All That Fall as a Case Study in the Possibilities and Problematics of Re-routing Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays for Performance in Other Media

• Autores: Everett C. Frost
• Localización: Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett / Laurens De Vos (ed. lit.), Mariko Hori Tanaka (ed. lit.), Nicholas E. Johnson (ed. lit.), 2021, ISBN 978-90-04-46839-9, págs. 295-310
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Beckett insisted that his radio plays were specific to the medium for which they were intended, having been written for voices, not bodies. Re-routing them to other media is a problem he could not have foreseen but one that is now made exigent by the subsequent advent of new technologies and the virtually total absence of radio as a medium for drama. Adaptations of them for stage and digital technologies can increasingly be expected to happen and need to be encouraged. But how to revive them and under what circumstances? I have no answers, but will use his first radio play, All That Fall to set a framework for discussing the issues in the spirit of John Cage’s remark in another context: ‘Permission granted, but not to do anything you want’.The radio play began as itself an adaptation of drama to a new broadcast technology. But radio producers quickly began to discover that the new medium was not merely a means for transmitting an ancient artform but an opportunity to use the new medium to create original forms of specifically aural drama more akin to music than to its theatrical origins. Adapting the radio plays for the stage and for contemporary forms of multimedia performance rescues them from oblivion by returning their dormant voices to drama’s origins in the theatre. It is not a displacement, but a revival.By placing Beckett’s insistence on their genre specificity as radio drama in this historical and theoretical perspective, I will not eliminate the intractable problems of extracting them from their broadcast specificity, but might contribute to a more general understanding of the problematics of cross-genre productions that extend beyond either radio or Beckett.