The Beckett radio plays make waves

'Never thought about radio play technique but in the dead of t'other night got a nice gruesome idea," wrote Samuel Beckett to a friend in 1955. Two years later, the BBC broadcast All That Fall to great acclaim, and now Beckett's first radio play will be broadcast here as part of National Public Radio's Beckett Festival. Featuring one of the finest Beckett ensembles ever assembled, the festival— it begins April 2, eleven days before Beckett's eighty-third birthday—will include all five of the plays Beckett intended specifically for broadcast. Though he came late to radio, it is a medium for which his work is remarkably well suited. In these disembodied voices twanging and crooning solipsistically on-air, his cadences resonate deeper, his syntax cuts sharper, perhaps, than onstage. Whatever else they achieve, the NPR performances will offer a smart contrast to the star-studded, shtick-filled Waiting for Godot last autumn at New York's Lincoln Center, a production which proved to be almost as elusive as Godot himself: everybody heard about it; almost nobody got tickets.

Also this month, Stirrings Still, Beckett's newest prose work, will be released: 226 copies have been printed, and each will cost $1,500. If you'd rather hear Beckett's words than buy them, turn on the radio.

J.R.