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Samuel Beckett's Media Plays LINDA BEN-ZVI The recently released Faber and Grove Press editions of the collected shorter plays of Samuel Beckett contain twenty-nine works. Ofthat number nearly half are plays written for a medium other than the stage: seven for radio, five for television, and one for film. The high number may surprise those who think of Beckett primarily as a dramatist of the theatre; it may also surprise those who read Beckett criticism, since names like Cascando and Eh Joe rarely appear except as items in some general overview of Beckett's writing. For example, individual media plays are identified by title in only six of the seventy-four Beckett entries in the 1981 PMLA bibliography, in only three of the sixty-four entries in the 1982 edition. When media plays are discussed, it has become almost a given to preface the analyses - as Clas Zilliacus and Martin Esslin do in their seminal studies of the radio dramas - with regrets about the lack of attention the works usually receive. 1 The most obvious reason for the critical neglect of such a large portion ofthe Beckett canon is inaccessibility: inaccessibility of the texts because of inaccessibility of performances. The radio dramas are rarely produced; and although tapes of the original broadcasts can still be located in the BBC archives, few go to the trouble required to hear them. Beckett's one film, Film, has also received a limited distribution; outside of Beckett meetings it is not often shown in either of its two versions.2 And while most of the television plays have been produced in more than one language and have had a wider dissemination than the radio plays because of the availability of videotapes of the originals, they too have reached a small audience. Unable to experience the media plays in the forms in which they were intended, the Beckett critic has had to approach the works solely through the text - a severe limitation. Even a brief glance at the printed script of Film reveals the problem: discussing a work that consists ofa series ofcamera angles and actor positions, with the only auditory sign "ssh!". Similarly, how does one Samuel Beckett's Media Plays 23 grasp the power of the television play Ghost Trio when music supplements the specified positions of the camera and the stylized gestures of the actor, or when music becomes a character - as in Words and Music - interacting with another character named Words. Even the most sensitive reader will be at a loss to imagine the resulting harmonies and cacophonies. Perhaps because of such obstacles, evaluations of Beckett's media works have varied more widely than assessments of his fictions and theatre pieces. While John Fletcher describes Words and Music as "the weakest of the radio plays,,,3 Hugh Kenner and Vivian Mercier praise it, Kenner calling it "the most original use to which Beckett has put radio, and one is tempted to say as original and moving a use as any to which radio has been pUt.,,4 Mercier goes even further and calls both Words and Music and Cascando "two of his [Beckett's] most moving works.,,5 Both critics, however, indicate that they are basing their appraisals on a reading ofthe text, since neither has heard the original. "I regret that I have only an intuitive base for this judgment," (p. 169) Kenner says; "I do not feel I have understood it fully on the basis of the words alone," Mercier writes (p. 153). Both critics might well have reached the same evaluations of the plays after experiencing them in performance, but what they based their critiques on was a form deprived of its essential element: the shaping presence of the medium itself. This loss is far greater in media plays than it is in theatre works. Unlike the stage that provides audiences the freedom a spatial form allows - the possibilities of scanning the scenes at will, fixing on gestures, props, and stage business - the media plays are temporal, coming to audiences sequentially, through the means of a mechanical device that imposes restrictions on the work and on the listeners or viewers. If the means is banished...

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