Embers

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.

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 cast included Michael Gambon as Henry, Sinéad Cusack as Ada, Rupert Graves, Alvaro Lucchesi and Carly Baker.

The sea, it has always been assumed, was the cause of his father's death: "the evening bathe you took once too often",[14] however, the next sentence tells us: "We never found your body, you know, that held up probate an unconscionable time".

"[17] 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.

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"[21] for the break-up of his marriage.

"[21] "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'.

[29] She cannot understand why such "a lovely peaceful gentle soothing sound"[23] should upset him so and refuses to believe that his talking helps drown it out.

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".

[33] What is interesting here is that Henry imagines that Ada, after witnessing his father sitting on the rock, gets on the tram (possibly horse-driven)[34] to go home, then alights and returns to check on him only to find the beach empty.

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.

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.

This was his second collaboration with Beckett (he also worked on All That Fall) only this time he "utilized a more traditionally 'musical' approach, moulding the abstract sound of the sea using distinct pitches.

"[41] Beckett himself, Zilliacus believes, has made the most important point about Embers: "‘Cendres,’ he remarked in an interview with P.L.

"[43] Like many of Beckett's characters (e.g. Molloy, May in Footfalls), Henry is a writer or at the very least a storyteller, albeit by his own admission, a poor one never actually finishing anything he starts.

His life is like a sentence (pun intended) – it reached a comma with his father's death and he has been unable to satisfactorily finish it.

He has no "professional obligations", no familial ties and now not even a woman to justify his hanging around this place like, as he puts it, an "old grave I cannot tear myself away from".

The sound of the sea continues throughout the play always "moving according to the temporal laws of the tide"[46] suggesting a linearality to the timeline but the action is grouped by association rather than presented in a chronological order.

[48] In May 1954 he received a phone call from his sister-in-law to let him know that his brother, Frank, had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

"Most evenings he walked alone after dinner along the seashore below the house"[49] "'To "act" it is to kill it':[50] 'radio text,’ Beckett here reminds us, is par excellence an art that depends on sound alone and hence cannot be converted to the stage.

It makes little sense, then, to complain, as does John Pilling, that Beckett should have included the voice of Henry's father, along with Ada's and Addie's voices, in the play: "But there is a very good reason for the omission, which is that, unlike the theatre, radio makes it possible to represent characters by means of metonymic sound images: The ghost of Henry's father is indeed "heard" throughout the play: not only when his son acts the role of medium, imitating such parental exhortations as "Are you coming for a dip?

"[51] Henry tells us at the very start of the play that his father is blind and yet when Ada passes him she makes mention that he did not see her.

"[53] Paul "Lawley has suggested that the enigmatic scene with Bolton’s opening and shutting the heavy drapes enacts the blinking of an eye, the room thus becoming a skull,"[54] a skull-within-a-skull in fact.

Hersh Zeifman, for whom Embers "dramatizes a quest for salvation, a quest which, as always, ultimately proves fruitless,"[55] sees this scene as "a paradigm of human suffering and divine rejection": Lawley's contention could equally be valid in that "Henry is losing his creative impersonality and is consequently moving inexorably into identity with his fictional creation, Bolton.

"[58] Whereas most scholars take Bolton's begging to suggest he wants to die, Michael Robinson, in The Long Sonata of the Dead, puts forward a simpler interpretation: The sad fact is that company is not the real answer.

If it is based on his father's seeking some kind of escape from a life that has become unendurable, with a worthless son, a suicidal daughter and possibly an argumentative wife all symptoms of it, then Holloway could simply be a personification of any means of release.

"[63] Also beforehand she was aware of "the least feather of smoke on the horizon"[30] but now "she cannot see the beach where Henry is sitting ('is there anyone about?’)[30] without his words to describe it.

"[64] The nature of their dialogue is odd too – quite civilized – considering the comment Henry made just before evoking her presence: "Ada too, conversation with her, that was something, that’s what hell will be like.

Katharine Worth conjectures that Ada represents a kind of muse, "a hint stressed in the sound of her voice – ‘low [and] remote throughout’[63] – and in the curious fact that she has been present in some mysterious way before he spoke her name.

"[66] Ada is "immensely there",[65] though, her personality is allowed to shine throughout her conversation with Henry; she does not merely respond, she initiates lines of thought, she nags him like a mother with her list of don’ts,?