All posts tagged sea

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
Posted in Play, Radio
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Posted by Simon on December 11, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/12/11/cascando-samuel-beckett/

Embers by Samuel Beckett (1959)

It’s silly to say it keeps you from hearing it, it doesn’t keep you from hearing it and even if it does you shouldn’t be hearing it, there must be something wrong with your brain.
(Ada in Embers)

Embers is a radio play which Samuel Beckett wrote in English in 1957, specially for one of his favourite actors, Jack MacGowran. It was first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 24 June 1959 and won the RAI prize at the Prix Italia awards later that year. You can listen to the original BBC production on YouTube, featuring Jack MacGowran as the main narrator, Henry, with Kathleen Michael as the ghostly figure of Ada, and Patrick Magee (who we have recently viewed in his performance in Krapp’s Last Tape) making brief appearances as the Riding Master and Music Master.

Many critics consider this a weak work and Beckett himself thought it didn’t come off, but I think it’s much better than his previous radio play, 1957’s All That Fall.

Plot summary

The narrator is a typical Beckett figure, an old man who seems to be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, tramping across shingle near the sea (which we hear throughout, in the background), sharing a jumble of memories, sense impressions, worries about his father, how he disappeared without trace, he remembers an argument when his father, for the umpteenth time, called him a useless ‘washout’, and so on.

Henry remembers how he tried to write stories, one about a fellow named Bolton, never finished it, one scene featured Bolton standing in his pyjamas in front of the fire, ‘an old man in great trouble’ (which could stand as the motto of almost every Beckett character), as another character named Holloway rides up to the house, enters, comes into the room in his wet galoshes…

He remembers scenes from his boyhood, his harsh father shouting at him to come outside in the rain, help with the lambs, shouting at the boy when he refuses. He remembers Ada, whose voice replies, faintly and from a great distance and then takes part in a dialogue as if her spirit has been raised from the dead. Ada fusses about him sitting on the cold stones. He asks if she can hear the clip-clop of horses’ hooves. She mildly says his laugh used to attract her, and he ejaculates a horrible strangulated laugh in mockery of his own softness. But we can tell how damaged he is.

Henry and Ada discuss their daughter Addie, and the play promptly dramatises two incidents when Addie was a girl a) when she plays some wrong notes on the piano and the piano master yells at her in a crescendo of shouting – which segues into b) a memory of Addie trying to ride a horse and suffering similar shouting abuse from a riding master.

As an indication of his present decrepitness, Henry tells (is it the ghost of Ada?) he’ll have a go at walking across the shingle to the sea, and back again. He barely gets ten steps before he is overcome by another memory, of himself when young, the roar of the sea and young Ada crying out ‘Don’t! Don’t!’ Was he trying to drown her? Or taking some kind of risk with the sea? Is that how she died, because the listener can tell that Ada is now some kind of pallid spirit.

Henry is harsh and rude to Ada but when she announces she is leaving, is overcome with panic and begs her to stay, to help him eke out the moments of his existence – but she slips away, leaving him alone, an old man on a desolate beach.

Reflections

It is the mental landscape of an old man whose mind is going, along with his ability to form entire sentences. Instead he uses Beckettesque and Pinteresque snatches of phrases, repeated, fragmented, punctuated by gaps and silences and pauses. Indeed, pause is the most frequent word in the script.

No good either. [Pause.]
Not there either. [Pause.]
Try again. [Pause.]

The text is like incantations he is repeating to try and drown out, to smother ‘it’. On the face of it ‘it’ refers to the sounds of the sea, because Ada questions why he comes down to the sea if all he wants is to drown out the sound of the sea, why does he ‘listen to it.’

But by dint of Beckett’s main literary technique, which is exhaustive repetition of a handful of themes and phrases, the word ‘it’ comes to mean something bigger, incorporating what appear to be horrible memories of his daughter, Addie, suffering; whatever incident it was with Ada near the sea; memories of his father being a brute, and many more entirely negative memories and emotions.

All told in fragments, repeated swirling fragments of language, shreds of memory blowing like dead leaves in a cold winter wind. The ‘it’ he is trying to repress, but seems helplessly attracted to, comes to signify all the inescapable memories of his life, the sum total of his life and experiences, swirling swirling…

The repetitions of key phrases create a tremendous mood. No good. Not a sound. White world. Washout. I can’t do it anymore. Christ. White world. Not a sound. No good.

And, in this production, the text is accompanied by a wonderfully haunting soundscape created maybe by an organ or early electronic instrument, a note which rises and falls in the background like the endless surf. It makes the play a great deal more listenable and cocoons the script in a kind of aural warmth, providing an eerie backdrop to MacGowran’s often harsh, strangulated voice.

Skullscapes

I am delighted to learn that Beckett scholars refer to this kind of work – the extended soliloquy of ‘an old man in great trouble’, decorated with all Beckett’s usual verbal usual tricks and themes – as a skullscape, because we don’t know if any of the other characters exist outside the narrator’s mind, whether or not it’s all happening entirely within his skull. Ada predicts that eventually:

You will be quite alone with your voice, there will be no other voice in the world but yours.

But maybe he has actually reached that stage already, a condition of ultimate solipsism where there is no outside world and he is alone, trapped inside a mind made up of snatches and fragments of memory, all of them baleful and painful.

It feels to me that none of these plays do or could go any further than Beckett’s mid-period novel, The Unnamable (1953), in deconstructing the very idea of a narrator, of narratives and even of language itself. That novel is absolutely central to understanding Beckett. It contains the seeds of pretty much everything which followed (except maybe from some of the wordless mimes or choreographs such as Quad).

Many of these plays feel like excerpts or offcuts from The Beckett Trilogy, little more than expansions and elaborations of basic ideas and techniques Beckett had perfected in his prose, and then set about exploring in the (admittedly very different) medium of drama (not just the stage, as he also wrote radio plays and TV plays).

It is most particularly Beckettian whenever the narrator makes it clear he’s making up stories and people to talk to, in order simply to keep on going, to survive. Here he is ten minutes or so into Embers:

Stories, stories, years and years of stories, till the need came on me, for someone, to be with m e, anyone, a stranger, to talk to, imagine he hears me, years of that, and then, now for someone who… knew me in the old days, anyone, to be with me, imagine he hears me, what I am, now.

That is more or less the method of Malone (whose ‘novel’ consists entirely of ‘stories’ he is making up and telling himself to pass the time until he dies, in Malone Dies) and of the unnamable, who is also making up people and stories in order to keep going, though he doesn’t know why, or doesn’t understand why he is compelled to go on, keep on, make words, make speech in order to go on. As Ada’s spirit threatens to depart, Henry suddenly panics and begs her to stay:

Keep on, keep on! Keep it going, Ada, every syllable is a second gained.

I think it is a powerful and haunting work. Beckett may not have liked it because it is such a naked repetition of themes he had covered at such great length in the prose works. But that’s half the reason I like it, because the theme of struggling on is so very powerful, and because there is something oddly comforting in the sheer dogged repetitiveness with which Beckett obsessively describes the sheer dogged repetitiveness of his characters who all feel, in the end, like the same character, saying the same thing, endlessly…

Ah yes, the waste. [Pause.] Words. [Pause.] Saturday… nothing. Sunday… Sunday… nothing all day. [Pause.] Nothing, all day nothing. [Pause.] All day all night nothing. [Pause.] Not a sound…

Credit

Embers by Samuel Beckett was written in 1957 and broadcast on the BBC in June 1959.

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 4, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Literature, Play
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Posted by Simon on December 4, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/12/04/embers-samuel-beckett/

Maggi Hambling: War Requiem and Aftermath @ Somerset House

The Inigo Rooms at Somerset House are hosting an exhibition of recent work by one of Britain’s most established artists, Maggi Hambling CBE. (The Inigo Rooms are reached through a doorway in the East Wing of the main quad of Somerset House – which is itself accessed either via a grand archway from the Strand or via the river terrace, linked directly to Waterloo Bridge by a sloping ramp.)

Aftermath

To see the exhibition you have to climb down an atmospheric old winding staircase to a long, narrow, darkened corridor with five rooms off it. Each room is sealed by a heavy wooden door giving an eerie Alice in Wonderland effect. But on pedestals the length of the corridor you can immediately see some of the 30 or so Aftermath works, all about human head-size, sitting on four-foot-high pedestals, spotlit in the darkness.

Hambling was born and raised in East Anglia and the sea is a big presence in her work. Probably her most famous – and controversial – piece is the four-metre-high steel sculpture of a seashell, Scallop, unveiled at the north end of Aldeburgh beach in 2003.

Aftermath is the name she’s given to a series of relatively small sculptures, begun in 2013. She’s taken driftwood from the shore, carved and reformed the pieces, coated them in plaster to soften the outlines and to create a dripping, molten look – and then cast them in bronze, and painted and repainted them with thick gloopy layers of paint. They’ve been subject, in other words, to quite radical transformations.

Installation view of the Aftermath sculptures

Installation view of the Aftermath sculptures

What is art if not an act of attention – the creation of an object or sounds or series of words – which themselves command attention? Quite how much attention is entirely up to the strolling viewer.

Walking down the corridor past ten or so of these strange, melted gargoyle shapes painted purple or blue-white or yellow – and then into a room full of twenty or so more – their sheer abundance liberates the viewer to window-shop and alight on this or that object as whims of light, angles or curves, catch your fancy.

Because one hanging on the wall at the start is shaped like a pig’s head, and the next one is a bright yellow glutinous object with tubes protruding which could be a heart, I wondered if they were going to be visions from an abattoir, and that that would be the link with the overall war theme of the exhibition.

But as I explored further I realised that they are far more diverse than that, in shape and colour and intention. I liked:

War Requiem II

The sign on the heavy wooden door advises that only one visitor at a time should enter the War Requiem II room, so I turned the handle and entered with trepidation.

It is a small room made smaller by four wall-sized panels of rough hardboard, on which are hanging about 20 abstract oil paintings all using the same thick swirls of Indian yellow and jet black oil paint to create tortured gashes. Maybe – I thought – they are the fires burning up out of the oil deliberately released by Saddam Hussein during the First Gulf War. In fact they have titles like Victim XXX and Battlefield XVIII, from which I realise they are intended to be much more figurative than at first appeared.

Battlefield XVIII by Maggi Hambling

Battlefield XVIII by Maggi Hambling

From loudspeakers overhead comes the haunting, swooning sound of the soprano singing the Lacrymosa from Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.

The room contains an old wooden chair to sit on and also two mirrors, all three objects lightly flecked with the same colours as the paintings.

Maybe as we walk round the small space we are meant to catch our reflection in the mirrors and think these victims of atrocity could be us.

You are the sea

At the end of the long dark Alice in Wonderland-style corridor is another heavy door with a minatory sign on it warning entrants to be prepared.

Inside another small room is a two-metre-wide concrete drainage pipe, placed on its side to form a circular seat. The mouth of the pipe is covered with a metal grille and the whole thing is a recreation of a vent from one of the many drainage systems which cover Hambling’s native East Anglia. Apparently, this one is a replica of part of the sluice at Thorpeness, built to prevent the sea flooding the river Hundred and, more metaphorically, from rushing in to overwhelm the land.

There’s a loudspeaker in the pipe and from it comes a recording of the seasounds, the remote booming and breaking of waters far below, which you can hear in the real vent. And mixed into the swashing, crashing sounds are fragments of speech, phonemes torn from Hambling’s 2009 poem You Are The Sea.

Dominating the wall is one of her very large Wall of water paintings – as so often she’s painted a series on the same theme – thick garottes of oil paint depicting the unruly element which threatens to wash us away.

Figurative

Those were the highlights. In other rooms are more obviously representational works. A vivid charcoal copy of a detail of Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian stands as their mascot, reopening the possibility of an immediately understandable figurative art. They include:

  • A large striking painting of a line of women in black burqas holding rocket launchers – Gulf women prepare for war – taken from a photograph, a snapshot of the absurdity and incongruity of a war which is still raging.
  • Cuddling skulls evocative depiction of a timeless theme for moralists.

In the 1990s Hambling created a series of bronze sculptures titled War coffin – consisting of small frames with fragments of metal dangling down – and the figurative room contains a TV on a pedestal showing a video which features the sound of the metal pieces knocking each other like wind chimes – an eerie tinkling which echoes down the darkened corridor.

Thoughts

For me the Requiem room didn’t really work, much though I liked the individual paintings: they felt too samey hung together, their similitude drained them of impact.

By contrast the walls of water paintings seemed to me to successfully vary a theme or subject and a style, ensuring visual consistency by the use of the same palette of whites and greys, but producing lots of new and fresh images.

They were helped by their scale. Whereas the victim paintings are all small and close to each other in the viewer’s field of vision, and so have a similar affect, the big walls of water had more space in which to express the variety of the canvases. You had to physically turn to address each one individually, which involved a slight but important mental adjustment as well.

But in my opinion it is worth visiting the show just to see the Aftermath pieces, to wander among these strange combinations of accident and artifice, and let the shapes and colours and configurations sink in, striking chords in your mind, opening visual and tactile possibilities. God, I wish artists let you touch their sculptures!

Related links

More Somerset House reviews

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by Simon on April 8, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture, War
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on April 8, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/maggi-hambling-war-requiem-aftermath-kings-college-london/

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