Chapter 6

Richard Rijnvos and Rough for Radio I: Towards the Enrichment of an Impoverished Text

Kevin Branigan

Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in a way?

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

With each of his successive radio plays, Samuel Beckett offered an ever-more intense study of the isolation of the individual from society. Rough for Radio I is one of his most extreme expressions of such alienation. Here the listener is presented with a character, simply named He, who occupies a nondescript interior, and a scenario that abandons any sustained development of plot or character. This absence of remarkable detail or dramatic action might result in the work’s total oblivion were it not for its most striking quality: despite being a portrait of isolation, Rough for Radio I is an open-ended text.

This chapter examines Rough for Radio I, which I describe as a ‘hemi-text’. The term seeks to describe a work that is unfinished by its very nature, as it requires artistic input from another complementary field in order to complete it. That is to say, an artist or composer must provide the other side of the creative dialogue before the two hemi-texts sound as one artistic whole. As Vladimir berates Estragon in Waiting for Godot for his reticence in replying to him, Rough for Radio I is a study of an individual who, despite an apparent need for company, is reluctant to respond to the concerns and questions of his visitor. Rough for Radio I invites the composer to complete a creative dialogue, thereby transcending the communicative dead-ends which abound in the text. First, I will briefly trace the musical development of Beckett’s radio works before I examine the themes and structure of Rough for Radio I, as well as the specific qualities which the Dutch composer, Richard Rijnvos, brings to his English language production, titled Radio I.

Beckett’s radio plays offer an ideal introduction to the development of his aesthetic, from the Joycean-influenced hiberno-modernism of All That Fall (1956) to an austere and less allusive style in Embers (1959), Words and Music (1962), Cascando (1963), and Rough for Radio I (1961) and Rough for Radio II (1976). All That Fall is brimful of energy, movement and music, despite being a sardonic presentation of degeneration, sterility and death. The music of Schubert is heard as Maddy Rooney trudges to Boghill station to collect her blind husband, Dan. The theme of premature death suggested by Schubert’s lied ‘Death and the Maiden’ pervades the play and yet Beckett’s heroine exhibits an admirable ability to laugh heartily at such suffering. Embers strikes a more sombre tone, and, while it also occurs in an external location, movement is reduced to a few footfalls on a pebble strand in contrast to the earlier pastoral walk to and from Boghill train station. A gloomy organ-like sound representing the sea and a few misplayed bars of Chopin are now the musical fare, and the characters Henry interacts with are ghostly figures, perhaps mere figments of his imagination. Radio is the perfect medium for such an ambiguous interplay between presence and absence. For this reason Beckett resisted non-radio productions of All That Fall and Embers. In radio broadcast it is possible to convey the haziness of Maddy Rooney’s perception of reality: she is our medium or guide, however unreliable. Likewise in Embers, the audience relies upon Henry’s insistence that the strange background sound is that of the sea, that his wife Ada joins him briefly and that his mute, blind father is beside him on the strand. Beckett’s own reflections on All That Fall are indicative of the intrinsic radio qualities of all his work for this medium:

It is no more theatre than Endgame is radio and to ‘act’ it is to kill it. Even the reduced visual dimension it will receive from the simplest and most static of readings … will be destructive of whatever quality it may have and which depends on the whole thing’s coming out of the dark.¹

Following his first two radio plays, Beckett made a radical shift from dramas that provided more conventional characterization and plot and which were located in an exterior natural setting. In these earlier works music was used to underpin movement and pacing, and the audience was eased into the broadcast by familiar classical pieces. Subsequently Beckett abandoned the use of past musical masters in favour of music that had to be written specifically for each new radio play. In Words and Music creative conflict is conveyed, where Words and Music represent respectively thoughts and emotions locked in a strained performance for Croak, the listener. Music has personality; he can be cheeky and uncooperative as he reacts to the banal poetic impromptus of Words. Beckett’s sense of both radio-specific drama and music alters between Words and Music and Rough for Radio I. Croak is a demanding listener whose emotional reactions and wishes influence the performance by Words and Music. As such, this is an instance of the potential for creative interplay between audience and performers, as well as between fellow performers. By contrast, the central character in Rough for Radio I listens to a transmission of music and a voice that he cannot interact with, neither of which can interact with each other either.

Rough for Radio I is a bewilderingly simple radio play. ‘He’ is preoccupied by musical sounds and a voice that emanate separately from a radio-like transmitter. He is visited by ‘She’ who listens intently and then leaves him, none the wiser. She is unable to comprehend his obsession with these sounds. Their conversation is strained; He only answers her questions, if at all, after some prodding:

SHE: Are these two knobs?

HE: Yes.

SHE: Just push? [Pause.] Is it live? [Pause.] I ask you is it live.

HE: No, you must twist. [Pause.] To the right.²

She’s efforts at small-talk and the apparent compliment about his Turkoman rug fall flat. He feels no obligation to reply. Her questions and those of the radio audience are either left unanswered or else answered insufficiently. Is she allowed to sit on the hassock? Can she have light or heat? Can he explain the nature of music and voice? Is he concerned if she walks into the house garbage on her way out? In this vatic text, Beckett withholds valuable detail which might enlighten the listener. We may contrast He’s reticence with Maddy’s efforts in All That Fall to paint her surroundings for the listener, describing the racecourse, the laburnum tree and other significant details along the roadway. As unreliable as her perception of reality might be, she addresses the radio listener directly and aids her/his visualization.

Following She’s departure, He becomes highly anxious as he detects fundamental changes in the music and voice. He telephones his doctor and begs him to visit. He explains that the music and voice are no longer sounding separately but are playing together and are coming to an end:

HE: [With music and voice.] Yes … wait … [Music and voice silent. Very agitated.] Yes … yes … no matter … what the trouble is? … they’re ending … ENDING … .³

The responses of the doctor’s secretary, and of the doctor himself, appear dismissive. He hangs up and is left alone, the sole entity able to comprehend the gravity of what he hears. The only indication given by Beckett concerning a change to the music and the voice is that, following He’s second phone call, they begin to emanate together and become ever fainter. As voice and music converge and falter, He is faced with the prospect of death or creative oblivion which is placed in counterpoint with the exuberance of new life, about which he hears over the phone: two confinements and a breech birth gain priority over his existential handwringing.

While Rough for Radio I was first published in English in 1976, it was originally written in French in 1961 and published in 1973 by Éditions de Minuit as Esquisse radiophonique. There is conflicting information concerning a French language version. In a letter to Richard Rijnvos, Edward Beckett refers to a France Culture (ORTF) production in 1962.⁴ However, in correspondence with Clas Zilliacus in 1975, Samuel Beckett was unaware of any such French broadcast.⁵ Zilliacus points out that Esquisse radiophonique was completed just before Beckett commenced work on Cascando and argues that it may be treated as a ‘proto-Cascando’.⁶ While the two plays are superficially similar, Cascando is more ostensibly about an unresolved creative process. In contrast with He, Opener, the narrator, is generally more at ease and in control of the voice and music he listens to. Beckett also provides a full text for Voice in the play. Had Esquisse radiophonique remained unpublished, the suggestion that it was an unfinished draft of Cascando would be more plausible. Beckett’s decision to publish it suggests that he considered it as a separate work.

Martin Esslin, who in 1976 sought permission from Beckett to produce Rough for Radio I for the BBC, notes the significance of the radio-like apparatus as well as the technical radio term ‘live’, used by She.⁷ It is perhaps understandable that he should identify radiophonic qualities in the description of this machine, with the implication that the play is a commentary on the nature of radio. Unlike a normal radio set, however, the two knobs mentioned do not permit tuning in to a station and regulation of volume. One knob on the machine accesses music; the second accesses a voice. He indicates to She that these knobs are to be turned to the right. Strangely, while a click is heard which indicates that She or He is turning them on, there is no such sound to indicate that they have been turned off. The pauses that occur in the transmission of the voice and music allow her to reflect and ask questions about what she hears. She realizes that even when she hears the music and voice together they are not actually together; they are separate transmissions heard simultaneously:

SHE: What is it like together?

[Pause.]

HE: To the right, madam.

[Click.]

MUSIC: [Faint, brief.] ….

MUSIC, VOICE: [Together.] ….

[Silence.]

SHE: They are not together?

HE: No.

SHE: They cannot see each other?

HE: No.

SHE: Hear each other?

HE: No.

SHE: It’s inconceivable!⁸

Her demand that what she hears be played louder is futile.⁹ There is no volume control on the apparatus and, in the absence of explanation, she remains mystified. She is typical of the listener faced with a sparse text. She makes an earnest attempt to comprehend what she hears, and while she might grapple with radiophonic terminology, the above questions and her subsequent query as to the ‘conditions’ to which voice and the music are subject merit a more considered response than He provides.¹⁰ But in contrast with a similarly elliptical but closed prose text, Company (1980), Rough for Radio I is open to completion by a possibly more expansive composer.

In 1989 Richard Rijnvos was commissioned by the Dutch Broadcasting Corporation to represent the Netherlands at the Prix Italia in 1991. The corporation stated: ‘It would be appreciated if typical radio aspects, such as our electronic studio equipment, would be involved’.¹¹ Rijnvos produced music and vocal text for Beckett’s Rough for Radio I and presented it under the title Radio I. This title differentiates it from Beckett’s skeletal text. In so doing, Rijnvos is calling attention to the fact that his production is not intended as an unproblematic completion of the text for broadcast. Indeed, this would be impossible, as Beckett’s text gives no significant detail concerning the nature of the crucial components of voice and music. Instead Radio I treats the text as an objet trouvé, in relation to which Rijnvos constructs a sound structure using his own musical score and a vocal sample. Although Rijnvos’s musical influences are eclectic, a major one was that of the New York School composers, notably John Cage and Morton Feldman. Rijnvos met John Cage for the first time in The Hague in 1988. From this moment on there is a marked shift in Rijnvos’s conception of composition, including a radical move towards incorporating music and sounds that are not of his own making into his work. This perhaps explains his attraction to Rough for Radio I, as Beckett also requires the inclusion of sounds which are not determined by him.

Rijnvos’s interest in Rough for Radio I is as much due to its musical and structural challenges as to any desire to further clarify any message embedded in the text:

In my opinion the only form of radio-making which shows an explicitly medium-bound character is the radio play, so this is what I decided to make. If it is the composer’s intention to base his work on an already existing text, rather than conceiving his own, it may be self-evident that he will look for a text in which the music is not, as usual, merely functional … but in which the music is allotted an intrinsic role such as we find in the texts for radio by Samuel Beckett where the music is made part of the ‘dramatis personae’.¹²

The composer’s attention to the formal aspects of the play is crucial to its success, as Beckett, since his critique of Joyce in Work in Progress, professed an admiration for material in which form and content are complementary:

The form, structure, and mood of an artistic statement cannot be separated from its meaning, its conceptual content; simply because the work of art as a whole is its meaning, what is said in it is indissolubly linked with the manner in which it is said, and cannot be said in any other way.¹³

In a play that is divested of the normal requirements of narrative or characterization, this attention to structure is indispensable if the producer wishes to put across a work which, while obscure in meaning, is nonetheless not abstract in form. What links the open form and structure of the play to its subject is the recurrence of incomplete and strained conversations. For even the apparent conversation between He and She is undermined by the pockets of silence that separate each exchange. Rijnvos highlights the problematic nature of their dialogue by allowing pauses of up to 10 seconds between their lines. If they are isolated, then they share this property with the multitude of other incomplete dialogues that occur in the play.

Rough for Radio I may be regarded in different ways as a result of this incomplete series of conversations. It may be interpreted as a pessimistic expression of humankind’s isolation from reality and humanity. However, it is significant that the completion of the play requires a musical component. Beckett seems to suggest that something additional to his own voice is required in order to achieve a less problematic communication or expression. His relative lack of technical musical expertise obliged him to seek a dialogue with a composer. The composer is fluent in a language which Beckett apprehends intuitively but cannot speak; a form of communication which he believes has not been ‘condemned to explicitness’.¹⁴

In Rough for Radio I, Rijnvos found a form for the presentation of music that is uniquely radiophonic since it is a text in which music’s role is specific but its nature is undefined. The principal clue identified by Rijnvos relating to the function of the music is found in the brief discussion between He and She quoted above, in which She observes: ‘They are not together? … They cannot see each other? … Hear each other?’¹⁵ Upon turning the first knob, she hears music faintly. When it ceases she exclaims ‘but there are more than one!’¹⁶ She may be referring to the number of radio channels, but her astonishment may also be due to her sense that the different musical elements emanate from different transmissions. Rijnvos also assumes a separation of musical sources. Since it is difficult to convey this to the listener without the benefit of visual cueing, Rijnvos presents an aid to the listener by recording each instrument in his ensemble separately and in contrastive sound ambiences. This permits a degree of differentiation in the broadcast:

I ultimately chose for writing music in seven instrumental layers. These layers are: 1. bass flute, 2. oboe, 3. clarinet, 4. trombone, 5. piano (doubling celesta) and tubular bells, 6. violin (solo) and 7. string trio. Other than instrumental identity, these independently composed layers differ in each acoustical quality with which they are recorded, again independently of each other. The clarinet, for example, is recorded very close by in the dry acoustics of a direction room, and the trombone from afar in a resounding staircase (by way of which it approaches the sound of an eerily close mist horn at sea).¹⁷

The British composer Christopher Fox also observed that ‘the clarinet is close and dry, the trombone distant and surrounded by resonance. Each layer of Rijnvos’s music is more or less long-breathed, registrally conjunct; together the layers exude a remote calm quite at odds with the mixture of exasperation and confusion of He and She.’¹⁸

Rijnvos’s compositional and production choices for Radio I may be seen as reflecting the influence of the New York School, in particular that of Cage, whose emphasis on indeterminacy is crucial. One of the American composer’s greatest achievements was to question our conceptual relationship with sounds. Cage gained notoriety for 4′33″ (1952), a piece for piano where the pianist sits at the keyboard but does not play. Instead the audience’s attention focuses upon the ambient sounds that surround her/him, sounds which s/he might customarily try to ignore while concentrating upon a performance. This typifies Cage’s challenge to audiences to consider all sounds as inherently musical. One of Cage’s own early influences was the French artist Marcel Duchamp whose use of objets trouvés suggested that all items, even a urinal (Fountain, 1917), can be considered art works when presented within the framework of a gallery. Cage advocated bringing elements that he had not composed into his work, as well as developing methods to allow indeterminacy as part of his compositional process. The instructions derived from non-musical elements such as the Chinese book of chance, I Ching, might be used to generate the sequences of notes, along with structure, rhythmic characteristics and other musical parameters. Cage’s collection of lectures and essays, Silence, has become a seminal manifesto for a musicality that celebrates the sounds that surround us: ‘One may give up the desire to control sound, clear his mind of music, and set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments.’¹⁹

Rijnvos’s music for Radio I gives a similar impression of chance juxtapositions. In the texture of the composition different motifs may be identified at first hearing and others revealed with repeated listening and familiarity. The piano tones outline groups of the intervals that reoccur throughout; punctuating high and low-pitched notes are played at various stages by all instruments. The dreamlike quality of the piece is reinforced by a recurring oboe motif, by long notes played on trombone and by chiming tones on tubular bells. The oboe motif has a strong melodic pattern, formed of slurred leaping intervals of ninths, sevenths and closer intervals of sixths, fourths and seconds. At times this motif becomes insistent and disjointed, while at others it is quieter and almost plaintive. Intervals which make up this motif occur widely among the other instruments in different registers and in elongated or shortened note duration. While the recording of each musical instrument is separate, the listener is the fixed point and determines any sense of order or progression that may occur in the overall soundscape. Is it possible as a listener not to detect consonance between the separate elements heard? For He, such convergence or resolution of the sounds would seem to defy their essential nature. His distress is in marked contrast to that of Opener in Cascando, who likewise listens to Voice and Music. While aware that these two are not linked, Opener delights in perceiving such temporal concordance despite the spatial separation of what he hears. He feels like an astronomer who admires the shape of a constellation whose stars are light years away from one another: ‘From one world to another, it’s as though they drew together.’²⁰

The other half of the radio transmission that preoccupies He is the voice. The vaguest of directions are given concerning the nature of this voice, and no indication is made as to what it says. For his proposed 1976 BBC production, Martin Esslin had suggested to Beckett that the voice be ‘no more than a faint mumbled murmur’. However, Beckett did not approve of this idea and, despite Esslin’s enthusiasm for the piece, decided not to proceed with the project.²¹ Rough for Radio I contrasts, then, with Words and Music and Cascando which, though similar in theme and structure, contain specific text for Words and Voice. There are also more specific directions as to the nature of the music in both works, and Beckett took great care to discuss the composition for the initial productions with, respectively, John Beckett and Marcel Mihalovici. Rijnvos feels that Beckett’s omission of any indication concerning the voice, ‘really lets us down’, but he believes that we can still gather ‘that the voice originates from a man and that he is alone’.²² We cannot tell whether this should be an incoherent mumble or a clearly heard vocal text. Rijnvos seeks a solution to the hole left in the text by Beckett by using a recording of the voice of John Cage. This calls to mind Cage’s Empty Words (1974) in which he read Henry David Thoreau’s Journal against a recording of dawn at his New York home. Here words are savoured for their musicality rather than their semantic significance.

Cage was consulted by Rijnvos concerning his inclusion in Radio I and considered it a ‘very elegant’ idea.²³ Rijnvos has been described by Christopher Fox as a ‘tidy’ composer and this insertion could not be any tidier.²⁴ It complements the metaphysical distress of He, who is haunted by phenomena that are beyond his control. Cage’s voice proposes a series of workaday considerations, questions and declarations that receive no response. He was recorded by Rijnvos at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague in 1988 as he arranged a workshop with the workshop’s participants, and the younger composer then isolated the parts of the recording that featured only Cage’s rambling voice. The series of statements and unanswered questions is uncannily suited to Beckett’s text, which contains many such one-sided conversations. Below is a sample of what Cage says:

Is there any one else?

What?

She’s not here?

She’s not coming?

I won’t be any place.

Now we have only the one left.

And they don’t seem to be speaking.

That means that you both you’ll have to both do both of these things before tomorrow noon.²⁵

Rijnvos uses Cage’s isolated words in order to fill the void in the Beckett text. As such, it is an appropriate choice, bearing similarities with He’s one-sided phone conversations. The composer had previously experimented with what he called ‘time brackets’, the inclusion of non-composed sounds in a score, which he learned from Cage, in Study in Five Parts for Piano (1986–7). This is an intricate piece for piano, recorded by John Snijders with a duration of just over 14 minutes. Despite the demanding nature of the piece for the musician, it is concluded by the insertion of a recorded plucked violin string. Rijnvos juxtaposes the simplicity of the time bracket with the demanding nature of the composition for piano. As Christopher Fox suggests, ‘the effect is like a window thrown open, a brief glimpse out of a crowded room into a quiet other landscape in which time is measured differently’.²⁶

Beckett’s short story Dante and the Lobster (1934) contains an instance of a similar appearance of a voice previously unheard at its conclusion. The story ends as its protagonist Belacqua guiltily boils a lobster alive. He consoles himself with the sentiment that at least the lobster will have a quick death. A three-word retort completes the story: ‘It is not’.²⁷ Is this meant to be the voice of the lobster, a divine interjection, an authorial voice or a combination of all three? Similarly, the linear progression of Embers is punctured by involuntary flashbacks to intense moments, voices and sounds in Henry’s life.

Rijnvos’s production of Radio I is 27 minutes in duration and features Joan Plowright as She and Michael Gough as He. The music is performed by the Ives Ensemble. There are long pauses, averaging 7 seconds, between the actors’ dialogue. A click is heard as She or He turn the knobs to the right. We hear the music first for 37 seconds. Contrary to the direction for faint music in the text, the music throughout the production is perfectly audible and the instruments are played mezzo-piano. The effect is impassive, as though the musicians were disinterested performers. The voice is then heard for 30 seconds: like the instruments, his voice is dreamy throughout the entire play, except for once when we hear excitement as he chirps ‘I can’t wait!’ The listener can savour each musical and vocal element without searching for progression or dramatic climax. When She wonders what voice and music will sound like together, we hear these elements side by side, voice for 40 seconds, music for 30. Following She’s departure, He turns the knobs and this time we hear music played for 2 minutes’ duration. Voice then joins after 35 seconds. The only discernible difference now is that Rijnvos’s music is heard played forte. He, however, is convinced that they are now playing together and are fading. As She shouted ‘Louder’ earlier, He now calls ‘Come on! Come on!’²⁸ He tries to influence their progression despite agreeing with the doctor that ‘there is nothing to be done’.²⁹ He is mysteriously able to turn them off when speaking to the doctor or his secretary. We hear music and voice for 2 minutes and 30 seconds following the secretary’s first call, for 1 minute and 45 seconds following the doctor’s call and for 1 minute and 10 seconds at the end, marking a clear diminution throughout. At this final point Rijnvos still chooses to play Cage’s voice and the music at the same level as before. Instead, he differentiates this passage by a gradual withdrawal of all instruments except for celesta and bells.

As Cage’s questions are left unanswered in the Rijnvos production, the composer seems to be making us aware of the unresolved nature of Beckett’s hemi-text. The result of this completion of the artistic conversation between Beckett and Rijnvos is risky. Rijnvos completes the work without the personal collaboration accorded by Beckett to Marcel Mihalovici in his composition for Cascando or to John Beckett in his composition for Words and Music. A scrupulous deference to Beckett’s wishes is recorded in The Art of Radio by Donald McWhinnie, the author’s principal BBC producer, and in Mediations by Martin Esslin, who also produced and directed a number of his radio and stage plays. It would appear that both of these highly accomplished producers felt a sense of failure if Beckett was dissatisfied with what he heard. An example of this is when Beckett listened back to Esslin’s radio adaption of Play: ‘I remember that playback in my office very vividly. Beckett sat through the whole play with an enigmatic and inscrutable expression on his face. When it was all over, he said: “I don’t like it at all. You got it wrong.”’³⁰

Of course Beckett was entitled to offer an opinion on such productions. However, many of the productions of the radio plays display an emphasis on achieving a definitive interpretation as desired by the author. Hence, we see Everett C. Frost noting that the animal sounds of McWhinnie’s BBC production of All That Fall had ‘failed to please Beckett and he urged us to get the actual sounds of the animals if we possibly could’.³¹ Beckett’s death in 1989 meant that Rijnvos was liberated from a need to seek the author’s interpretation when approaching this text. He is not concerned with seeking a definitive understanding of Rough for Radio I; he is aware that his is but one interpretation amongst many.

Communication becomes particularly difficult when we consider a Beckett text. Rough for Radio I is a distillation of the author’s abandonment of content, of affecting the pose of ‘a non-knower, a non-can-er’, as Beckett described himself in an interview with Israel Shenker in 1956.³² The result of the Rijnvos production is the creation of various ill-matched couples. They are together more through fate than choice, and their communication is endangered by misinterpretation. Beckett and Rijnvos achieve a crucial artistic coupling in Radio I: in Rijnvos’s presentation of Beckett’s text, Cage’s voice couples briefly and incommensurably with music, just as He and She meet briefly for their uncomfortable exchanges.

As a result of such an impoverished text, any addition can potentially create a richer work. Beckett was wary of the changes that music might bring to his austere texts. He was somewhat surprised that John Beckett’s music for the radio production of Molloy, featuring Patrick Magee, did not overwhelm the prose: ‘I was also extremely pleased with the music. I had wondered a bit if the text would take it’.³³ In Radio I Rijnvos assumes an equal status with the author in order to bring the text to life and to make these two hemi-texts sound together.

¹ Samuel Beckett to Barney Rosset, 27 Aug. 1957, in Clas Zilliacus Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television (Åbo, 1976), p. 6.

² Samuel Beckett, Rough for Radio I, in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London, 1984), p. 108.

³ Ibid., p. 110.

⁴ Richard Rijnvos, ‘What is it Like Together? Genesis of the First Production of Beckett’s Radio I’, in Marius Buning and Lois Oppenheim (eds), Beckett in the 1990s, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 2 (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 1993), pp. 103–10 (p. 109).

⁵ Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, p. 122.

⁶ Ibid, p. 119.

⁷ Martin Esslin, Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett and the Media (London, 1983), p. 142.

⁸ Beckett, Rough for Radio I, p. 108.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Rijnvos, ‘What is it Like Together?’, p. 103.

¹² Ibid., p. 103.

¹³ Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (London, 1987), p. 44.

¹⁴ Lawrence Shainberg, ‘Exorcising Beckett’, Paris Review 29/104 (1987): 100–136 (p. 116).

¹⁵ Beckett, Rough for Radio I, p. 108.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Rijnvos, ‘What is it Like Together?’, p. 106.

¹⁸ Christopher Fox, ‘Square Dances: The Music of Richard Rijnvos’, Musical Times 140/1869 (1999): 22–30 (p. 25).

¹⁹ John Cage, Silence (London, 1978), p. 10.

²⁰ Beckett, Cascando, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 141.

²¹ Esslin, Mediations, p. 144.

²² Rijnvos, ‘What is it Like Together?’ p. 107.

²³ Ibid., p. 108.

²⁴ Fox, ‘Square Dances’, p. 22.

²⁵ Rijnvos, ‘What is it Like Together?’, p. 108.

²⁶ Fox, ‘Square Dances’, p. 22.

²⁷ Samuel Beckett, Dante and the Lobster, in More Pricks Than Kicks (London, 1979), p. 19.

²⁸ Beckett, Rough for Radio I, p. 110.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Esslin, Mediations, p. 139.

³¹ Samuel Beckett to Barney Rosset (his publisher at Grove Press), 27 Aug. 1957, quoted in Everett C. Frost, ‘A “Fresh Go” for the Skull: Directing All That Fall, Samuel Beckett’s Play for Radio’, in Lois Oppenheim (ed.), Directing Beckett (Ann Arbor, MI, 1994), pp. 186–219 (p. 194).

³² Israel Shenker, ‘An Interview with Beckett’, New York Times (5 May 1956), in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London, 1979), p. 148.

³³ Samuel Beckett (Molien, Ussy-sur-Marne) to Donald McWhinnie, 11 Dec. 1957 (previously on deposit at Beckett Archive, Reading, now privately owned).