Beckett “Cascando” Jermyn Street Theatre

Like Quinn, Pan Pan’s co-founder Aedin Cosgrove, the designer, suggests a column of black cowled gowns might attract attention and that we are the observed. Alas only drunk people even stared and when one asked an insistent question, a Pan Pan padding behind us had to answer. Either way, it adds nothing.

With discreet and well thought-through attentiveness though, members of Pan Pan steer and attend to the crocodile of monks, head-down in Beckettian pose, listening as we peditate and allow the rhythms of walking to correlate with the discontinuous text. That is the key connection. It’s an excellent idea.

Amongst the locutions of Beckett’s blasted wordscapes, to put it vulgarly, Cascando is about the attempt to compose and the lessness as it were of hearing: a fining- down or literally, diminution in tone. There’s movement towards a completion as words themselves dip into inaudibility. Which isn’t always the point. Cascando contains three characters, two of whom speak, and a fourth, Woburn, who’s alluded to, always ahead, never appearing. He’s described as using boats and living in a shed. A sort of nautical Malloy (or Godot) tramp.

Jimmy Eadie conceives the sound envelope with Daniel Reardon as Opener and Andrew Bennett as Voice. They’re distinct though very soft and low. Too low. We take it for granted both deliver beautifully and are consummate. The third character ‘Music’ is created by Eadie.

Conceptually that works in vacuum of maximum attention. Though given the traffic (and this was the third later evening slot) and vaguely-aware mill of folk around, concentration was difficult.

Someone attached to the theatre witnessed that a Sunday afternoon run had attracted much attention and that’s surely true. Perhaps subsequent frequency of the spectacle, added to the late evening run, has dulled this. That and the fact that such sights are hardly uncommon. And I’m not sure anything is gained by being an object when you’re attempting to concentrate on the fractured text in itself.

Again, the re-membering of the text by the act of rhythmically assembling it whilst walking is an attractive esoteric idea; and should somehow be fulfilled. The audience bar a fair number of loyal Jermyn Street regulars will be self-selecting. That said, the exercise, designed to force us to concentrate on words as Buddhists focus on breath, is compellingly calming, alien and attentive to the state perhaps well-suited to the text. 

The trouble is twofold. First the text as delivered whilst even minimally distracted by following the group of fellow cowled friars, isn’t so audible as to invite real engagement. Second, and this will be obvious, Beckett’s text is one of the most challenging to apprehend as a whole: except in litanic waves. Text bristles with lacunae, fractures and whatever Beckett said, inflected by new (from the late 1950s) French critical thinking. Full comprehension we take as not granted. Normally though Beckett isn’t that obscure.

Alternatives are limited. As a delivered text by an actor on stage, the intimacy of whisper, the very thing radio and headphones capture, is lost. Film too. Radio again might provide the medium Cascando is meant for. It does however seem gloriously of its time, in a heroically experimental phase of radio drama. One Radio 3 has just ditched after its entire existence championing it from 1946. And this piece, marooned, cries out – if its small mews night be permitted that  – for an ambient treatment.

Ireland and France know how to seize Beckett and cheat the Estate of literalism. Conor Lovett and Theatre Gare St Lazare for instance delivering the whole Trilogy in an evening, and many other texts and shavings, attest to that. So does Lisa Dwon, that other greatest exponent of Beckett.