Cascando, Barbican review: one for die-hard Beckett fans only
If Samuel Beckett’s late plays were a building, they might well be the Barbican. More specifically, its Brutalist floating walkways – all strict repetitions and colourless geometrical paths, radiating a stripped-back simplicity, yet very easy to get lost in.
Cascando, a new promenade performance from Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre, guides us through that modernist maze. The audience don floor-length black cloaks – becoming anonymous, hooded figures like those of Beckett’s play Quad – and are led outside single-file, like lemmings, for a curious walking tour.
Audience members blushing under their cowls as tourists point and take photos might find this all a bit of a distraction from the play itself: a new recording of Beckett’s radio drama Cascando, played through headphones hidden underneath each hood.
Like Pinter and Stoppard, Beckett wrote some of his most inventive work for the wireless. But Beckett’s last original radio play is an odd little enigma, an echo of earlier ideas. Like his livelier Words & Music, Cascando is a three-hander where one character happens to be played by an orchestra. Any attempt to describe the plot soon slides into subjective guesswork.
The first words we hear sound like solid fact – “It is the month of May” – until the speaker qualifies them with “for me”. In this world, the month is a matter of opinion. Those words are spoken by Opener (Daniel Reardon), who has repeatedly been told that the things he hears are “just in his head”.
What does Opener hear? Two streams of sound, which he can “open” or shut off at will. We hear them too; sometimes apart, sometimes together. The script suggests they should eventually come together “as though they had linked their arms”, but in this production they never quite feel in sympathy.
One, Music, is self-explanatory: Jimmy Eadie’s original score is heavy on discordant, uneasy strings. The other, Voice, takes a bit more explaining. Voice is a storyteller with “thousands” of stories under his belt, none of them the right one - except, perhaps, for the one he’s telling now, a fragment of a tale involving a figure in a coat and hat called Woburn, repeatedly falling over “face in the mud”.
Exhausted, Voice is compelled to keep telling this story, dwindling towards an end that’s always just beyond reach. (It’s tempting to see this as an allegory for Beckett’s own writer’s block.) The 1964 BBC radio version created real pathos out of this predicament, thanks to the great Patrick Magee’s uniquely fragile, phlegmy, feral voice.
Andrew Bennett takes a different tack here: his Voice is calm and in control, with a rich clear timbre that would be lovely on the Shipping Forecast. It’s an odd choice on director Gavin Quinn’s part. What emotion Cascando has usually comes from the contrast between the stentorian Opener and suffering Voice, but here both are briskly impersonal.
Pan Pan had a couple of critical hits with their stagings of Beckett’s best-known radio plays, Embers and All that Fall. They were clearly casting around for another, but I wish they’d gone for his brilliantly comic and chilling Rough for Radio II instead. This Cascando is a solid production of a play that’s anything but solid; a worthwhile experiment, and one for Beckett completists only.
Until July 11; barbican.org.uk
