Samuel Beckett and the Radiophonic Body: Beckett and the BBC

This essay examines the radiophonic body in Beckett's All That Fall. All of Beckett's plays focus on the body, with an intensity unprecedented in the history of the stage. Typically filled with down-and-out characters who exist in a state of lack or negativity, Beckett's theatre explores the defects of man and woman as a spectacle of ruin. This essay endeavours to rethink the body in Beckett's drama in light of his first radio play. Like his earlier work, All That Fall reflects the familiar modernist constants of sterility, paralysis, decay, and death. But unlike anything Beckett had written before, this radio play gives his negativist philosophy an unusual twist, particularly in its representation of female subjectivity. By pushing the acoustic possibilities of radio, Beckett endows his protagonist, Maddy Rooney, with surprising presence. That Beckett should allow one of his characters such fullness of being is unexpected, especially in light of his radical minimalism, and suggests how writing for radio altered, even if only temporarily, the ontological parameters of his theatre.