Samuel Beckett And Bbc Radio

This book is the first sustained examination of Samuel Beckett’s pivotal engagements with post-war BBC radio. The BBC acted as a key interpreter and promoter of Beckett’s work during this crucial period of his "getting known" in the Anglophone world in the 1950s and 1960s, especially through the culturally ambitious Third Programme, but also by the intermediary of the house magazine, The Listener. The BBC ensured a sizeable but also informed reception for Beckett’s radio plays and various “adaptations” (including his stage plays, prose, and even poetry); the audience that Beckett's works reached by radio almost certainly exceeded in size his readership or theatre audiences at the time. In rethinking several key aspects of his relationship with the BBC, a mix of new and familiar Beckett critics take as their starting point the previously neglected BBC radio archives held at the Written Archive Centre in Caversham, Berkshire. The results of this extended reassessment are timely and, in many cases, quite surprising for readers of Beckett and for scholars of radio, “late modernism,” and post-war British culture more broadly.

This new edition brings together all of Beckett's dramatic writings for radio, television and film, offering works which range from eloquent comic naturalism to an eviscerated and pared-down symbolism. Above all, Beckett found his unique uses for the radio-play, a medium 'for voices not bodies', compacted of speech, sound and silence - and the plays in this volume intently explore the resources and limits of the sound-stage.My father, back from the dead, to be with me. (Pause.) As if he hadn't died. (Pause.) No, simply back from the dead, to be with me, in this strange place. (Pause.) Can he hear me? (Pause.) Yes, he must hear me. (Pause.) To answer me? (Pause.) No, he doesn't answer me. (Pause.) Just be with me. (Pause.) 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 the sound of the sea, that if you didn't see what it was you wouldn't know what it was. (Pause.). Hooves!Contents: All That Fall, Embers, Words and Music, Eh Joe, Quad, Film, ...but the clouds..., Ghost Trio, Nacht und Träume, Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II, Cascando, The Old TunePreface and Notes by Everett Frost

British Radio Drama, 1945-1963 reveals the quality and range of the avant-garde radio broadcasts from the 'golden age' of British radio drama. Turning away from the cautious and conservative programming that emerged in the UK immediately after World War II, young generations of radio producers looked to French theatre, introducing writers such as Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco to British radio audiences. This 'theatre of the absurd' triggered a renaissance of writing and production featuring the work of Giles Cooper, Rhys Adrian and Harold Pinter, as well as the launch of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Based on primary archival research and interviews with former BBC staff, Hugh Chignell places this high-point in the BBC's history in the broader context of British post-war culture, as norms of morality and behavior were re-negotiated in the shadow of the Cold War, while at once establishing the internationalism of post-war radio and theatre.

Published to celebrate the centenary of Beckett's birth

In the decade following the success of Waiting for Godot (1952), Samuel Beckett wrote some of his most absorbing work for radio. These plays display the author's appreciation of the essential properties of radio broadcasting. They also highlight a profound musicality which, while evident in his novels, poetry and plays, is particularly noteworthy in this medium. This book is an analysis of the contribution made to radio drama by Beckett. In these plays, he is concerned with themes of human isolation and the frailty of memory and communication. He identified radio as an ideal medium for the presentation of these themes and the development of drama which could transcend the limitations of realism. Beckett used music as an essential component of his radio output for a variety of purposes. In this study, the author argues that, while Beckett's radio plays are suffused with a bleak sense of disintegration of language, music offers a sense of optimism. A variety of musical and performance perspectives is utilised to gain a greater appreciation of these radio plays.

This book, first published in 1999, addresses Beckett’s visual and musical sensibilities, and examines his visionary use of such diverse modes of creative expression as stage, radio, television and film, when his medium was the written word. The first section of the book focuses on music; the second part analyses the visual arts; and the third part examines film, radio and television. This book uncovers aspects of his thinking on, and use of the arts that have been little studied, including the nonfigurative function of music and art in Beckett’s work; the ‘collaborations’ undertaken by composers, painters and choreographers with his texts; the relation of his literary to his visual and musical artistry; and his use of film, radio and television as innovative means and celebration of artistic process.

Beckett’s dialogue with the arts (music, painting, digital media) has found a growing critical attention, from seminal comprehensive studies (Oppenheim 2000; Harvey, 1967, to name just two) to more recent contributions (Gontarski, ed., 2014; Lloyd, 2018). Research has progressively moved from a general inquiry on Beckett beyond the strictly literary to issues related to intermediality and embodiment (Maude, 2009; Tajiri, 2007), post humanism and technology (Boulter, 2019; Kirushina, Adar, Nixon eds, 2021), intersections with popular culture (Pattie and Stewart, eds., 2019). However, a specific analysis on Beckett’s relationship with Italian arts and poetry on one side–and on Italian artists’ response to Beckett’s oeuvre on the other–is still missing. The volume offers an original examination of Beckett’s presence on the contemporary Italian cultural scene, a stage where he became (and still is) the fulcrum of some of the most significant experimentations across different genres and media. The reader will look at him as an “Italian” artist, in constant dialogue with the most significant modern European cultural turns.