Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- The Essential Beckett: A Preface to the Second Edition
- A Beckett Chronology
- Acknowledgments
- Crritics and Crriticism: “Getting Known”
- Preliminaries
- The Page
- The Stage
- MacGowran on Beckett
- Blin on Beckett
- Working with Beckett
- Notes from the Underground: Waiting for Godot and Endgame
- Beckett Directs Godot
- Beckett Directs: Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape
- Literary Allusions in Happy Days
- Counterpoint, Absence, and the Medium in Beckett's Not I
- Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett's That Time and Footfalls
- Footfalls
- Samuel Beckett and the Art of Radio
- Light, Sound, Movement, and Action in Beckett's Rockaby
- Beckett's Ohio Impromptu: A View from the Isle of Swans
- Quad and Catastrophe
- Coda
- Notes on Contributors
Samuel Beckett and the Art of Radio
from The Stage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- The Essential Beckett: A Preface to the Second Edition
- A Beckett Chronology
- Acknowledgments
- Crritics and Crriticism: “Getting Known”
- Preliminaries
- The Page
- The Stage
- MacGowran on Beckett
- Blin on Beckett
- Working with Beckett
- Notes from the Underground: Waiting for Godot and Endgame
- Beckett Directs Godot
- Beckett Directs: Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape
- Literary Allusions in Happy Days
- Counterpoint, Absence, and the Medium in Beckett's Not I
- Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett's That Time and Footfalls
- Footfalls
- Samuel Beckett and the Art of Radio
- Light, Sound, Movement, and Action in Beckett's Rockaby
- Beckett's Ohio Impromptu: A View from the Isle of Swans
- Quad and Catastrophe
- Coda
- Notes on Contributors
Summary
Samuel Beckett's work for radio is a highly significant part of his oeuvre and far less fully discussed in the mounting literature on Beckett than his other output, far less readily available, also, in performance, which alone can bring out its full flavor. But beyond that, Beckett's experience with broadcasting, and above all radio, has played a significant and little-known part in his development as an artist.
It has become a kind of cliché of the Beckett literature that the BBC commissioned radio plays from Beckett. Even the cover of the first American publication of All That Fall and Embers in the Grove Press paperback Krapp's Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces (1960) baldly states: “Two radio plays commissioned by the BBC's Third Programme.” Beckett himself has always strenuously denied that he writes plays on commission from anyone. And the truth is that he was, indeed, never commissioned by the BBC to write anything. The real story of the genesis of these radio plays is far more complex and interesting.
The first communication between Beckett and the BBC goes back to the period before his rise to fame as the author of Waiting for Godot.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- On BeckettEssays and Criticism, pp. 273 - 291Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2012
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