Cascando is a radio play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in French in December 1961, subtitled Invention radiophonique pour musique et voix, with music by the Franco-Romanian composer Marcel Mihalovici. It was first broadcast on France Culture on 13 October 1963 with Roger Blin (L'Ouvreur) and Jean Martin (La Voix). The first English production was on 6 October 1964 on BBC Radio 3 with Denys Hawthorne (Opener) and Patrick Magee (Voice).
"The play was originally to be called Calando, a musical term meaning 'diminishing in tone' (equivalent to diminuendo or decrescendo), but Beckett changed it when ORTF officials pointed out that calendos was the slang word for camembert in French."Bair, D., Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1990), p 574 The term cascando"From the Italian, it means stumbling, falling, tumbling, and is usually associated with rubble or jumbled ruins." - Bair, D., Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1990), p 574 ('cascades') involves the decrease of volume and the deceleration of tempo.
Cascando is also the title of a 1936 poem by Beckett.
Structure
"Beckett first wrote out the complete part for Opener, inserting the spaces for Voice and Music, before writing out the complete part for Voice. The music was then composed separately by Marcel Mihalovici, who, of course, at that time had the text as guidance, and only then were the three parts combined and produced in the studio by [the director]."Grant, S., Samuel Beckett's Radio Plays: Music of the Absurd
"The duration of the individual interjections for Voice and Music correspond to each other, so that when Voice speaks for ten seconds, for instance, Music too is held for the same amount of time. Furthermore, when Voice repeats his foregoing account, Music too plays a slightly varied repeat of its previous phrase. There is a musical crescendo at the end of the play, and a gradual fade-out, which corresponds to the build-up of anticipation in Voice's documentation of his protagonist's progression towards his goal and Voice's own longing for the close of the story to end all stories."
Synopsis
The play opens with a familiar Beckettian theme, the search to put an end to language: "—story . . . if you could finish it . . . you could rest . . . sleep . . . not before".Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 137 “The shape of the narrative itself is indicative of the mind already in the process of degenerating towards an impasse. Voice alternates between talking about the story-telling itself, or the need to find the story to end all stories, and narrating [what it hopes will be that final] story."
The persona has been divided up. "Voice is aware that his own identity is bound up with his fiction ('I’m there … somewhere'Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 139) and that it is his own quest to find himself.”Pilling. J., Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), p 105 Why words and music? Perhaps to emphasise the limitations of words, a life-long preoccupation with Beckett. Broadly speaking words convey meaning, music feeling; Opener is trying to combine these two elements to tell a more rounded version of his story. "If Voice is Opener's own mental voice, and Music is his emotional faculty, then Woburn may be the objectification of Opener himself."
Cascando involves a fear of finishing in the wrong place, or in the wrong way. At the end of the play the three 'characters' enjoy a moment when they 'speak' in unison. "As though they had linked their arms,"Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 143 says Opener who then pronounces his creation, "Good." The play ends, the actors pack up and go home. For many it may not be a satisfactory ending – it lacks closure – but it has reached an end, Woburn drifts out to sea. The open ending is a mainstay of the film industry epitomized by Shane's riding off into the distance at the end of George Stevens's 1953 film of the same name. This is as close as Beckett comes to one of his characters sailing off into the sunset.
Beckett has said of Cascando: "It is an unimportant work but the best I have to offer. It does I suppose in a way show what passes for my mind and what passes for its work."Letter of 21 September 1962, in Harvard Collection, cited in Worth, K., 'Words for Music Perhaps' in Bryden, M., (Ed.) Beckett and Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1998), p 10
Opener
"His opening statement, 'It is the month of May . . . for me,' suggests, as critics have remarked, that it is the time for creation or "ritual renewing".Brienza, S. D., ‘Perilous Journeys on Beckett’s Stages’ in Burkman, K. H., (Ed.) Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett (London and Toronto: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987), p 42 Approximately two thirds of the way into the play, he says 'Yes, correct, the month of May. You know, the reawakening'.Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 141 He repeats, a little later, 'Yes, correct, the month of May, the close of May,'Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 142 but at this point he reminds us that the days are long in this month, so that their ends are always postponed.”
At one point Opener reveals how he has been ridiculed by people saying, "it's in his head". He is a writer/story-teller – his lives in his head – but the locals (his critics) obviously don't appreciate his work. He used to object but he doesn't even try and explain anymore, he doesn't even respond to them nowadays. He's resigned himself to the fact that he is misunderstood. He recalls painful trips he used to make, one to the village and a second to the inn. Woburn too has developed a fear of interacting with people.
Opener identifies strongly with Woburn, It may be that rather than simply a story this is a plan of action, a run through of what he either intends to do or wishes he could do, a Thanatos wish. Part of him wants to give up but the writer in him (personified as Voice) can't give up. Opener's remark, "I'm afraid to open. But I must open. So I open," is all too familiar Beckett reasoning, echoing the Unnamable's "you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on",Beckett, S., Trilogy (London: Calder Publications, 1994), p 418 the leitmotif which Beckett embraces in all his work. Like other Beckett characters (e.g. May in Footfalls"'Words are as food for this poor girl.'" Beckett says – Asmus, W. D., ‘Practical aspects of theatre, radio and television, Rehearsal notes for the German premiere of Beckett’s That Time and Footfalls at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt, Berlin’ in Journal of Beckett Studies, No 2, Summer 1977), writing, although clearly not the most pleasant of activities, sustains him: “they don’t see what I live on.” (Roberta Satow's article on "repetition compulsion" makes interesting reading here: https://web.archive.org/web/20100117153938/http://www.robertasatow.com/psych.html).
We think of Samuel Beckett as a writer but in reality that was only one aspect of the whole man. His output was certainly not large and he was plagued with long bouts of ‘Writer's block', always stuck "between the limitations of words and the infinity of feelings"Bob Blaisdell's article, In Spite of Everything Writing Does One Good provides insight into Kafka's own thoughts on writing and could apply equally to Beckett – "Writing did not give him vitality … It was a compulsion, a habit, a refuge. It made life possible and purposeful; it sometimes, not always, gave him peace of mind. Sometimes it brought him to despair over its difficulty, or it exposed his weaknesses to the light, but he also noticed how sometimes, in the midst of that despair, writing gave him distance from (and thus rescued him from) that despair." as Kafka put it, and yet this aspect of him kept pushing him a little further from the shore, metaphorically speaking. As he got older and older he must have considered that every work might be his last. He must have thought that with Stirrings Still; as its title suggests, after all this time his imagination was still stirring, still clinging on for dear life.
Voice
When instructed by Opener Voice begins mid-sentence, reminiscent of Krapp's taped diary entries. When told to stop he does in the same way. Cutting off the voice makes it sound like Voice is pre-recorded and Opener is simply switching on and off, like Macgillycuddy in Rough for Radio I, but this isn't the case.
Voice jumps straight to describing his ongoing need to complete a last story, to say what needs to be said, and keep on with this tale until its end; then he will be able to "rest [and] sleep … not before."Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 138 Voice is desperate. Like Henry in Embers he's never been able to finish any of his stories and he knows he won't have any peace until he does.This is reminiscent of the character Joseph Grand in Camus's The Plague: Grand is a poor writer in Oran, attempting to write the perfect book but has yet to get even the first sentence to sound exactly right; he engages all of his efforts into perfecting this one sentence, sure that the rest of the novel will fall into place after it is perfected. Grand begins to review his past, to contemplate his previous endeavors. He, unlike many, is using the time positively, to improve himself. In time he is stricken with the plague. He thinks he is going to die and asks for the manuscript to be burnt. Grand believes that he will die without having found words to express either the love or anguish he feels, but as he gives his manuscript to his friends, they notice that on the last page, under the latest version of the "month of May" sentence; Grand has finally found the words for which he was searching. Grand however doesn't die. He makes a miraculous recovery and continues to work on his book. – Camus, A., The Plague translated by Stuart Gilbert (London: Penguin, 1976), p 215
Throughout the play Voice returns to these thoughts, willing himself on, determined this will be his final attempt, convinced this is the right story. The ache in his voice is tangible – "Come on! Come on!" – as if everything has been invested in this story's ending. Towards the close of the play Opener joins him in this geeing-on closely followed by Voice confirming, "—at last … we're there" acknowledging that he has not been entirely alone in the creative process.
Woburn
Beckett told his friend, the scholar Alec Reid that this play is "about the character Woburn who never appears". The story that Voice devises concerns this man (whose very name "intimates a stream of woe"Ackerley, C. J. and Gontarski, S. E., (Eds.) The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p 649). In the original French text, he is called Maunu"If we are allowed to invert the 'u' into an 'n', Maunu would become Man nu, a convenient Franglais denomination for man stark naked deprived of his convenient cover and stripped of the myriad inauthentic and inessential detailed characteristics by which we usually ... recognize a man for what he is." – Tymieniecka, A., translated by Andrzej Potocki The Acting Person (Springer, 1979), p 174 ("naked miseries").Cohn, R., A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), p 272 Woburn/Maunu has had a long life and a misfortunate one which has changed him but he's still recognizable as the man he once was five or even ten years earlier.