Embers
Embers is a radio play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in English in 1957. First broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 24 June 1959, the play won the RAI prize at the Prix Italia awards later that year. Donald McWhinnie directed Jack MacGowran – for whom the play was specially written – as "Henry", Kathleen Michael as "Ada" and Patrick Magee as "Riding Master" and "Music Master". The play was translated into French by Beckett himself and Robert Pinget as Cendres and was published in 1959 by Les Éditions de Minuit. The first stage production was by the French Graduate Circle of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Festival, 1977."
The most recent version of Embers was broadcast in 2006 on BBC Radio 3 and directed by Stephen Rea. The cast included Michael Gambon as Henry, Sinéad Cusack as Ada, Rupert Graves, Alvaro Lucchesi and Carly Baker. This production was rebroadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 16 May 2010 as part of a double bill with a 2006 production of Krapp's Last Tape.
Opinions vary as to whether the work succeeds. Hugh Kenner calls it "Beckett’s most difficult work" and yet maintains that the piece "coheres to perfection," John Pilling disagrees, remarking that Embers "is the first of Beckett’s dramatic works that seems to lack a real centre," whereas Richard N. Coe considers the play "not only minor, but one of very few failures." Anthony Cronin records in his biography of Beckett that "Embers met with a mixed reception the general tone of English criticism was somewhat hostile to Beckett" at the time.
The author's own view was that it was a "rather ragged" text. He said that it was "not very satisfactory, but I think just worth doing … I think it just gets by for radio."
For all his personal reservations the play won the RAI prize in the 1959 Prix Italia contest, not, as has been often reported, "the actual Prix Italia … which went to John Reeve’s play, Beach of Strangers."
Synopsis
The play opens with the sea in the distance and the sound of footsteps on the shingle. Henry has been walking along the strand close to where he has lived his whole life, at one time or other on either side of "a bay or estuary".Henry starts to talk, a single word, "on," followed by the sea again, followed by the voice – louder and more insistent this time, repeating the same word, as it will say, then repeat as a command, the words "stop" and "down." Each time, Henry obediently yet reluctantly does what his voice first says, then tells him to do, he stops and sits down on the shingle. Throughout the play, the sea acts like a character in its own right.
The first monologue
The sea, it has always been assumed, was the cause of his father's death: "the evening bathe you took once too often", however, the next sentence tells us: "We never found your body, you know, that held up probate an unconscionable time". Nothing in the text explicitly says that Henry's father was suicidal – though this has been inferred from the story of Bolton and Holloway discussed later.He imagines his father, whom he describes as "old … blind and foolish", sitting beside him on the beach and addresses the whole opening monologue to him, apart from a single aside to the audience, but the father never once responds. His father could never stay away from the sea and it seems neither can his son. "The sea presents an antithetical image to Henry. He must stay near it, and yet he attempts to distance himself from its sound." Even when he finally received his inheritance he only relocated to the other side of the bay; it has been a great many years since he actually swam in it. He tried once going to landlocked Switzerland but still could not get the sound of the sea out of his head.
To drown out the sound, rather than seek out company, he began making up stories but could never finish any of them. He remembers " a great one" and starts to tell it:
Henry tells his father that, after a time, his stories were not company enough and he began feeling the need for someone from his past to be with him. He then continues:
Henry suddenly stops his story and jumps to the last time he saw his father alive. His father's eventual disappearance followed an angry interchange between the two of them. He wanted Henry to go swimming with him but Henry refuses and so the last words his father ends up saying to him are: "A washout, that’s what you are, a washout!" Whether his father was accidentally washed out to sea and drowned or deliberately killed himself is something no one knows for sure. Understandably Henry has punished himself for years over his decision not to go with him.
His relationship with his daughter had not been good either, a clingy child and, as we discover later, not particularly proficient or interested in anything she was required to do; Henry blames the "horrid little creature" for the break-up of his marriage. He re-enacts going for a walk with her and how he ended up reducing the girl to tears when she refuses to let go of his hand.
Henry treats Addie in much the same way his father appears to have treated him. He remembers: "That was always the way, walk all over the mountains with you talking and talking and then suddenly mum and home in misery and not a word to a soul for a week." "The consequent judgement that Henry was a 'sulky little bastard, better off dead' is consistent with his father's final verdict of his son as a 'washout'."
Out of the blue Henry calls out to his estranged, possibly ex, probably dead wife, Ada.
The dialogue
The central sequence involves a dialogue between Henry and Ada, which provokes three specific memories presented in the form of short "evocation" involving other characters. Each occasion ends in a character crying or crying out and is artificially cut short at that instant.Before this, the two engage in quasi-domestic small talk. Ada wants to know where their daughter, Addie, is. Henry says she is with her music master. She chides him for sitting on the cold stones and offers to put her shawl under him, which he allows. She asks if he's wearing his long johns but Henry is difficult about answering her. The sound of hooves distracts him. Ada makes a joke about horses and tries to get him to laugh. He then returns to his old preoccupation, the sound of the sea. He wants to go but Ada says they cannot because they're waiting on Addie. This triggers the first evocation.
Ada suggests that he consult Holloway about his talking. This was a source of some embarrassment to her when they were together. She cites an instance where she has to explain to their daughter why her father was talking to himself in the lavatory. She cannot understand why such "a lovely peaceful gentle soothing sound" should upset him so and refuses to believe that his talking helps drown it out. He tells he that he's even taken to "walk about with gramophone" but forget it this day.
He reminds Ada that it was on this very beach they had sex for the first time. She'd shown great reluctance and they had to wait a long time before the coast was clear. She did not get pregnant right away however and it was years before they had Addie. He wonders what age the girl is now but – unexpectedly for a mother – Ada says she does not know. He proposes going for a row, "to be with my father", he tells her but, again, she reminds him that their daughter will be coming soon and would be upset to find him gone.
Henry explains to Ada that his father does not talk with him like she does. She is not surprised and predicts that a day will come when there will be no one left and he will be alone with only his own voice for company. She remembers meeting his family in the midst of having a row, his father, mother and a sister threatening to kill herself. The father storms out slamming the door, as he did the day he disappeared for good, but she passes him later sitting staring out to sea in a posture that reminded her of Henry himself.
"Is this rubbish a help to you, Henry? "I can try and go on a little if you wish." He fails to answer though and so she slips out of his consciousness.
The second monologue
He says he is not ready and begs her to stay even if she will not speak and "Henry improvises upon her story, attempting to build it into a more complex and extended narrative but he fails". What is interesting here is that Henry imagines that Ada, after witnessing his father sitting on the rock, gets on the tram to go home, then alights and returns to check on him only to find the beach empty. Was she the last person to see him alive?Resigning himself to being alone Henry picks up the Bolton story from where he left off:
Henry is like the "writer-protagonists of the novels, using their speech/writing to fill the moments until death." But he finds he cannot go on. He curses, gets to his feet, walks over to the water's edge where he takes out and consults a pocket diary. With the exception of an appointment with the "plumber at nine the waste" pipe his future is empty. The play ends with no resolution other than the certainty that the next day and the next day will be the same as the previous ones.
Interpretation
Since Embers can be interpreted in a variety of ways it is perhaps worthwhile considering what Beckett said to Jack MacGowran, not specifically about this play, but about all his writing:Henry, the central character in this play, cannot find the words to articulate his situation and fills in the blanks with what he can in an effort to make sense of things. In this context, the play is its own metaphor. Words have become redundant, but they are all Henry has to explain the unexplainable. If critics get frustrated because there are no answers then they've got the point.
Sound effects
"Beckett’s paradoxical endeavour to question sound in this radio play is achieved through the use of grossly made sound effects."The sound of the sea dominates the play but it is not an accurate representation and deliberately so. Henry warns us that the sea sound effects are not perfect and this casts doubt as to whether he is even on the beach at all; perhaps everything in the play is taking place within his head.
The pioneering sound engineer Desmond Briscoe was responsible for the sound of the sea in the original BBC production. This was his second collaboration with Beckett only this time he "utilized a more traditionally 'musical' approach, moulding the abstract sound of the sea using distinct pitches."
"Henry also demands certain sound effects to provide a contrast to the monotony of the sea. He twice asks for the sound of hooves, hoping that the 'ten-ton mammoth' can be trained to mark time; have it 'stamp all day' and 'tramp the world down'. He similarly asks for a drip, as if the sea could be drained by the sound effect."