulling themselves through the mire, their heads full of garbled philosophy and obscure references to Dante.

The Old Tune is often overlooked by critics because it sticks out as an anomaly, a throwback, in Beckett’s steady progression towards evermore abstract and highly stylised dramaturgy, towards works which are more stage direction and choreography than dialogue and character. It’s like a last flaring-up of a more straightforward humanist view of character and an invocation of the Irish accents and speech rhythms of his youth, which he was rarely to use again.

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

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by Simon on December 18, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 18, 2020

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Cascando by Samuel Beckett (1961)

… we’re there… nearly… finish…

‘Cascando’ is an Italian word implying the decrease of volume and the deceleration of tempo. Related, maybe, to ‘diminuendo’, meaning ‘diminishing’, getting quieter.

Cascando is a radio play first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, 6 October 1964. A speaker, an old man (inevitably) named OPENER (‘I open and I close’) inaugurates activities which consist of words spoken by VOICE, who he listens to for a bit before ‘closing’ and the ‘opening’ a sequence of MUSIC.

The music for the original production was composed by French composer Marcel Mihalovici. I like this, and Words and Music, because I like this kind of ‘experimental’ modern music. Here’s the 1964 BBC production featuring Denys Hawthorne as Opener and Patrick Magee (who we’ve seen in Krapp’s Last Tape and as a voice in Embers) as the quavering, tremulous Voice.

Voice’s words are the same kind of fragmented, demented monologue we first encountered in The Beckett Trilogy, the central theme being Voice’s struggle to tell a story the right way, in the right order, if only he can manage all the elements into the right order, and tell the story right, then he can rest, he can sleep, he can finish, has told so many, thousands, but this time, this time, he’ll manage it, tell it the right way and, finally, at last, sleep and rest:

if you could finish it… you could rest… sleep… not before… oh I know… the ones I’ve finished… thousands and one… all I ever did… in my life… with my life… saying to myself… finish this one… it’s the right one… then rest… sleep… no more stories… no more words… and finished it… and not the right one… couldn’t rest… straight away another… to begin… to finish… saying to myself… finish this one… then rest… this time… it’s the right one… this time… you have it… and finished it… and not the right one… couldn’t rest… straight away another… but this one… it’s different… I’ll finish it…

You’ve got to be awed at the way Beckett span out a career by repeating the same handful of themes or ideas, describing mentally defective people or the forgetful elderly or derelicts, themselves repeating the same handful of themes and ideas, and so on in a vanishing perspective.

For a man who cultivated the imagery of poverty and sparseness and minimalism it’s impressive, almost alarming, how many works he managed to write. All on more or less the same idea (‘I can’t go on… I must go on’) repeated ad nauseam by a succession of defunct old men.

The element of repetition is strikingly obvious at a meta level, because the notion of a kind of Master or impresario calling forth the power of Voice and Music to compete against each other is identical to the previous radio play, Words and Music, this one in fact written immediately after the former.

Even the imagery is from a very narrow range. Once again the sea is a central image, as it was in Embers where a cracked old man sat looking out over the waves, or in the long sequence in Molloy when the hero sucks stones by the sea. Now the story Words struggles to complete does, in fact, surprisingly, appear to progress a little, with the obsessively repeated figure of Woburn, apparently going across the beach, wading into the sea, into a boat and then:

… we’re there… nearly… Woburn… hang on… don’t let go… lights gone… of the land… all gone… nearly all… too far… too late… of the sky… those… if you like… he need only… turn over… he’d see them… shine on him… but no… he clings on… Woburn… he’s changed… nearly enough-

I think it’s an inspirational performance by Magee, quite a bluff, muscular man who, for this production, makes his voice small and fine and trembling, and the worn-out, despairing feel he lends to the repeated phrase ‘Come on‘ is wonderfully… well, what emotion does it evoke, what mood, what strangeness, pitiful hope, self-delusion?

this time… it’s the right one… finish … no more stories… sleep… we’re there… nearly… just a few more… don ‘t let go… Woburn … he clings on… come on… come on —

Listen to it twice. You get an increasing feel for the dynamic between the words and music – apparently in each section, words and music are given exactly the dame duration. And a growing sense of the progression of Voice’s story about Woburn. From what originally sounded like a cascade of words, the outlines of the narrative of Woburn waking in his bed, getting up, leaving his house, going down to the beach, wading out into the sea, mounting the boat or dinghy and heading off for the island emerge more clearly – and the frustrated excitement of Voice as he nearly gets it right, almost nails it, has It, the Final Version, in his sights – become more powerful and poignant.

And, on repeated listening, you begin to feel the dynamic between Opener and Voice. On one level it’s as if Opener is a sadist, in ‘opening’ up Voice he condemns him to the endless iteration of a story he is doomed never to fulfil, like Sisyphus and his rock. But at other moments, Voice seems to be carrying forward Opener’s own quest, and so is like an aspect of his mind or psyche, an aspect he dominates and sits above, but which is always there. Voice doesn’t ‘answer’, doesn’t address high questions or questions from outside – he is intimately involved in Voice’s struggling, muttering, quavering request, to get there to finish, to complete, and please please be allowed to rest…

Repeated listening reveals its depths. Cascando is marvellous. Wonderful.

Credit

Cascando by Samuel Beckett was written in French in 1962, first broadcast in French by the ORTF in October 1963, first broadcast in English on the BBC Third Programme on 6 October 1964.

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

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by Simon on December 11, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 11, 2020

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Words and Music by Samuel Beckett (1961)

Another work from Samuel Beckett’s ‘radio phase’, when he experimented with the possibilities of radio between about 1956 and 1961. It’s a short text (just eight pages in the Faber Collected Shorter Plays) for voice and music, so it tells you a lot about the contribution of musical interludes and silences, that the fully dramatised piece stretches to over 40 minutes.

Characters

There are three entities or ‘characters, Words (who speaks a lot), Music (whose parts consist entirely of patches of music) and a human character named Croak. Right at the beginning, before Croak arrives, Words makes it plain he detests Music:

Music: How much longer cooped up here, in the dark? (With loathing.) With you!

Word tries to keep himself going by giving himself a topic for discourse, namely Sloth and rattling off a paragraph of bombastic nonsense on the subject, before breaking off because he can hear the ‘Distant sound of rapidly shuffling carpet slippers’.

Croak

Croak arrives. He apologises for arriving late, saying something about a face on the stairs. Croak appears to be a lofty impresario who gives subjects for Words (who he calls Joe and who, in reply, calls him ‘My lord’) and Music (who he calls Bob) to describe or embroider as if in a competition. At moments Croak shouts at them, calling them ‘dogs!’, at other moments calls them ‘my comforts’, ‘my balms’. At the beginning he tells them to be friends, reinforcing the impression given by Words’ opening words, that the two hate each other.

The competition of Words and Music

And then, as if at the start of a familiar routine, Croak gives them their first topic for the evening. First Words has his speeches, then Music makes its noise. Croak signals the change between each with the loud thump of a club, presumably on the floor.

After Words and Music have each had a go (accompanied by Croak’s groans and comments) one section is drawn to an end, and then Croak gives them another topic. The topics are:

  • Sloth (ad libbed by Words)
  • Love
  • Age

Morton Feldman’s music

‘Music’ is meant to produce actual music and various composers have risen to the challenge of writing music to represent the contribution of Music to the dialogue. In the original BBC radio production the music was written by Beckett’s cousin, John Beckett, who wrote the music for a number of Beckett’s productions.

The earliest version I can find is this production which features the music of Morton Feldman, the highly experimental avant-garde American composer. I’ve always liked Feldman’s music, it has a slowly penetrating, atonal, modernist simplicity, and its sparseness seems a perfect accompaniment for Beckett’s sparse words and scenario.

A twentieth century masque

Because I’ve been reading 17th century literature recently, this work strikes me as being a kind of twentieth century masque, in which allegorical Types compete for the favour of a judge or adjudicator, in just the same way that, in the classic 17th century masque, allegorical performances were put on for the enjoyment of the king himself (King James or King Charles), who were sometimes asked to display their wisdom and authority by deciding stylised debates between classical virtues or attributes.

Except that, it being the twentieth century and Beckett a writer of the absurd or of nihilistic futility, the words of Words are a meaningless farrago, a pastiche of Shakespearian eloquence whose booming clichés elicit only groans from his master, Croak.

‘What is this love that more than all the cursed deadly or any other of its great movers so moves the soul and soul what is this soul that more than by any of its great movers is by love so moved?’

It’s like a Shakespeare sonnet which has been put through a blender, grammatically it makes sense but has been deliberately mashed to sound like repetitious nonsense, making the rather obvious, schoolboy point that Shakespearean rhetoric comes from an age convinced of its own values and coherent worldview, whereas in our own oh-dear-so-disillusioned age, that kind of confidence and fluency is no longer possible. Alas and lackaday.

Sex

Sex is surprisingly present in many of Beckett’s works, albeit in deliberately harsh, absurdist and anti-romantic forms. Take the second part of Molloy, where Moran casually tells us about his masturbating, or the hint of BDSM sex in Murphy, the narrator of First Love having sex with Lulu, Sam having sex with every woman in the neighbourhood despite being confined to a wheelchair in Watt, references to gay sex and being ‘sucked off’ in Mercier and Camier, MacMann folding his penis up and trying to stuff it in Moll’s dried-up vagina in Malone Dies. Many of the prose texts go out of their way to use the rudest words possible, starting with bugger and shit and working up to the f word and the c word.

My point is we shouldn’t shy away from acknowledging sexual references or vocabulary just because it’s in Nobel Prize Winner. The opposite, he thoroughly enjoyed ‘twitting the bourgeoisie’ as Leslie Fiedler put it, with rancid descriptions of sex and the crudest sex words.

There’s another element which is the surprising presence of the memory of a love affair in Krapp’s Last Tape. Krapp obsessively repeats the memory of a moment when he lay with an unnamed young woman, his hand on her breast.

I don’t for a minute find it a moving memory. Beckett is anti-sentimental. I find it more interesting to entertain the notion that Beckett refined a rhetoric of paucity and impoverishment, of senility and forgetfulness, of mechanical repetitions, he created some great scenarios (man plays tapes of his younger self, woman buried up to her waits in sand who accepts it as perfectly normal, old man conjures Words and Music to compete with each other) but then doesn’t know what to do next and so resorts to sexual imagery and content.

Exactly as this play’s immediate predecessor, Rough For Radio II, starts out being about two characters supervising the violent torture of another but, about half way through, loses interest or gets distracted from the nominal theme, when the pretty young stenographer is asked to take off her overalls, when the torture supervisor orders her to kiss the torture victim and when the torture victim’s chief memories seem to be of a full, milky breast.

I find most of Beckett’s scenarios powerful and impressive, but am quite regularly disappointed by the lack of subject matter. Or the fact the two men in the bunker and the woman up to her waist in sand and, as here, the allegorical figures of Words and Music have so little to say for themselves. Are incapable of anything but tittle tattle and trivia, as when all Words can think of to describe Age is:

‘Huddled o’er . . . the ingle (Pause. Violent thump. Trying to sing.) Waiting for the hag to put the … pan … in the bed…’

Waiting for a hag to bring a bedpan, is that it? So I’m not surprised that, rather as Krapp’s Last Tape runs out of ideas and is forced to resort to a basically sexual memory of the young man lying with his hand on the woman’s breast, so Words and Music appears, similarly, to run out any ideas for content and resorts to… breasts.

… flare of the black disordered hair as though spread wide on water, the brows knitted in a groove suggesting pain but simply concentration more likely all things considered on some consummate inner process, the eyes of course closed in keeping with this, the lashes . . . (pause) . . . the nose … (pause) … nothing, a little pinched perhaps, the lips….. tight, a gleam of tooth biting on the under, no coral, no swell, whereas normally… the whole so blanched and still that were it not for the great white rise and fall of the breasts, spreading as they mount and then subsiding to their natural… aperture…

As a heterosexual man I am all in favour of heaving bosoms but their appearance in three of Beckett’s plays in a row suggests a pattern, one of the oldest writing strategies in the world… if you run out of inspiration, put boobs in it! Maybe you can dress it up quite considerably more academically than that, but that’s what it appears to boil down to – Beckett doesn’t have much to say, what he does have is either gibberish versions of Romantic rhetoric or pseudo-philosophical speculation, images of decrepitude and decay, or, to keep the thing going a little longer (which is, after all, THE central Beckett theme) sex, the most basic, primeval aspect of human nature. If it is a description of a woman’s young nubile body, then her natural… aperture, is obviously her ****.

Which brings me to my final point. We have heard Words describing the heaving bosom, and Croak cry out ‘Lily!’ as if Words is evoking a memory of a woman called Lily (so similar to the repeated memory of the woman’s breast in Krapp’s Last Tape). The final passages of Words and Music have Words repeating the same idea in the same phrases over and over again:

…the brows uncloud, the nostrils dilate, the lips part and the eyes … (pause) … a little colour comes back into the cheeks and the eyes (reverently) … open. (Pause.) Then down a little way (Pause. Change to poetic tone. Low.)
Then down a little way
Through the trash
To where … towards where…

Then down a little way
Through the trash
Towards where…

All dark no begging
No giving no words
No sense no need…

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

A glimpse of what, we wonder?

Through the scum
Down a little way
To where one glimpse
Of that wellhead.

What is a wellhead? ‘Wellhead is a general term used to describe the pressure-containing component at the surface of an oil well’ (Science Direct website). Pictures show it to be rather phallic in shape, and it contains pent-up, high-pressure liquid.

So is Words evoking a memory of a woman named Lily giving Croak a blowjob? Moving down, down, past the tummy fluff and pubic hair (the trash and scum) down to his pressure-containing equipment?

And is that why Croak drops his club, says nothing more, and shuffles off, thus ending the play? Is the memory of such unforced (‘No giving no words/No sense no need’) bliss too much for the old man to bear, just as the memory of young Krapp cupping a young woman’s breast in a field is too much for old Krapp to bear?

Long pauses

Maybe. But maybe the more dominant impression of hearing an actual production of Word and Music like this one is of the immense, yawning silences it contains. Pauses. Gaps. Emptinesses. You have to be in just the right mood, very attentive, totally engaged, in order to let the full tapestry of sounds and silence entrance you. Otherwise, all those silences run the risk of alienating the less engaged listener. And repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Beckett’s main literary technique. Beckett’s main literary technique.

The face. (Pause.) The face. (Pause.) The face. (Pause.) The face.

Credit

Words and Music by Samuel Beckett was written towards the end of 1961 and broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 13 November 1962.

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

Leave a comment
by Simon on December 9, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Play, Radio, Theatre
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on December 9, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/12/09/words-and-music-samuel-beckett/

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